Crystals, Mediums and the Ex-Wife Who Will Not Let Go

What is the difference between a beautiful rock and a tool that changes your week? Do you have to believe in Reiki for it to work? And when your husband's ex-wife is still calling his mother fifteen years after the divorce, are you overreacting or are you right?Party's Over returns to the TCL Chinese Theater with a guest who works in a space a lot of people are curious about and very few understand. Courtney is the founder of The Urban and the Mystic, a meditation and Reiki practitioner, and a medium. She is also an old friend of Veida's, which is why this conversation moves faster and lands harder than a first meeting would allow. Sandra Lena Silverman and Veida Horn ask the questions most people are too self conscious to ask, starting with the one everybody is thinking: is this a cult?Courtney's answer to that is the reason her company exists. She was standing at a gem show looking at a room full of extraordinary crystals when she recognized the gap between people who live inside energy work and people who find it beautiful and faintly ridiculous. She was not interested in converting anybody. She wanted to democratize spirituality enough that a curious person could pick up one tool and use it.So they go through the tools. Rose quartz is the heart chakra stone, the stone of unconditional love, and her case for it barely requires belief at all: even if you think it emits nothing, it is a literal touchstone reminding you that you are choosing not to be cynical, not to assume the world is against you. Lepidolite goes in your pocket before you speak in public, because the throat chakra governs communication and feeling it there is a reminder that you are being intentional. Emerald was an engagement stone long before diamonds took the job, because it carries deep and everlasting love. Amethyst is beautiful in sunlight right up until the sunlight bleaches it to a murky gray, so keep it out of the window. And black tourmaline is what she calls the mother of all protection stones, the one she sends home with nervous flyers, small enough for a bag or a bra, or large enough to sit by your most used entrance where it both protects the house and reminds you what energy you are putting into it.Veida, whose anxiety about flying arrived along with motherhood, takes that one personally. She also brings the story that makes the strongest case of the episode. Her daughter wanted the amethyst geode moved out of the living room and into her bedroom, and her night disturbance