I just returned from a heart-illuminating journey to Peru.   I always experience it to be nothing short of a miracle every year I am able to go.  Over the past five years, I have been blessed to bring 3 groups to travel and work intimately with a Q’ero family in Peru.  I am always incredibly blown away and grateful how effortlessly the groups come together through the response to my simple newsletters or the happen-stance meeting with a new friend where Peru happens to come up in the conversation.  
 
While we visit some outrageously unique ancient sacred sites brimming with extraordinary energies (that I believe are incredibly important for us to tune into at this time)---what always brings me back is the extraordinary of the ordinary.  

One thing I have been aware of every year that I bring groups, is how deeply included and welcomed everyone feels in the presence of the Q’ero.  While I consider them my family, I hope everyone who has had the opportunity to meet them (physically or energetically) may consider this as well.  Not to create any ‘specialness’ about us or them…but in fact…as a way and means to set a bonfire to scoarch any sense of specialness, so we can open to receive the ancient wisdom of the indigenous heart---the deep inclusiveness which can allow our heart to infinitely expand in a circle of life.   

By specialness, I don’t mean our unique authentic expression of Heart.   I mean the plague of our Western culture that keeps us striving and wanting power, feeling elite, reaching to the pinnacle at the top while all the while keeping us on the see saw of inferiority and superiority.  

In my journeys over the past several years, especially since opening to the Wisdom of the sacred feminine (which in my experience is our intimate connection of our Soul to our Greater Soul…the Soul of the Earth) it has been a consistent dying.  A dying to my cultural self-identity.  Deaths are difficult even when we are dying to the false sense of self.  To the child in me not being special was death.   The pain of my trauma and my sense of inferiority kept me wanting power, recognition, fame.   All the things that I was conditioned would bring happiness.  This response was primarily on auto-pilot fueled by shame for most of my life.  To intimately  feel the pain of unloveablility and to die to the dreams of my cultural conditioning that I was conditioned would heal or ‘fix’ that sense of not being good enough was quite the opposite direction to turn to.   Here, I discovered that which I believe is the only true power that matters…the power of the heart…

Shining out of the eyes of the heart, the extraordinary of the ordinary truly shines.  Journeys to Peru always offer this ongoing invitation to the heart.   The amazing joys and the causeless laughter that arise from this. 

My friends in Peru would call family that extends beyond bloodlines, ayllu.  In traditional ayllu, community gathers around a plot of land.  Within that land, every part of the life is held in deep reverence.   Regardless of roles and status within the community, everyone and all of life, from leaders to the ants mattered.  It is a way of recognizing that a community is as strong as the weakest person or creature.  Mountains are living deities, the Earth is our Mother and we are even kin to the smallest of small creatures.   From what is above, to what is below, what is within and what is without--every aspect of life is vitally essential to the living whole.

         In bringing forth the ancient ways of the heart to our culture, how can we tend to our ayllu?   Can we honor the sacred nature of creation?    Can we extend our hand to someone or something in need?  Can we begin to tend to all of life, all of our feelings, everything that arises as sacred?    

 **********
After a week of rest and integration, I am now scheduling sessions starting tomorrow.   Session series are also available.

*******
            There are a few spaces left for an amazing circle gathering of women in the upcoming retreat, Reawakening the Sacred.   It is on Memorial weekend, May 23-25 (Sat. through Sunday).   This weekends are an amazing opportunity to for women to dive into the mystery of Nature.   It is a gathering to restore the mystical divinity to our bodies and to the Earth.   It is for women who are intimate with their own pain and are ready for a direct experience and approach to the shadow that is alchemical in Nature.  It is opportunity to gather together, in circle and open to the mysteries that can emerge when we grieve for Gaia.   The magic that can get released when we turn towards the places within us that we have rejected the most.   While I have my own offerings that have arisen out of initations in the past years, it is also a time for us as woman to gather together, in a very sacred space to restore ancient Wisdom and ways of the feminine mysteries of love.   To learn to notice the symbols, images and world of the imaginal that connect us to the dreaming Earth and be a midwife for the new dream of the Earth to be restored through us.   

