Sue Shaw Interviews Remi

When did your awakening begin? 

I saw a little advert in the local messenger which said “Are you a visionary, a feeler and intuitive or a prophetic?” and I thought, what are they? I need to go to this. I went along and it was run by two American ladies and it was the Inner Peace Movement. They invited us to join a six week course where we would find our gifts. I loved my childhood and I loved my teenager hood but I really got lost in those years after my teenage hood, getting married and having a child and I walked into that room and sat down and those ladies started to talk and I knew I’d come home.

How did you come up with the name Carpe Diem?

I had three months in Dubai with Mel and Paul (my daughter and her husband) when they lived there after I sold Crystal Wave, and it was about nine months after and I was lost. My son in law, Paul said to me, “Rem, you need to get yourself a little shop mate, you’re dying. I’ve already seen my dad die, and I can’t see you die as well.”. So I sat with Mel in a little coffee lounge downstairs from their apartment and I said “Carpe Diem, seize the day, I’m going to do it!” and that was it!

Custodian of Crystal Wave – Henley Beach

We had a big community there. It was an amazing thing, I woke up one morning in June of ‘92 and a voice said to me “go and buy the Crystal Wave”. I said what with? I haven’t actually got any money and it said, don’t worry, the money will be there. Anyway, I had a bit of a laugh and went back to sleep and I woke up and my half sister became the financier of the shop and we went and asked Marinus Keunig, who had it for sale, we would love to become the custodians of Crystal Wave, how would you feel about us taking it over? and he said, it’s yours, you’re the first people that have come and said you’d like to be the custodians, everybody else comes and asks how much do you want for your business mate, In your dreams! And that’s how we took the business over. The day we took over, people just came in the door, it was the most amazing thing. A couple of years after, we opened a coffee lounge and a garden out the back, and across the road, I opened the Centre and three consulting rooms behind the shop. We had a few really boom years until I listened to outside advice from an accountant and the old boom went to bust and I shut everything down except the shop.

Carpe Diem Haven

We closed it down almost two years as it did hardly anything in that time, it was pretty flat in energy. Then my friend Steve Farrugia came along and he revamped the shop with me, and my office and he built me a garden out the back. We revamped upstairs and the idea actually was for me to live up here. So I’m getting it all ready and then I thought oh, this space is so beautiful, I can’t live up here, I’ve got to share it with everybody. It actually just happened in a couple of weeks after we’d finished. It was literally the next week when Siona, our Herbalist contacted me and you contacted me and Kylie’s contacted me and Rachel was already here.

It is a safe haven. That’s why we’ve called it the Haven even though you call it the Heavenly Haven. I hope I’m not going to ascend to heaven quite just yet. I’ve got a little bit more I want to do but we’re cooking up a storm because we’ve got Deb, our Aroma Therapist and she is the most amazing cook. So we’ve got cooking as well as workshops, training courses, reiki courses and Hypnotherapy with Victoria.

At the moment, I’m doing monthly meditation. When I was at Crystal Wave, I think I notched up 4000 tarot readings so it’s possible that I’ll get back into some reading as I have got a long list of people who are actually waiting for me to do that but I’ve been so busy trying to get this business off the ground and functional in the way Mel and I want it to roll that it just has not been the time but Mel said to me tonight after work, Rem, I think your moment is here.

How did it all start at Carpe Diem?

The question to myself was, why would I sell a shop to open another crystal shop? I wouldn’t. I felt like my time in the metaphysical world was over and I wanted to do something totally different and I know retail, so I thought I’d open a Homewares store and sell lovely spiritual prints and furniture and tablecloths and placemats and yadi yadi.

So I filled the shop up with all these lovely things and I had my two cats Chance and Blaze, and we had an old antique bed for sale full of cushions so everybody would bang on the window and come in to see the cats, but they never actually came past the till.

People would say “You’re the crystal Queen, where’s the crystals? Where’s the CDs? Where’s the books? Where’s the oils?”, and they weren’t even interested in what I did and all the beautiful stock in that shop – half of it is upstairs in our Haven now, so it didn’t go to waste.

I gradually got in some crystals and then it’s grown and grown and now the shelves are groaning with stock. It’s just so full. I’ve invested every cent that I’ve got into this business in the last 11 years and it’s been the most rewarding thing because it’s just that beautiful beacon and its arrived and now it’s got a new ascension that’s transcending with our work in the upstairs Haven which is going to impact how downstairs works as well.

Where did you grow up?

