by Julie Rieger
“Your mom is saying, ‘If there had been a magazine on how to raise a gifted child, I would have read it.’ ” Okay, now I knew for sure that Mom was there. She was a magazine hoarder with a particular yen for Consumer Reports and Cat Fancy. She’d kept every copy since 1976. I lost it again.
“ ‘From the very beginning, you made your way around like you didn’t need any help,’ ” Brenda continued, speaking my mom’s words. “ ‘I wish I would have known more what to do to help you, but you were so gifted. You may look like me. You may act like me and talk like me. But that heart of yours is yours. You had to do things for a mother that no daughter should have to do.’ ” Then, after a pause, “ ‘And I was nice to your father.’ ”
And I was nice to your father.
Those were the last words I spoke to my mom: Be nice to Dad. I have no idea why and had forgotten about them until that very moment. When my mom was dying, did I unconsciously intuit the moment she and my dad would reunite as ghosts? Did my mom finally do what I’d asked her to do for the first time ever (because she sure as hell didn’t do what I asked her to do when she was alive)? More to the point: How the fuck was Brenda able to do this, whatever “this” was?
That first reading with Brenda changed my life forever. The specificity and nuance of the information communicated simply blew me away. There was now absolutely no question in my mind that loved ones had crossed over to the Other Side and reached out to communicate. In receiving their communication, I, too, crossed a threshold: In that moment I believed in life after death. It’s that simple. In fact, I didn’t just believe, I knew. And now I wanted to know more, way more. I wanted to know what my mom and Mona were doing outside their bodies.
CHAPTER FIVE
Paranormal CliffsNotes
Paranormal events are just edges of the infinite we “happen” to encounter.
—C. DOUGLAS DILLON
All a skeptic is is someone who hasn’t had an experience yet.
—JASON HAWES
We human beings like to dispute what others would call facts when they don’t line up with the truths we tell ourselves. That’s especially the case when it comes to invisible shit. But come on: Empires have risen and fallen partly based on religious differences, right? Well, religion is also invisible and faith based, but no one will deny the massive influence it’s had over us for a gazillion years.
I’m going to talk a lot about the unseen world throughout this book, but for now I’ll just start with a brief primer. First off, nobody knows precisely what ghosts are or why human beings have perceived them for eons. It wasn’t until fairly recently, like around the Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth century, that science and technology started explaining away unsolved mystical or supernatural mysteries as “psychological.” (No surprise: traditional psychology and psychiatry also appeared around the same time.)
Before that you’d basically get burned at the stake for ghostly shit or anything that smacked of the supernatural, not because people didn’t believe in the spirit world, but because they totally did: Remember, our country was settled by religious refugees (some might call them fanatics or extremists; just sayin’) who had a keen sense and extreme fear of the supernatural. The Salem witch trials in the 1600s drive that point home. Wikipedia calls them a “vivid cautionary tale about the dangers of isolationism, religious extremism, false accusations, and lapses in due process.” You could say the same thing about Joan of Arc: She led her country into battle and would be canonized as a saint, but that didn’t stop the English from burning her at the stake because she heard the voices of Saint Michael, Saint Margaret, and Saint Catherine.
Six centuries and probably six hundred wars later, we’re still doing the same thing: While science is trying to explain away the supernatural (mostly dismissed as hallucinatory), mysticism, spirituality, and the supernatural have become hugely popular—and pop culture can’t get enough of it.
It’s impossible in these pages to cover the huge amount of books, TV shows, and movies that have been produced about ghosts and the paranormal, from the dawn of cinema to the recent Doctor Strange, featuring Benedict Cumberbatch in his hot-shit red cape. The paranormal film genre is now one of the most popular genres of all time. Mediums have also become mainstream and massively popular, from John Edward and Concetta Bertoldi to Theresa Caputo and James Van Praagh, to name just a few. (I’ll get to some of them later.) The bottom line: Paranormal films are the most profitable genre in the business.