More info:.  
http://www.courtneydukelow.com/-may-weekend-retreat.html

********

This year, I was able to bring back a few sacred items and mesa cloths from Peru.  They are all hand-crafted with love from my Q’ero friends.  For those who work with a mesa or are familiar with cloths, the prices reflected are significantly lower than what most people are selling them for.   If you know anyone who may also be interested, please pass this along.  

http://www.courtneydukelow.com/store.html


With loving kindness, 

Courtney

I often receive many email invitations to courses around becoming empowered, making it to the top and leaving a legacy.  In the past several years, my journey has been one of a conscious apprenticeship with loss.  I have learned an enormous amount from this journey and it has been incredibly empowering.  It has inspired a book which I recently completed.    This journey has birthed forth a deep awareness of a cultural shadow of 'making it to the top.'   Whether it is financially, spiritually, or socially.  This cultural shadow seems to foster envy, greed and competition.  It can keeps us isolated and separated from each other.   What about making it to the bottom?  Rooting into the depths of our inner Nature, the sacred Earth.  Finding the sacred unity in the heart of Nature which unites us all.  What happens when we step off the vertical ladder?   

About a year and a half ago,  I gave a massage to man at Jackson Wellsprings.    He had just gotten back from India.   My first thought was that he was with his guru-striving towards the pinnacle of realization at the top.   When I touched him, I felt an enormous wellspring of grief arise within me.   I asked him, “Where have you been?”   He said he had been working with children in one of the worst brothels in India. As we continued with our bodywork session, I felt as if I was receiving the children.  I could see their faces and feel the horror and grief of their circumstances.   The session moved me deeply.   It felt like a profound blessing.

At the end of the session he said, “I don’t know if I made a difference in those childrens’ lives.”   I immediately said, “Of course you did.”   He replied, “No, I really don’t know.  They are used to having people come and go.  I know they sure got into my heart and changed my life.” 

I think about that session a lot.  I continue to learn from the honesty, rawness and realness in this exchange.  What if we truly don’t know how our actions affect each other?  What happens if we let go of trying to leave a legacy, being a hero and making it to the top?  If we could truly not know but find the radical courage to let suffering crack our hearts open into deeper compassion and love.  What can be revealed then?  It is not everyone's dharma to work in brothels.  What happens if we let loss into our hearts?   If we allow the suffering to crack our hearts open?   What happens if we are stripped of a hero’s agenda but flow with the uncertainty of a cracked open love?    What wants to find space in your heart today?   

 *********

 For those who would like to receive healing support, I am offering a special which is redeemable until mid. February.  I am offering series sessions for $200 for 3--90 min sessions or 5--90 min. sessions for $330.  If you are curious of my work and haven't received a session, I am offering an introductory 90 min. session for $65.   


Much love and many blessings, 

Courtney

A few nights ago, I was sharing a moment of tears and loss with a friend who after many years, will be leaving Ashland.    We were sharing how much courage it takes to truly, authentically love and let ourselves intimately attach to each other and to life.  

It takes courage to let people and life into our hearts.   In my experience, when I open myself to love, I open myself to loss.  In our culture, we seem to have some deep seated conditioning to view loss as failure.  We try to hurry to quickly back into gain.   What I have noticed within myself and with others, is that in times of change or loss, when it isn't fully honored and we don't fully grieve our losses, then part of us sanctions off or detaches from Life.   Part of us may close and become afraid to open.  Afraid of being hurt.   Afraid of rejection, betrayal or abandonment.   

When my former partner and I separated,  I was so deeply humbled and thought that I was doing something wrong because loss and grief would continue to show up for years and still continues to show up.  At one point, after lots of personal work and healing sessions, I had to stop analyzing it, doing inner dialogues and gestalts around it and let it find a home in my heart.   In this, I realize life can rather simple in the beauty ways of the heart.  When I find a home for loss in my heart, I discover a deeper Love as my heart stretches and stretches wide to include everything:  losses and gains, joy and sorrow, life and death.  

Kahil Gibran speaks of this so intimately in his poem on Love, "if in your fear, you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure, Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's thressing-floor, Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears."    

 In these moments when I rest in authentic vulnerability, I step off the see saw of the unconscious mechanism of mind..of superiority or inferiority..not propped up above life or on a ladder of attainment.   One where I rest within the Greater Soul of Life and our one human family.   

 I slowly begin to recognize that which I love in my friends and family in Peru.  A life where I find my place amongst the intricate weave of Nature.  A life in which Nature's way begins to birth Herself through me.  I feel and catch a glimpse of the Living laws of Nature, of 'ayni'--the unconditional sacred reciprocity with life.  It is single and most important principle that guides the lives of Andean people.  My mind thought I knew 'ayni'.  After 6 years of intimate relations and earnest pilgrimages to Peru, I believe I am just now beginning to have a sense of the 'ayni', this sacred and right relationship with life.   So, I find myself inexplicably drawn again to deepen in these wisdom ways of the Heart.  I invite you to join me on a sacred journey to Peru and Bolivia in March.  
http://www.courtneydukelow.com/peru-trip.html

****************
FREE MONTHLY TELECONFERENCE 
Wendesday, October 1 at 6:00pm 
http://www.courtneydukelow.com/free-monthly-teleconference.html

**************
OCTOBER SESSION SPECIAL 
3 sessions series for $200.  5 session series for $330.   

Many blessings, 
Courtney

Dear Friends, 

I hope this email finds you deeply well and enjoying this first day in September.   

I wanted to send out a note to let you know that I will be offering a free teleconference this Wednesday.  It is an opportunity to come together in sacred ways of the heart for energetic meditations and soul centered sharings.   The call in number is 712-432-1212 and access code is 930 446-118.      

Reawakening the Sacred 
September Retreat 
I also wanted to let you know that there is still space available for the upcoming retreat, Reawakening the Sacred on Sept. 26-28. 

This weekend is an opportunity to reconnect more intimately and deeply with the Soul of the Earth, our Great Mother.  It will be held at an amazing wilderness preserve near Ashland.   We will participate in ancient ceremony and rituals that support deepening our inner connection with the Earth's living spirit.  
 
Carl Jung once stated, “The word ‘matter’ remains a dry, inhuman, and purely intellectual concept.  How different was the former image of matter—the Great Mother—that could encompass and express the profound emotional meaning of the Great Mother.” 
 
When we see and intimately experience the Earth, not as just a mountain, a rock, a tree, a river, but as a Soul in which we are a part of, a spark of wisdom ignites within our matter.  We can begin to restore the magic of the Earth through us.   This magical wisdom connects us all in the matrix of Mother Nature's creation.  We rediscover that sacred resting place within us, where we can intimately feel our place in this world.  

Blessings, 
Courtney 

There is a deep and sacred resting place inside of us.  This echo of Home is the echo of our origins, of our original innocence.  This call from our deepest core, vibrates through our life, sometimes in an agonizing ache of longing, like a wolf that howls to the moon.  Other times, in a pang of separation from the veiled but unforgotten wisdom of our deepest core.  These aches and pangs often propel our attention away from this sacred call Home from our depths, and into the periphery to try to cover up or dull it down.  
 
At some point, along our journey of our hallowed wanderings through all our experiences, our Soul’s may hear this call Home. It is a call that begins to bring our attention back from our periphery to our depths, to the blessed unveiling of our deepest core, the Garden of Eden within.  Concurrent with our Soul's call, often times, a loss in our life or some difficult journey or challenge may arise that initiates our descent into our depths.  It may rattle us and shake our foundational roots as we begin to question what our lives, our desires and what it is that most fundamentally matters. It is essentially unveiling our core longing that has has been buried under our peripheral desires of our culturally imposed values.  Our journey into the descent may take us into our grief, our unexperienced pain and our cut off places within us that we have been hiding, denying or rejecting.   It is a journey that ultimately guides us back to the Tree of Life within,  our Feminine Divinity.  
 
