The Crystal Workshop: A Journey into the Healing Power of Crystals - Azalea Lee 2020

Understanding your Intuition and How it Works with Crystals

BEFORE WE CONTINUE ON to developing your intuition, I want to highlight a significant point about the last exercise: Even if a dozen people looked at the exact same scene, no one would make the same list of symbols. Each person will notice different things, because what catches a person’s attention depends on how the world looks through their eyes. This is because how you observe the world is just as unique as you are and the symbols you will notice are the ones that contain the information you most need. As with the blind men and the elephant, your intuitive perspective has put you in a position to see the symbols that are most relevant to you.

If you had trouble seeing the connection between your symbols and your question, don’t worry. Sometimes developing your intuitive abilities is like searching all over for your keys, when all along they’ve been in your hands. Your expectations of what intuition is supposed to look and feel like can keep you from seeing the information that is right in front of you. Though the intuitive information is there, your determination to see it in a particular way prevents it from coming into focus for you. But as long as the question you posed was clear, there are several ways you can help yourself unravel the information that is within your symbols.

Sometimes all one needs to do is to go deeper into a symbol’s meaning. For example, once, while doing the previous exercise in a workshop, one participant could not make sense of how her symbols related to her question. She mentioned that she had seen a clear blue sky and birds flying in the air, and knew that these symbols were related to the feeling of lightness and spaciousness. But she was still unable to see how it related to her question, “What is going on in my romantic relationship?”

As soon as I asked her to sink deep into the feeling of the birds flying in the sky, she began to cry. She realized that the lightness and spaciousness she felt when embodying these birds felt like freedom, something she wasn’t fully aware she was craving. Her relationship had been in turmoil. Though she cared for her partner and was doing what she could to keep the relationship together, in that moment it dawned on her how much she longed for freedom.

Simply by delving into the feeling of her symbol, she was able to experience its meaning rather than have only a conceptual understanding of what her symbol meant. Unraveling her symbols also helped her reveal her innermost truth to herself. Not only did the exercise answer her original question, it also gave her information on how she needed to proceed with her relationship. And all this information was compressed within two symbols.

Another thing you can do to make the information in your symbols clearer is to expand your awareness. We all have particular things we tend to focus on when we look around us. For example, when I have done the observation exercise (exercise 2) in workshops, I have discovered that while some students will tend only to notice buildings, others only see plants and other objects in nature, and some seem to be aware only of people and the activities they are doing. This tendency to focus only on certain categories is common, but it illustrates how narrow one’s field of vision can be. This happens because it’s a way for you to subconsciously filter out aspects of life that you don’t want to look at or see. It’s one thing to be drawn to a particular subject/area and notice it first, but if you don’t “see” anything else, it means that your perception has been limited. But if you can practice expanding your awareness to other categories of objects you aren’t normally inclined to pay attention to, your perception will broaden and you will be aware of more symbols that can be interpreted. This will result in a much wider range of symbols to glean information from.

Another reason why the previous exercise may have been challenging has to do with your prior experience with intuition. If you are someone who is already connected to their intuition, you may have expected this exercise to feel like what you usually experience. But the practice of decoding symbols can be very different from the intuitive experiences of “gut feelings” and psychic “impressions.” In fact, the example used in exercises 2 and 4 was written by an energy healer who didn’t initially see the connection between her symbols and the question she asked. What helped her understand her symbols’ meanings more deeply was going through the exercises in a more detailed way. In addition to expanding her awareness of the symbols that were around her, she went deeper into the details of each object. Instead of just explaining the symbol of a “dog,” she explained the meaning of a “terrier” and a “middle-aged dog.” Each time she broke down her symbol, more intuitive information appeared.