Consider these stats:
Every two seconds, someone in North America does a Google search on the word “ghost.”
“Kid-friendly ghosts” is searched nearly 800,000 times a year on YouTube (and there are 4,117,975 #ghost posts on Instagram as I write these words).
Roughly 40 to 45 percent of the US population believes in ghosts (Harris poll).
Three in four Americans believe in the paranormal (Gallup).
Twenty-two percent of Americans say they’ve felt or seen a ghost (CBS News).
When it comes to the Internet, there are more than 143 million Google entries for “ghost” and more than 32 million results for “ghost photo.” The top Google ghost questions include the following:
What does the Bible say about ghosts?
How to talk to ghosts.
What do ghosts look like?
How old is the belief in ghosts?
How to overcome fear of ghosts.
How to summon a ghost.
What does it mean when you dream about ghosts?
How to contact ghosts.
How many people believe in ghosts?
How to communicate with ghosts.
And then there are the 300 million Buddhists, 800 million Hindus, and millions of assorted “others” who believe in reincarnation. They probably don’t even think to ask those questions because the answers are self-evident to them.
We human beings are not just biological matter, we’re also comprised of energy. We intimately coexist with the unseen world and its invisible energies, from the force of gravity to invisible waves that transmit every form of media into our lives on a daily basis. Satellites keep our lives buzzing along invisible electronic grids that do everything from making our remote controls work to control tower radar that keeps airplanes from colliding in midair, never mind the miracle of electricity, microwaves, radio, and microchips that are all powered by invisible energy.
So bottom line: If a colonial woman back in the 1600s said to some Puritan dickweed that one day people would have small handheld devices to talk to and see each other in real time from different parts of the planet, you can bet she would have ended up a femme flambé faster than you could say the word “ghost.” And if that same woman happened to be a lesbian?
CHAPTER SIX
I’m Coming Out—Again
The single best thing about coming out of the closet is that nobody can insult you by telling you what you’ve just told them.
—RACHEL MADDOW
When someone lives as a minority, they experience the world differently than those of us who live in the majority. We may occupy the same physical space, but we don’t occupy the same psychic space.
—JENNIFER GRANHOLM
Official lesbian leader Ellen DeGeneres made the toaster oven famous to the lesbian world in the “The Puppy Episode” when she came out in her sitcom, The Ellen Show. A toaster oven is a marker of a lesbian’s sexual experience with a straight woman, as in: If you recruit a straight girl to the wild side, you get a toaster oven. But I got this wrong: I used this term when referring to gay men and actually thought that all lesbians got toaster ovens. (And please don’t tell the lesbian police, because they might take my toaster oven back.)
Despite her celebrity status, Ellen’s coming out was no picnic. The network dropped her and she was shunned by many fans until the culture at large finally embraced her for who she truly is. Though I managed to come out without getting ostracized by too many people, coming out as gay is still a
wickedly courageous act. Simply speaking, coming out in general is composed of four essential ingredients: 1) You have a secret unlike those of most other people, 2) that secret is counterculture, 3) people are still seriously scorned for it (despite recent strides), and 4) that secret poses perceived religious conflicts for Bible-thumpers and assorted traditionalists.
But if you think that coming out once in life is a lot, imagine coming out twice. Because coming out as a ghost photographer had similar ingredients and was just as scary as coming out as gay. I knew that I’d be scorned or judged or called “woo-woo,” “kooky,” or “a liar.” I actually would have judged a self-proclaimed “ghost photographer” to be odd before my own psychic journey began. My worst fear was that I would lose credibility at work, much like the illustrious Ms. DeGeneres. That didn’t happen, fortunately; in fact, quite the opposite took place, though my fear was as real as it was on the day I told an old friend that I was gay in 1993. You gamble, because once you spit out the words, you don’t know what response you’ll get.
So, gay or ghosts, it doesn’t matter—there must be a universal plan out there that assures there’s at least one taboo thing about me that makes people uneasy. Take your pick: lesbian or ghost photographer.