The Tree of Life is represented throughout all major religions.  In China, the Tree of Life is represented as a dragon and a phoenix.  In Hopi traditions, it is the center point in the labyrinth where our wandering Souls find rest and rebirth.   In Kabbalah, it represents the map of Creation.   This impulse of Creation that calls us to our journey into duality, into the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and also calls us Home.   This is the impulse of the Divine Feminine arising from the Heart of the Earth and the core of Her outrageous creation.
 
The call on Wednesday will be focusing on The Tree of Life.  It won’t be a lecture or teaching on it, but rather an energetic opportunity to open more intimately to your sacred core and the Holy Unity of the Tree of Life.  It is my intention it will offer a deep support, a unified field in which we can meet our experience, easing the struggle of our journey, lightening the forces within us and in our collective that want to keep us locked down in 3-D duality or solely perceiving our ‘issues’ from a very narrow bandwidth of perception.  Our time together is sacred, a time to open to the awe, mystery and beauty of our most sacred Feminine Divinity.

These calls are free and open to anyone.  If you know anyone who may be interested in joining, please feel free to pass this email along to them.   Wednesday, August 6 at 6pm to 7pm PST.   Call in:  605-475-6767 Access Code:  755-1266.  

Blessings,
Courtney

Dear Friends,

Happy Summer to you!   I hope this email finds you deeply well.  

I wanted to let you know of a wonderful special that I am offering until August 15.  I am offering 3-90 min. sessions for $200 or 5 sessions for $330 for in-person and phone sessions.  My normal rates are a sliding scale of $90 to $130 for 90 min.  I also offer 60 min. sessions for $80.   Because transformation is a journey and process, series sessions offer an incredible support in diving  into your depths, so that you can birth into greater power, light and grace.   These sessions are designed to be scheduled once a week or twice a month to receive the full benefit.

Occasionally, first time clients ask me how I work and what modalities I use.   It is always difficult for me to articulate it because every session is unique, focusing on your intentions and intimately guided by your own Soul's glorious wisdom.  My work is body-centered.  I firmly believe and experience that our bodies are an amazing focal points of consciousness.  Our Soul's consciousness is vast and multi-dimensional.   As we discover and deepen into our capacity to embrace everything that shows up within our experience, all of our emotions--from the highest realms of our consciousness to the lowest dimensions of our being, a wonderful experience of unification begins to happen-resulting in greater peace, freedom, wholeness and power.  When clients come to me with pain, my attention is naturally guided to any underlying dynamics that may be attributing to the source of pain.   I approach pain, as well as any personal life 'issues' in one's life, not as a 'problem' but as a call from one's Soul, an entry point to dive into our depths to integrate any places within us that we have denied and pushed away.   

Please feel free to share this email with anyone you think may be interested.   Thank you!   

In loving blessing,
Courtney

Dear Friends,
 
I wanted to share this amazing video production with you that a friend sent to me who was part of my first group pilgrimage to Peru.  There are three trailers as well as a list of showings (which may be in your area).  
 
Of course, making my heart shine and leap out of my chest on the very front cover of this book is my Q’ero Godmother, Dona Maria.  I was watching the video with my twin sister Kelly and every time I would see a Q’ero friend or a familiar heart-song place, I would scream out their name in utter joy and delight.     
 
Up until quite recently, I felt disconnected from my biological family.   Meeting my Q’ero family and being ‘adopted’ by them through their ceremonial ritual of becoming a Godmother helped nurture, heal and awaken to my indigenous roots and heart.   When I began to bring groups to Peru, I noticed the same welcoming they offered to me, they offered to every single person in the group for they not only know that we are all children of Pachamama, they live it and everyone who meets them experiences the deep welcoming and knowing that we are all brothers and sisters. 
 
