This is Tiffani Sheriff and she is a force. She is calm, extremely intelligent, articulate, intuits connections, generous,. She listens with her whole self and has a direct gaze. Tiffani is completely present and always has been, she is fierce, kind, adaptable and practical. Tiffani is of spirit, dream, and awake. She is pop culture savvy and politically astute. Tiffani and her beautiful daughter live in New Orleans and Tiffani is magic.
Please enjoy Tiffani’s full length interview by following the link: https://vimeo.com/330263665
Or watch Tiffani’s full length interview here:
New Orleans magic is a true, magnetic thing. It is so rich, dense, that If you experience New Orleans as a head beating against the wall, thats what you are beating up against. You are not letting what is under the surface influence you. It’s an introduction to the flow of Mystery. The legends of this city are true. I once lived in this city and my northern and west coast self could not wrap my head around this basic M.O. and I was always so frustrated when I wanted to take care of a thing practically. It still kinda frustrates when I visit and me, the self proclaimed Mystic Superhero Of Love and Fear; I still have so much to learn, to listen to.
I say Mystic, I lay claim to it. Tiffani and her call to arms of showing up in my fullness compels me to take this moment here to stand up among my spirit sisters and brothers. Tiffani and her powerful spiritual integrity inspire me to stop shuffling around in the shadows overcome by shyness, enough.
I don’t know who I am anymore to be brutally honest. I used to know, so fiercely. I held on to my identity as Sara Brown, invincible, self reliant badass extraordinaire, so tight. So tight that the Mystery with great helpings of external and internal Pressure caused my ego to explode in an overwhelming metaphysical rewiring one fine morning in dirty old New Orleans. Magic City epicenter.
I experienced it as a complete cold water plunge into the endless depth of my primal fear through an electric firestorm being set off in my nervous system. I never resurfaced, not really. Someone else did wearing my face. The face I came into this world with, the first face before all the conditioning, she came back for me and I still don’t know her very well three years later. I like her though. I didn’t at first, but through the trauma of losing my constructed adult identity, I found this First Self and grew to love her. She is now me and I can do Magic. I have visions, I heal with my hands and trees speak to me through the language of energetic pressure in my palms. Crows follow me and throw down gifts of feathers and chunks of bark frantically pulled from the branches on which they perch. I meditate with red dogs, our chakras breath together through their fur and my bare skin. My ancestors are a chorus of angelic cheerleaders joyfully cheering me on as I uncover yet another layer of supernatural connection.
Sometimes you have to be hit on the head to talk to angels.
New Orleans, the Mystery birthed in the bedrock, the land is haunted. Then brought in chains, the Magic of desert and hot sun enslaved and consumed, woven dark and deep. A port town, Magic imported from around the world, soaked in the cracks of the infrastructure, that infrastructure that feels so unstable is actually born on the supernatural. And that Magic once grabbed me by the throat and when I was able, I ran away from that city as fast as I could.Â
The day I met Tiffani Sheriff and interviewed her for The Nature Of Refuge, I had been on the road interviewing all the amazing women who have taken part in this project, for pretty much exactly a year. I had swung down to New Orleans from the midwest and was headed to Los Angeles where I was going to start writing the book about the whole shebang. I was hitting specific cities on the way over and setting up interviews as much as possible before I arrived instead of the more intuitive, spontaneous flow I had created with meeting my women up till then, I was trying my hand at a more structured approach in my last push of this revolution of the work. But in New Orleans, that of course went out the window. My attempts to confirm an interview with the various people I knew there acting as potential emissaries, none panned out. I arrived In New Orleans without anything set and I needed to move on within the week but I wasn’t fazed, this was familiar territory, the instinctual approach and New Orleans herself.
I was staying with a friend who is a painter and when I showed up all road jangly, he suggested we go to an art opening to see a friend’s work, that was a perfect suggestion and off we went. When we walked in, we were surrounded by familiar work in a familiar gallery on Julia street, one of the known gallery rows in the city. The familiar work belonged to a man that I used to assist for. I also used to shoot the weddings he would send my way in addition to helping out wherever he needed me with his fine artwork. The gallery was familiar as I used to run errands for this man between he and the gallery. I laughed, and there was the man himself in a fabulous outfit holding court at his opening, a man that before I had come to New Orleans for this project, I had been trying to track down and see if he could assist in introducing me to a woman of New Orleans. And there he was. Perfect synchronicity in the city of Mystery, its a small town. I laughed again and walked up to him.
Yes!, he said, he had a friend that he thought would be perfect, I got a phone number and a name and that’s where the information stopped. I didn’t need more than that, I was used to going in a blank slate, I liked it, it was exciting and the heart connection occurred so far ten out of ten in every variation of meeting and interviewing. I called Tiffani and she was immediately receptive to the type of work I was presenting and asking her to be a part of. She was open to her story joining the varied narrative of vulnerability and how a person can traverse it. It always takes my breath away and gives me electric shivers in the ease of the yes these women have given me in the work, their generosity moves me beyond words. Â
The day that I was to interview Tiffani, I was was looking for a priestess. I thought that i could find her and ask her about the Magic in New Orleans and why it had marked me with a cosmic restart button three years before, the whole Mystery that had lead me to the creative download and performing the work of The Nature Of Refuge to begin with. I was hoping to find this priestess and have this conversation before I was scheduled to meet Tiffani at 1pm.
There was a voodoo shop next to the food co-op in the once rougher artist neighborhood that was now throughly gentrified. I used to go there once in awhile to purchase a candle spell or something small but I never spoke to the voodoo priestess that presided over her Magic, I was drawn to her spirit of magnetism . When that inner electric hurricane hit me over the head that one bizarre day, my terror was so complete that I only thought of escape not investigation with someone who might actually have some guidance. So here I was three years later, finally clear headed enough to go to a source and ask for help.
She wasn’t available, the shop was closed due to a private ceremony being performed, that priestess was busy investigating magic with someone else. I sat outside on the steps for awhile, wandered with my thoughts, here I was in New Orleans again.
I got up and went down to the Piety Arch nearby, a park with a big, beautiful arch that led you to the Mississippi’s edge with pretty paths and grass and flowers, a favorite place of mine to go and dance at the river’s edge back in the day. Tiffani was the one to suggest it when I asked her if she had a special sanctuary spot in the city to conduct the interview, when she said Piety Arch I smiled into the phone.
I went to go meet Tiffani down by the river, and wouldn’t you know it, she was the priestess I was meant to meet that day all along.
Tiffani Sheriff is a woman multi-faceted and operating on all cylinders, she roars into life and purrs steady. A woman from New York with roots in West Africa, Tiffani came to New Orleans. New Orleans, where she discovered she could finally decipher the influx of energetic and spirit communication Tiffani had been a conduit for her entire life. Tiffani is an empath who is creating a path of bringing the mystical into the practical. Promoting a relationship with the spirit world and the vortex of energetic exchange, in tandem with business models and everyday language. Strip away the melodrama to revel the practicality of clear communication on all levels. And how, by demystifying the extra sensory experience, we as humans can fully utilize all our abilities to actualize emotional and spiritual clarity coupled with material abundance.
Tiffani has created a consulting firm, Musings , that brings her professional expertise from the fashion and fine art industries, together with her lifelong extra sensory experience. Musings offers a menu of services aimed at holistic wellness such as tarot readings, astrology readings, lead meditations, retreats and workshops, the list goes on. Whatever intuitive tools a professional creative would want to bring to her projects or business model for guidance in creating practical structure and actualization, Tiffani also views beauty in all its forms and explorations as a refuge unto itself, a powerful magic. She offers her clients intuitive guidance in their aesthetic, beauty and spirit hand and hand and Tiffani is there to be a guide and professional facilitator.
Tiffani speaks of her life experience as one of continual winding, never straight forward and always inherently unsafe. Death has visited her close and often. Nothing certain, she intuited the truth from the beginning, had it whispered in her young ears by the spirits, we are all so achingly close to the edge and can fall, and will fall, at any moment. We are all angels preparing for that Fall.
In all of this primal chaotic force, Tiffani has always found sanctuary inside herself, learned to create the quiet sacred space in her own psyche, she carries her refuge with her wherever she goes in life, Tiffani will take it with her in death. In this sacred inner space, Tiffani learned the interpretation and separation of the hieroglyphs of the spirit whispers and ancestor shouts and the continuous wide river of electric connection between all life. It’s just another language, making innate sense once deciphered. Tiffani can escape into trance in a second and access this inner sanctum, she reveals that so can her daughter, the circle of ancestry is actually an ellipse, coming back to the similar place just slightly to the left with the new generation.
All of this is the Magic of New Orleans. Tiffani is giving it, the Mystery, a practical language to share with others as a profession, as a bridge in the ways that it makes simple sense to her, a conductor. She was the one that told me indirectly it was time to come out of the Mystic Closet, to claim myself along side her as a fellow conduit to a heightened human experience, to share and to teach and to listen to what’s coming next, right around the corner, the evolutionary leap.
Thank you Tiffani.
This is the nature of refuge.
