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 disturbances stopped. Courtney is not surprised, because children are sponges for energy and never stop to interrogate it. Tell a child a stone will help them sleep and they simply move toward what feels good. Adults, in her framing, get a little dumber as they age, because they stop trusting what they feel and start arguing with it.

Her argument to the skeptic is the most disarming thing in the first half, because she does not need to win it. Quartz crystals run the timepieces, computers and phones everybody carries, because crystals are superb energy conductors. But set that aside entirely and the placebo effect is still real, still studied, still working. Put your mind there, leave yourself open, and you will feel better. That is the whole ask.

Reiki gets the same plain treatment. It is a shifting of energy through the body's energy centers. Chakras hold energy, they can be imbalanced or blocked, and the work is clearing the freeway until everything runs green. Sandra asks whether you have to believe in it for it to work, and Courtney's answer is practical rather than spiritual. She can feel someone blocking her even when it is unintentional, the same way a personal trainer cannot do much for a client convinced nothing will help. Her line is the sharpest of the segment: why spend three hundred dollars for an hour of her time to prove a point that nothing can help you?

Veida raises the person whose energy felt genuinely bad years ago and feels fine now, and Courtney turns that into the idea that carries the episode. You can shift at any point in your life, in either direction, which is exactly why the thoughts you think and the words you use matter. You may have been dealt bad cards. You can still play a good game. She backs it with a story about having dinner with Marianne Williamson, dissolving into tears on sight, and hearing her explain why she prays for difficult people. One of two things happens, Williamson told her. Either they change or I change, and either way I stop caring. Courtney's addition is the part worth keeping: if you shift, the thing stops hitting you the same way, and if they shift, the relationship changes. You get what you wanted either way.

The second half turns to mediumship, and Courtney explains how she found out, which happened while she was dating someone. She describes the sensation in terms any parent understands immediately. You can see the person in front of you speaking but you cannot hear them, because somebody is pulling at the hem of your skirt going mom, mom, mom. She eventually told the man she was seeing that a friend of his had passed, described the circumstances, and delivered a message. He went quiet, because every detail was accurate and he had never told her any of it.

What makes the conversation more than comforting is her insistence on specifics. Real mediumship, in her account, is a grandfather arriving during a facial with a message about his daughter switching from coffee to tea and putting in vegetable plants. It is somebody unpacking boxes. Those small checkable details are how you know, and she explains them so listeners can judge for themselves.

Sandra then shares a practice she has never fully explained on the show. Her father passed in 2009. Through a medium she asked whether he would communicate through a p