When I met Dona Maria, I cried and cried and cried.  Her eyes sung to me a song of blessings, grace and miracles of the Mother.  I knew I was looking at the embodiment of the Divine Mother, of a true Matriarch in her radiant pure wisdom.  Her body is 85 but she remains like the innocence of a child, a child knowing the miracle of her true Mother, the cosmic Living presence of the Earth.   This was so different than any teacher or guide I had ever met.   There was no air of pretense, perched above-ness or eliteness.  There was no talk about being ‘one’, spiritual phrases, or elite rites.  Their ways are much more simple and pure, embodying the living values of the Earth, which I believe are reflections of the values of our truest and deepest nature.  
 
When I told her that I was bringing groups of people to work with her (and her sons), she looked at me utterly shocked and said, “Why are they coming to see me?  I mean I am soo short!”   When our taxi would get overcrowded past the ‘legal’ requirements, she would sit in the back, with one of their cloths over her short little body and head.   While I have had a lot of experiences at the sacred sites that have connected me to an ancient wisdom and civilization, whenever I would ask her a question, my spiritual ego would get busted.  Her answer always somehow would be guided back to Pachamama, as she would throw her hands up in the air and with the deepest love and innocence proclaiming, “PACHAMAMA!”    It took me a while to realize embodied that Pachamama is a cosmic living being, making up the fabric of this reality and ALL that we see, in which are Souls are an individualized expression of Her.    It took a few years before the indigenous spark ignited within me and I began to awaken to the intimate embrace of the sacred Earth, our amazing cosmic, ego-stripping yet soul reviving Mother.  In my heart and experience, this is the Rise of the Divine Feminine.  The sacred ignition and reawakening to our true feminine Divinity, the sacred Earth within each and every one of us.  It is through awakening to Her living presence within us, that restores and rebirths the purity of our Soul’s embodied.   
 
I am organizing a small group for October (possibly November) as the dates are still somewhat flexible.  If you can’t join us, please check out this video or the trailers.   There are heart-opening video clips and pictures which truly captures the heart of Q'ero mysticism.     
 
http://www.paqoandino.com/#about-the-film
 
http://www.courtneydukelow.com/peru-trip.html
 
In love,
Courtney

Dear Friends,
 
Happy Spring to you all!   I love the beauty of this time of year.  Some flowers and trees in full bloom while others are just slowly beginning to open.  It takes courage to be in winter.  It also takes courage to let the sun’s light slowly penetrate and encourage the flowers to blossom with the warm solar rays of the emerging spring sun.   As the buds may be closed, shy to open to the glory of the Sun’s rays, our inward blossoming may mirror at times the same.  We are nature, part of Her glorious creation.  I love walking past some flowers when all of the sudden I am struck, filled with the wonderous smell that transports me to the Heart of Nature and Her Heaven.   Isn’t it amazing when the wind captures the smell of a rose, of a flower and carries it in the wind, so we catch a whiff of this pure astonishing grace.   Then, we return to smell the flower directly and sometimes it doesn’t capture it in the same way.   The wind blows but we rarely ask where the wind is coming from. The spirit of Her nature, alive in and as all things, including us.   This is the real beauty of the Sensuous.   Not as some front or face we put up to the world for everyone to see.  But one that draws us in and in and in to the mystery, the purity, the grace of the Earth’s magnificent creation.  Where this rebirth into spring, allows us to birth into the deeper fullness and beauty of all that we are.  The resurrection of the Christ, where we participate in our Easter egg hunts, of the places in our psyche that are still hiding.  Where in the blooming Heart of Nature inside of us, welcomes and embraces these places and spaces that we have pushed away.  In Mother Nature's embrace, you may hear Her says, “This too, is included.  This too is the beauty of my Creation.”   
 