But the biggest challenge for this healer was her expectation of the kind of answer she was going to get. This prevented her from seeing that her question had actually been answered. Her question was, “Where should I move next?” She had recently retired from her job and felt it was time to move from the city she had lived in for so long. Now that she was receiving a pension, she was free to travel and go to any city she wished. Though she felt drawn to move to a new city, she also didn’t feel the need to settle down anywhere. She was undecided in what to do, but simply knew it was time to no longer be tied to her former home.

When I asked her to look more closely at the descriptions of her symbols together, she saw themes begin to emerge. While for someone else trees might have meant grounding in a single geographical place, to her, trees represented the vivaciousness of growth, wisdom, and stability. She also noticed the detail of the cracks in the sidewalk making “changes, as things in the path are encountered.” There were also many symbols with meanings of back-and-forth movement, like traffic on the two-way street and the stop and go of the traffic lights. She even was drawn to noticing the apartment building, which she immediately deciphered to mean “not staying long, not committed to a mortgage”! She had expected the answer to her question to be some kind of hint of a city or at least the feeling of where she was supposed to go next. But when she stood back and looked at the personal meanings of her symbols, she was able to see that she had indeed gotten the answer to her question of “Where should I move next?” which was “Nowhere, permanently!”

Living in a world infatuated with being “right” causes us subconsciously to believe that there are only two possible answers in every scenario, “wrong” or “right.” Even from a very young age, the tests we take in school are based on this premise. Though we know that life is not that black and white, this perspective has become ingrained in such a way that it cannot help but bleed into other parts of our lives. One of the places where this binary point of view shows up in is with your intuition. But intuition is not about being “wrong” or “right.” Rather, it is about leading you to information, to the area of strongest probability. But because we have been so well trained to classify our results into two categories, we automatically assume that our intuitive answers can also be “wrong” or “right.”

In both the instance of the woman whose symbol was the birds flying through the sky and the healer who kept having themes of back-and-forth movement, there wasn’t anything in their symbols or meanings that drew a hard line between a right and a wrong answer. Instead, each one’s intuition revealed the circumstances that would be most truthful to her being and provided a direction for her to move. If either one had decided against following the suggestion presented by her intuition, she still would not have gotten tickets, red check marks, or any other forms of punishment for proceeding the “wrong” way. There would have been something to learn from each experience she’d had, and thus no experience would have been wasted. It’s just that her intuition would have presented the information or direction that was most fulfilling to her soul. The same will be true for you.

SYMBOLS OVER TIME

While symbols are helpful for getting in touch with your intuition in this moment, you want to start recording and keeping track of your symbols because they can reveal more information and meaning over time. As you review your symbols from your past, you may uncover insights that you did not realize were there.

For example, there was a time in my life where many of my dreams involved me driving a white Honda Civic, a model of car I was then driving in my physical life. At first, I thought my frequent dreams were simply a consequence of all the driving I happened to be doing, juggling a full-time job while also taking a full load of classes. Sometimes, these dreams would be about expertly weaving in between cars and changing lanes like some pro race car driver. However, most of the time, these driving dreams would be frustrating: I would be stuck in traffic or literally driving up a vertical wall to get where I needed to go. But as the dreams kept reoccurring, it began to dawn on me that these dreams were showing me important symbolic information about how I was moving through my life.

I eventually determined that to me “driving” symbolized movement from one place to another. I recognized that it was faster than walking but covered less ground than being on a plane. But at least with driving I was still the one navigating and in control. My white Civic was my first new car, and as a teenager living at home, jonesing for freedom and with a deep desire to go forth into the world, the car became a representation both of myself and of all the hopes and dreams I had for my life at that time.

The other details in these dreams would reveal to me information about the circumstances I was in and how I was handling them. When my dreams were about driving like a skilled race car driver, they were showing me that I was also skillfully navigating the situations around me in my waking life. When my dreams were about being behind some slow-moving vehicle, they were showing me that I happened to be dealing with a slow-moving person or situation. When I found myself in awe and amazement as I dreamed of defying gravity and driving up a wall, my dream was telling me that I was doing something I had thought was impossible—while also telling me I was feeling as if I was going crazy for doing it. Each detail gave me clues that helped me navigate my life and showed me when I was (too often) pushing against a situation.