In coming out again, I also had to get past my own incredulity about myself. I had to believe that what I was experiencing was real. My entire life became a tribute to the wise words of Wayne Dyer: I had to change the way I saw things and what I believed about them.
I was already known at work as a renaissance lesbian (that’s actually what I call myself, because I’m into arts and crafts and clickers), but adding ghost photographer/mystic-in-training was a different story. After my first reading with Brenda, I flew to Cincinnati to see her for a private four-hour follow-up. Then I returned for another. And another. And another. I hadn’t just changed the way I looked at things—the spirit world was tapping me on the shoulder. (Later, it would hit me over the head with a frying pan.) I was not only paying attention, I was on a mission to learn everything I possibly could. I wanted to harness the same superpowers as Brenda and wear a damn cape.
I quickly became Brenda’s elf in training. (Brenda calls me an elf because I’m constantly doing and making things. I could live in a tree that I carved out myself and bake cookies in it.) On weekends I would fly to Cincinnati to study with Brenda and learn about the tarot, stones, crystals, dowsing rods, and pendulums—five things I’d never strung together into one sentence until just now. At first I felt a little like Keanu Reeves sticking his fingers through the Matrix with his mouth perpetually ajar. Eventually I ended up more like Harry Potter trying to get his shit together at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry—but not before I became the kind of woo-woo cliché that I used to role my eyes at. Particularly after I stumbled on the Crystal Matrix, an amazing metaphysical supply store in LA that was founded by Patricia Bankins, healer, certified past life and regression integration therapist, Reiki master, and high priestess of all things mystical. Patricia quickly became a friend and teacher.
To be clear, the only crystals I ever had before this time were the wineglasses in my bar. I’ve always associated them with the New Age movement of the 1970s, which had given them a bad rap along with macramé, patchouli, and too much hair. (Actually, I think macramé should make a comeback. We definitely need a macramé movement.) But if changing the way you look at things changes the things you look at, well, nothing spoke to that reality more than my relationship to crystals.
I knew squat about crystals until I met Patricia, and perhaps you know little about them, too. But like the fossil fuel you put in your car that literally makes your life go round, crystals are some of the earth’s most powerful materials. Think about it: Fossil fuel is formed by the decomposition of dead organisms that contain energy from ancient photosynthesis. And those organisms date back hundreds of millions of years. So every time you fill your car with gas or enjoy any of the countless basic amenities we modern humans take for granted, you’re essentially tapping into prehistory and an organic world that’s as dense and rich as cheesecake.
Crystals, in fact, are even older than the fossils that fuel our world. They are billions of years old, much older than the dinosaurs, going back to the big bang. They grow deep in the earth’s crust but are also found in deep space—in fact, as you’re reading this, tiny silicate crystals are floating inside icy comets on the edge of our solar system.
And that’s just the beginning of the amazing qualities of crystals. These incredible earth gems have bona fide healing and bioelectric properties. Black tourmaline was studied by our illustrious Founding Father Benjamin Franklin for its bioelectric properties, which were later confirmed by the Curies (the folks who studied radiation in the early 1900s). These properties are called “piezoelectricity” and “pyroelectricity,” depending on whom you’re talking to.
If you have any doubt about how real and powerful they are, consider your basic quartz: Its bioelectric properties are used to regulate the movement and precise frequency of clocks and watches. Quartz is also used to regulate the precise inner workings of microprocessors, radios, solar cells, and other sophisticated technology.
Crystals are comprised of repeating three-dimensional arrangements of atoms, ions, and molecules. They are some of the most elegant and complex expressions of earth chemistry that you can possibly imagine. Your average crystal was growing in a real matrix—a natural material such as soil or rock—as far back as the Precambrian era and will outlive you by billions of years. The oldest known pieces of the earth’s surface are 4.4-billion-year-old zircon crystals found in Western Australia. Back then, the earth was still being formed by stellar dust and interstellar gases.