Enjoy the Spring! In this time of opening to the power and emerging beauty of spring, please know I am here and available if you are called to receiving healing and transformative support for your journey of embodying  and awakening to  your deepest potential and the intimate embrace of all that we are.    Please check out my website for more information.  I made some changes as well.   
http://www.courtneydukelow.com/luminous-healing-sessions.html

As I plant my Spring seeds, I wanted to let you know that I am planning another group to Peru this October.  The dates are still flexible and somewhat negotiable if you are called to join and another time works better for you.  For more information, please check out my website.  I also uploaded more pictures for you to enjoy.
http://www.courtneydukelow.com/peru-trip.html

Love and Blessings, 
Courtney

Last week, I returned from a sacred pilgrimage to Peru.  Peru is a second home for me.  It is a place that makes sense to my Soul.  Where the heart of indigenous wisdom shines  and many still live in the essence of tribal togetherness rooted in the deep soils of the Earth. They depend on each other and need each other.  Many, like my mystical friends and family in the Q’ero communities, continue that ongoing conversation with Mother Earth and bask in the awe inspiring spiritual dimensions of her Being.   
 
One of my favorite places in Island of the Moon in Lake Titicaca. Surrounded by the vastness of Lake Titicaca is this very small, remote and local island consisting of 25 families.  From the first step onto this island, the magical aura of the Sacred Feminine fills my being.  There are no hostels here, no stores and no restaurants.  We were lucky and blessed to get a meal and a room in a local’s home-a thin mattresses resting upon the reeds which they harvested from the Lake.   There is no running water, no showers and no electricity.   The only thing that is offered here is the mystical, which is an invisible elixer for my Soul.  Our room nestled so very closely to the ancient ruin, Coati, the ruin of the 3 Virgins dedicated to the worshipping of the Sun.  Exquisite doorways, portals, remain of this ruin.   Within each doorway is the sacred chakana, the Andean Sacred Cross, the symbol of creation and the levels of attainment and mastery of our consciousness.  
 
There are three worlds, realms of consciousness making up our human experience:  The upper wold (Hanan Pacha) includes the stars, celestial beings, the sun and the mystical and multi-dimenional realms of of our Spirit.   The middle world (Kay Pacha) is where we are now and the support from the mountains, our community and all the natural world.  The lower world (Uqhu Pacha) is the deepest place in the inner Earth, it is the underworld, the shadow, our repressed emotions, the places in trauma where we fragment ourselves from our center core essence, the personal and collective unconscious and the power of creation. The hole in the center is our deepest core essence, the radiant emptiness which out of the love of creation, births the three worlds, offering us the opportunity for self mastery.   The 3 Virgins represent the purity and power that exist within the heart of the three worlds.  
 
Each of these doorways is a sacred portal opening to our inner being. Some go up and some go down.  We are told to fear these lower and underworlds, ‘hell’.  Yet it is here that our deepest healing can take place and true power is birthed.   There is a wisdom that only darkness knows.   To enter these doorways, there is a code, a language of the Soul.   I hold it all in deep reverence and realize these sacred sites offer a deep initiation.  If it goes up, it offers an opportunity to deepen my connection to the spiritual light dimensions of my being.  It if goes down, I am drawn into the darkness like entering the sacred womb of the Mother where often there is some pain or some part of my experience that I have been denying, I can now welcome into my heart.   It is through this embrace of all that we are, a deeper wholeness and integrity is birthed into the middle world.  
 
This sacred embrace of the amazing, dynamic, full nature of all that we are is what the chakana represents in my experience.  It is the guiding influence of my life and my work with others.  I have an ever deepening commitment through my own healing and awakening, to continue to open to the purity and power of these three realms of our human experience, so that my presence can offer the deepest support to others.  
 
GIFT CERTIFICATES FOR THE HOLIDAY SEASON
 
 I have gift certificates available, in print and in email format, for anyone who would like to gift themselves or someone else a healing session.  I am offering a series of 3 or 5 healing sessions for the holidays as well.   3 session series are $200, 5 sessions are $325.   I work in person and over the phone or Skype.   I hold every session as a sacred journey, unfolding according to your heart’s intention and what it is you are wanting.   Sometimes in shows up in the form of a nurturing massage and other times more body centered energy work and intuitive counseling and guided questions to support a deeper connection with your experience.  I am here and would love to be available to you.