In Stansbury, and I worked in my parents’ fish and chip shop from the age of 10 when bullets were eight a penny.

My poor parents used to get some amazing sweets in and they’d go, gee, that’s been a really good seller. I’ve never ever said anything but those wonderful sellers were in my pocket. I can’t get the smile off my face to connect with everybody tonight, it’s just overwhelming.

Until I moved into the spiritual world, I’d never found my Tribe and here at Carpe Diem the tribe now is growing and growing. We have to find our tribe if we want that sense of belonging. We have to find where we’re accepted and loved for who and what we are.

I remember reading in the TS bookshop, a little brochure and it was Learn Rebirthing, Transform your Life, Clear all your past patterns, with Diane McCann. I’d never heard of Diane. So I went along to the preview and it was one of the biggest moments of my life. I’d moved to Adelaide from Port Pirie a few years before and it was like stepping on a path. My best friend Claire was the Assistant that night. We’ve been friends since 1985 and Diane I hold in my heart.

I did that training, and I was a rebirther for several years and did lots of meditation classes and relationship work, all sorts of things and they were a wonderful few years, and you know how you look back on your life and you reflect, when I got that message to buy the Crystal Wave, it took me down a practical path and I’ve had all these years on that path but sometimes I wonder what the path would have been if I’d stayed on the purely metaphysical, being of service, not through retail, through an open door of a shop but actually through my own work. I’ll never know the answer to that.

I’ve lost contact with so many of my precious friends. My face was always at the counter. In the first six or seven years, I was everything – I was on the counter, I was a photographer for Mel’s Three Mad Fish website, I was the bill payer out the front, so everybody saw me, and now I do everything out the back. Mel has taken over, and it’s lovely but she’s had her sickness in the last few months so our faces have been a little bit lost. I just feel like we’re rebirthing and coming back right now.

What is Rebirthing?

Rebirthing is breathwork. So you have a client and they lie down and you get them doing a circular breathing, and in that breathing, you move into a space where things can start to come up and shift and release and you’re working with the energetics of that person and it really is release work. In the 80’s when I learnt, it was very cathartic and we’d be sued now with what we did then if we were doing it now because life has changed so much. When you’re rebirthing, you sometimes you go back to your birth or back to past lives, but it’s a way of learning to love you. 

Diane was a wonderful teacher. She’s the best.

Have you noticed changes in the metaphysical world over the last 30 to 40 years?

I came into the spiritual world hot on the tails of the hippie realm, I was not a hippie. I had my car and I was more interested in dragging up and down the main street of Stansbury in my car Snoopy, my FE red and white Holden with its tail strips hanging out the back. That was me. So then I moved into that spiritual realm after I’d had Mel in ‘73 and that was when I started homeward bound.

In the 80’s everything was very cathartic and if you did rebirthing, you could be running around in the nuddy and there was all sorts of mind blowing things. You could get textas and this is when we did NLP, we all got textas, and we were writing all over people and they would just had to sit there and say nothing and you could basically do whatever you wanted to with them, in a non exploitative way I better add! It was amazing.

Then we moved into Crystal Wave and people were very serious about their spiritual journey and there were a lot of gurus and that’s where I probably came unstuck in the 2000’s and I thought I don’t want to be a guru and I just can’t do this anymore.

I let it go, but I noticed in the last 10 years the shift is immense. People now want to find their roots. They’re not so much interested in learning spirituality as a discipline, they’re interested in learning it because they’ve got anxieties, and all the fear based stuff that’s coming at us from the media. People want to hang on to something and they’re moving into the spiritual realm where they can feel love for self and acceptance for self so that giddy heyday is gone, and we’re moving now into this heart centered, deep, profound feeling of it is okay to be me and I don’t have to be an Instagram model, I can just be me and people are searching, they’re hungry for it.

After selling Crystal Wave, I retired, and that lasted a year. I lost my direction. I’ve lost my direction many times in life. I’ve been down so many paths, lots of them have been dead ends too but there is a theme running through it and it’s called retail.

We’ve had amazing things happen up here in our Haven. We had Scott Alexander King do everybody’s spirit guides one night. He had panthers walking around up here and lions, in spirit form. We had Cheryl Lee Harnish from Canada,who did the Return to Spirit deck. We’ve had a lot of wonderful guests up here.

Now that Mel and Em are here, they’ve taken over a lot of the work and Jessie and all the tribe, Rachel and Pam and Vicki, I hope I haven’t forgotten anybody. It’s my time now to indulge.