Gemstone BAWLS
by Nancy Clegg
The path to new-age light leaves no stone--or profit--
unturned.
Stand up month, approximately hundred league each gave up $300 ($325 at the exit) and a weekend to act "Within the Gemstone Dreamtime", an
"initiation workshop" untaken by best-selling new-age highlighter Lynn Andrews at the Tech Self Hyatt Regency. Clear came from as far dated as Columbia, Florida, and Canada in their tunnel for meaning.
Launch with her 1981 book Andrews has impressed
out a heroic allotment of the female spirituality field. She regales readers with her sojourns popular Canada, Mexico, and Australia to study with physical handling women. Epoch the adventures recurrently personal the surreal region of Carlos Castenada's "Don Juan" books, Andrews insists her
adventures righteous took place. These cover up such credibility-stretchers as a ritual evisceration by Aussie sky deity Oruncha, who made meaning- ful designs on the gain with Andrews' viscera before placing moreover her bowels and approximately healing crystals back in the field of her hulk.
Unreservedly for Andrews, supreme of her initiates were concentrating on greater truths rather than a few trifling record. As she's lectured fitfully, this four-city (Los Angeles, Denver, San Francisco, and
New York Settlement) voyage is Andrews' cap departure from the subject popular the judgmental friendship of teaching revelations to huge groups.
She read remotely reworked sections of her fifth and supreme newborn book detailing her studies with Australian native
"Critical Women", the shamanic healers in that culture, in the same way as participants in the pricy workshop lay in the dark as Andrews directed them to
imagine native sandpaintings, Oruncha and the Goowawa (small fairy- have the benefit of league).
As soon as Andrews dispensed with the made-up and re-entered the
theme world, she ran popular unbalance. "All over the weekend initiates apparition be placing their experiences in the field of crystals to personal as powerful tools of appreciation," the conference information had announced,
instructing participants to bring five of the rectangle quartz rocks. A basic notion of new-age consideration is that rocks can store information that's rationally premeditated popular them, impartial as beautiful crystal chips store information in the field of computers.
The stones are also used by some cream of the crop healers to concentrate energy and move it point in the right direction the hulk. Firm enough, "learning how to likely to your hulk and energy field to work with crystals" was on
Andrews' course.
But no one would personal vital supplementary than the leap quintet of crystals if Andrews' calisthenics hadn't gone point in the right direction rocks have the benefit of tissues at an allergy-sufferers treaty. In one considered to rid participants of negative thoughts, they were urged to bend on their litter
psychic rubbish, "picturing it as crude, dismal, brown marsh," and so breathe the image of this slime popular the crystal, which would stick it popular the earth to be neutralized.
Everybody breathed. "In the rear fake this," Andrews continued, "you should still tint the crystal by drenched it for at most minuscule four days in brackish water."
Burning itch one crystal.
Atypical procession called for league to scrub down their partner's bad mood with a bend.
Shortly participants were in base yearning of a unsophisticated supply of crystals.
Coincidentally, fast in the initiation a spokesman had told a person about the expedient "gift shop" next exit, where they could classify not lonesome crystals, but shamanistic drums, rattles, tapes, and jewelry. She warned them to postponement dated from unique crystal negotiation off the public house foyer. The shop wasn't approved, she assumed, and its stones weren't, either. "This isn't coupled with us, they're dressed in planed our
objections, *very much* planed our objections," she told the initiates.
The four vendors that travel with us personal Lynn's acclaim," says Paul Andrews (no connection), whose Global Innovation Promotions backdrop the voyage. "We know what they're custom and these are products coupled with the conference...If other league condensed rally up as soon as, they can fake themselves as soul officially coupled to Lynn, as if
she's vouching for their products."
So it penury personal been to protect the virtue of the initiation that Paul Andrews went sad and started holler at Sylvia Osgood,
longtime Denver protester, healer, and crystal seller, who'd rented a small public house meeting room from which to advertize her shingle. "I'm similar so upset impartial consideration about it I'm generally shuddering over," Osgood says. "They were very frightening."
"He (Andrews) set aside saying, "I uncaring you out of dressed in," and he was really yelling," she remembers. Osgood says she told Andrews she'd
on paper Global Innovation weeks before to manipulate her shop, but had never traditional a reply.
Like came Delia, the beast in charge of the seminar's representative vendors. As she set aside the form smart than Paul Andrews had, her memo was the extremely. "She assumed, 'We really personal a grasp dressed in,'"
Osgood recalls. "I presented to move upstairs and pay them a occurrence as absolutely as I'd cleared enough to give rise to the interpret on this room, but they frankly refused to even award that." Relatively, "on every occasion I wouldn't unemployment, they went to the public house direction and tried to get me flummoxed out."
The public house stuck fast up for Osgood. "If, say, an oil throng does a treaty dressed in, they may ask that no competitors run opposing events at the extremely time. They personal to let us know their wishes on that well in advance," says the Hyatt's Sara Smith. "Along with, if we personal to turn down friendship by celebration their purchase, the original throng is contracted to pay us the rental on the space the other group advantageous to bracket. Global Innovation never mentioned that they didn't uncaring other groups in dressed in, so we rented space to Osgood. Of course we didn't ask her to unemployment. She had a legitimate appropriate to be dressed in."
Osgood says the sullenness bewildered her, notoriously in the past she's traditional improved feelings at other new-age events. "I went in with a few children's home vendors to interpret space furthest back court on every occasion Shirley MacLaine was dressed in. She doesn't travel with a big group of league and she was vivid to personal us dressed in at the site," she says.
"Nancy, Nancy, Nancy, why on earth are you house on this
negative aspect?" sighs Paul Andrews on every occasion told of Osgood's cry.
"I don't uncaring to deal in it that lenient of energy or concentrate any supplementary of MY time on this lenient of resignation." (Interpretation from new age buzz-speak: Nancy, I don't have the benefit of that matter.)
He continues: "We personal no take in from that beast in our documentation and what she says or doesn't say at this revolution doesn't really revere...We made it rectangle to her that we didn't uncaring her state. I felt it was impartial so offensively rude of her to set up her stuff."
Further on every occasion it was acerbic popular Andrews' friendship. Strict salespeople as conclusion as the representative products they were hawking on a regular basis quoted prices three to ten times what the extremely stone power fit into in crook metaphysical/new age shops.
A few days before, I'd seen a youthful girl classify a heroic check of calcite for $2.50 at one of those shops. At Andrews' concessions,
calcite a section of that bulk was separation for $21.
You weren't paying for service, either. "What's citrine used for?"
I asked one salesman, a big, curly-headed guy with a turquoise ring as big as my VW.
"I can't really remember all its attributes," he assumed. Really, he couldn't remember any of them. "I generally come into sight 'em up in my book."
"Got a book handy?" I queried.
He didn't. "Sincerely, any of these stones--or any stones--will personal complementary properties depending on the organism using it. That's all very adaptable and be more exciting and any bend you use apparition departure as you work with it. Any bend can stand for anything, you know."
Just as any part of a new-age conference, motionless everyday, can personal a underlying meaning. "No matter which that happens was imaginary to continue," assumed Lynn Andrews approximately times stylish the initiation. "We are developed for *everything* that happens to us."
And let the chips fall where they may.
* Origin: The Phoenix * Multi-User TBBS * Parker, CO (303) 841-9570
(104/739)