When you think about their incredible properties, is it any wonder that crystal balls have been used as divination tools as far back as Celtic Druids? Or that the Christian Church condemned them during medieval times as heretical? Or that people in high political places have used them for divination, including Dr. John Dee, a renowned mathematician, geographer, and consultant to the queen of England in the late 1500s?
I began to amass the biggest and most badass collection of crystals. My specimens currently include two nuummite skulls, each fifteen and twenty pounds. Nuummite is over three billion years old, found only in Greenland and also considered part of the Earth’s first crust, and revered for its transformative qualities. I have different tourmaline stones called liddicoatite found only in Madagascar (that rare crystal comes in stunning colors and really opens up your third eye), as well as extremely potent double-terminated black tourmaline from Sindhupalchowk (don’t worry, I can’t pronounce it either), a remote Nepalese mine in the mountainous region outside of Katmandu. I also have selenite wands from the Cave of Swords in Mexico, and enhydros crystals with tiny million-year-old water particles trapped inside. A forty-eight-pound quartz skull from China presides over my office like a special dignitary, flanked by other small crystal skulls in various colors. (I clearly have a thang for crystal skulls.)
I also have two phurbas that were custom made for me by a Tibetan monk. A phurba (pronounced “purr-bah”) is a three-sided dagger and Tibetan ritual tool that wards off dark energy. The three sides of the phurba blade are known as the “three poisons”: attachment, ignorance, and aversion. In ancient times some of the most prized phurbas were made with what Tibetans called “sky-iron,” or tektites and meteorites. Also called a kila, a phurba has energy that’s intense and sometimes merciless. Daggers, scepters, sabers—they all look like phurbas and are part of our collective storytelling imagination for a reason. (Spoiler alert: The dagger that brings the Nightwalkers to their knees in Game of Thrones is made of dragon glass—aka obsidian.)
My phurbas weren’t cheap—they’re adorned with coral, turquoise, and a magnificent carved crystal skull—but hey, a girl needs her protection. My home office now feels like a cross between a steampunk saloon and the Emerald City—and, yeah, my road to enlightenment was pave
d in very expensive stones.
I spent a year being trained by Patricia in transcrystal therapy, which involves using the bioelectric properties of crystals to heal and integrate the body with the mind-spirit and the emotional self. It also helps sleuth out where emotional trauma may have lodged itself in the physical body. We even had weekly homework that I completed diligently and on time—a far cry from my experience as an ADD student who could only focus on what interested her. (Attention parents: ADD kids are not generalists, so don’t expect them to be. They’re wildly passionate for and hyperfocus only on what interests them at school. So be it. You can’t fit a square peg in a round hole.)
I also studied the meaning and dynamics of the chakras (energy centers of spiritual power in our bodies; see appendix five, “The Crystal Kingdom”) and, along the way, got in touch with some deep-seated childhood issues I’d been storing in my root (first) chakra like a lot of shitty discount baggage. (I’ll open some of that baggage later.) Part of my chakra training included learning the ancient technique of laying of stones and the use of a pendulum, which is a small weight on a chain that can be used to register energy in one’s body (energy that might be stuck or need healing) and in larger spaces like houses and rooms. These small wonders have been used throughout the centuries as divination tools for locating water, precious stones, and other key resources. (I now have a small collection of very special pendulums to which I’m fiercely attached.)
At the Crystal Matrix, I also met Ima, a gifted psychic who’s studied with some of the most enlightened souls, including many who were taught at the Berkeley Psychic Institute. Ima can see and move energy (without leaving her sofa to do so). She can also talk to the dead, to spirit guides, and to the higher selves of mere mortals like you and me.
Ima taught me a set of psychic tools and practices, one of which is how to properly ground myself. I’m not talking about getting calm and centered through meditation; I’m talking about getting psychically grounded through a visualization technique. I imagine a “grounding cord” that starts at the back of my first chakra (aka the crack of your ass, if you need a visual) and goes down into the center of the earth.