I fell in love with rocks as a kid. Clear quartz has always been my favorite – and other members of the quartz family (notably Tibetan quartz and rose quartz) – primarily because it was so accessible. But I’ve never just loved one stone. For example, our family visits to Cape Cod when I was growing up always led to bringing home multiple containers of beach stones. I still do that! And my children do it with me.
On the one hand, this is simply a matter of a hobby,right? I collect stones the way some people collect baseball cards and others make models of famous battleships. But on another level, my relationship with stones is deeply metaphysical and intimately related to questions about healing. As I have said multiple times on this site: I believe in the healing power of crystal, if only to the extent that our powers of belief are in and of themselves healing.
I do not think that this sort of interaction with minerals and stones and rocks and crystals is for everybody. I’m not on a crusade. But if you have a natural inclination to pick up interesting rocks – take them home and polish them – and keep the best ones on display, well, then maybe you have a soul connection to stone that can help you navigate difficult areas of life. Not just physical woes – but emotional ones as well.
And, of course, I have a deep faith in the spiritual qualities of stone.
First and foremost I believe that we must have a personal relationship with the stone or crystal with which we intend to “heal.” That is, if you are working with amethyst, then know amethyst. Love it. Be able to look at a bin filled with hundreds of samples and find the one or two that are without blemish. At this level, I am talking about finding that crystal that most collectors and enthusiasts (whether they’re into healing or not) would agree is fine specimen.
That’s one way to personally relate to stones – you know what you’re looking at when you look at them. But on another level, you have to really love the stone. And that’s kind of strange, perhaps, but there’s no way around it. Just as you need to understand the broader family of the crystal or stone in question, you also need to be able to relate to one in particular. It’s like caring a lot for the neighbors, but only the one that’s your age is your best friend.
If the stone is not resonating with you at both of those levels – we might call the first the scientific and the second the spiritual or personal – then you cannot ask much of it.
The second issue around the healing properties of stone or crystal has to do with your expectation. It is very important to manage these! I had a friend who used to say that expectations were resentments under construction. The Buddha once told his followers that expectation was the death of happiness. You can really screw up your healing by wanting too much or wanting the wrong thing.
The best way to avoid this – and to have a healthy expectation around healing – is to work with somebody else. You might want to find someone who shares your interest and faith in stones. Or you might simply want to work with a more conventional healer – a naturopath or homeopath, say. Doesn’t matter. For me, bringing another person into the mix almost always helps ground me. It is a way of getting feedback from somebody that can check your own baggage. They might remind you of something that you’re overlooking. Or they might say, you know, I think you’re getting a little carried away with this one element. If you trust them, then their feedback can almost always be helpful. We do not heal alone. It really does take a community.
As our experience deepens, we can perhaps begin to get more deliberate with our healing. It is an art, after all. We live in a culture that tends to revere science and order and logic. I don’t have a beef with that per se, but I do think that there is more to life than what we can measure with our instruments. If you have a headache, by all means pop an aspirin. But don’t be afraid to integrate a little quartz into the process too. Healing is about contact – with one another, with our deeper self, with the matter of which our bodies are composed. In this sense, stones are not so dissimilar. They, too, are made of matter. Even though they vibrate at a vastly different frequency, they do vibrate.
Perhaps that is the salient quality of stones and crystals – what makes them so useful to certain healers and to health in general. When we resonate them – when we align with them – we are making contact with that part of ourselves that tends to transcend egoic thought. You can’t talk to a stone the way you talk to the mailman. And so we enter into a communion that is profoundly silent but also profoundly resonant. In that space, our own healing properties are awakened, too.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }