Coastviews Magazine Article
Victoria Marina-Tompkins: Guiding people through the major life transitions
by Whitney Merrill
Victoria Marina-Tompkins, photo courtesy of Paula Kirkland.
Victoria Marina-Tompkins has written and published a new book entitled
Spiritual Turning Points: A Metaphysical Perspective of the Seven Life Transitions. A longtime Coastside resident known for her deep wisdom and compassionate nature, she has an active private practice at the
Flight of the Hawk Center for Contemporary Shamanism in Half Moon Bay. She sat down with me recently in her El Granada home to share some of her personal story and her purpose for writing the book.
Marina-Tompkins was born and raised in the Bay Area where at the age of 8 she started her musical training on the violin, later majoring in music performance and psychology at Cal State East Bay in Hayward. She began her professional music career when she was 19, working at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco; her first show was
Two Gentlemen of Verona: A Rock Musical. She went on to do a wide range of work, playing for commercials, movie soundtracks and the symphony — and with Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr. and many others.
Marina-Tompkins said, “I loved making music in my 20s. I met my husband — a jazz sax musician — and was living the creative life.” During this time she had a son and studied Orff Music for Children at the University of California, Santa Cruz, which opened her eyes to tribal-based rhythms and drumming, improvisation, and world music. “People think that being a professional musician is glamorous, but it’s very repetitive,” she said. Orff Music “felt more rich, and I saw that all children are innately musical. You just have to give them the ability to express that.” In 1985 she created Tunes for Tots, a music school for children based on the Orff-Schulwerk method of teaching.
Alaska represents the mysterious passageway of death through which we all must pass. Photo courtesy of Victoria Marina-Tompkins.
During this time Marina-Tompkins also began her study of shamanism with Michael Harner and Angeles Arrien — and her study of women’s spirituality with Karen Vogel and Hallie Austen Iglehart. She said, “Growing up, I was interested in spiritual matters, and explored tarot as a teenager. I was always interested in what we can’t see but that we intuitively know is there.” She began to make a transition, changing her focus from music to spirituality. She said: “It was my experience as a musician that helped me to understand that there is something greater than yourself, higher than high. You get out of your little self, into your bigger self, connect to the Tao. Connecting with spirit seemed very natural.”
While Marina-Tompkins had taught music to children for years, the move to teaching shamanism was a critical turning point in her career. Linda Yule, her friend and a psychotherapist, suggested they conduct a class — and they did, and the students liked it. “At that time, no one was teaching shamanism on the coast,” Marina-Tompkins said.
The iris represents the True Self as it prepares to unfold after the internal work at mid-life. Photo courtesy of Victoria Marina-Tompkins.
That class led her to found the Flight of the Hawk Center for Contemporary Shamanism in Half Moon Bay where she taught programs in cross-cultural shamanism and developed a private practice in intuitive counseling. Marina-Tompkins describes her approach this way: “I like combining astrology, esoteric studies, and spirituality, grounded by shamanism that is very earthy.”
Through her years of working directly with people in her practice, she “saw that there were very natural transitional periods. Many times we react with fear when we come to a point like that and fall into resignation or depression. I learned that these were opportunities and that we live a lot of lives in one life. Part of my belief system is that we have the opportunity to choose from fear or from love. We may get stuck in old patterns but we always have the opportunity to choose every day. When you look at the little choices as practice … the big choices are easier.”
Marina-Tompkins’ book focuses on the seven major transitions of life, from birth to death, and provides specific guidance and examples of how to make these transitions in a positive way, to live a truly powerful life. Readers can learn about the 2 year old, realizing that the tantrum is the child trying to create self identity. Or that teenagers choose their self-defense mechanisms in response to expanding this identity, and that we address identity issues again in mid-life as we seek the emergence of the True Personality and engage in our
Life Tasks. And throughout, the book is filled with people’s stories.
Marina-Tompkins said: “I could not have written this book until I did. I needed 20-plus years of stories, otherwise the ideas are abstract.” She continued: “Illustrating the seven transitions through people’s lives makes the concepts more tangible. Storytelling is healing. We heal through sharing our stories and listening to the stories of others. We see the common threads that run through all of our lives.”
Marina-Tompkins said that she had three primary reasons for writing the book: “To bring together my life work, to give back what I learned, and to be of service … to help other people. Indigenous people say your only responsibility in life is to bring forward your gifts. … Maybe my contribution is the combination of all three.”
Her book can be found on the Coastside at Ocean Books on Main Street and at Harbor Books in the Shoppes at Harbor Village. It is also available online through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iBooks for Apple. Formats are hardcover, paperback, and e-book. She is currently teaching workshops, performing radio interviews, and continuing her private practice with clients worldwide.
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