Many years later, long after I had stopped having dreams about driving my white Civic, I stumbled across a page in an old dream journal. In it, I wrote of a deeply frustrating dream where I was driving to some destination in Los Angeles, only to get stuck in total gridlock. Though the next freeway exit was only a few cars ahead, as far as I could see, every car in every lane was packed bumper to bumper with no room to move. I was so close to the exit, but because I was completely surrounded on all sides by cars there was no way I could get off the freeway. All I could do was wait in frustration until traffic began to move again. And because traffic was the worst I had ever seen, it was going to be a very long wait.

At the time of this dream, one of my greatest aspirations was to move to Los Angeles. I felt a distinct connection between this desire and the dream I had had, and in both my physical and dream life I felt the intense disappointment of my goals being delayed. I hadn’t wanted to hear it, but I knew my dream was telling me that my life goals were not moving on my schedule and that my only choice was to wait things out. And indeed, my dream of moving to Los Angeles was delayed many more years, and I spent the interim futilely fighting the circumstances of my life instead of making the most of the situation I was in.

I had already been happily settled in Los Angeles for some years when I rediscovered the journal entry. As I reread it, I found myself gobsmacked by all the information that had been hidden in plain sight and finally understood what all the symbols in my dream had been about. For in my dream, the freeway exit that was only a few cars ahead of me, the exit that I would have gotten off at out of angst and restlessness had I had the chance, the exit that I knew in the dream was not my intended destination, was the same freeway exit before the actual exit to my first Los Angeles apartment.

When I had my dream, I had no idea that it contained information about my future, only that it was confirming what was happening in my life at the time. Even though I had forgotten about it, the dream had been so intense that when I was reminded of it, I could both instantly and viscerally recall how it made me feel. The potency of my feelings within the dream had been even more intense than the memories I had about that time of my life, when I had felt like I was constantly moving, yet going nowhere. And all this intuitive information, with relevance for me both back then and in the future, had been compressed within the symbols of one dream. It just took quite a bit of time before I could finally understand what my dream was telling me: that I had been very close to my goal (the exit to my first apartment) but that it was going to take time (traffic) to get to my destination because I was in circumstances greater than me (massive gridlock).

Now I rarely dream of driving, and when I do I’m not driving like a frantic teenager. The intervening years of experience have given me more wisdom to understand that movement doesn’t necessarily equate with progress, and I now better understand how to go with the flow of life while still being in control in the driver’s seat. When I do happen to dream of driving, I take note, because these dreams always have a significant relationship to those I had as a teen. Every so often a driving dream will return to show me how I am currently moving through life, with each model of car I drive giving me different information. If I happen to be driving a white car (as I had as a teen), I pay attention to any angst I might be feeling, for my dream is reminding me to be aware of any old, unproductive habits that may be returning. If I do dream of my old Honda, it can be an even louder warning to take notice of my life. Or if I happen to be driving a current model car like a responsible adult, it is showing me just how far along I have come with my patience.

24/7 ACCESS

As you can see, symbols hold the key to accessing the intuitive information that is around you. And now you have symbols from your last exercise that you can add to your personal symbol dictionary. In addition to helping you connect to your intuition, your symbol dictionary can be used for scrying or interpreting your dreams. The more effort you put into deciphering your symbols, the more you will notice them around you and the more intuitive information you will be able to interpret from them. As time goes on and as you continue adding details to your personal symbol dictionary, you will discover deeper meanings within them, and each variation of your symbol will shed light on the general meaning of your symbol on the whole. As your symbols come up again and again, you will begin to see significant relationships developing between them. These relationships will also impart additional intuitive information.

All of this is why you want to take the time to go deep into your symbols. For any direction you go further into gives you additional information to work with. And this will only serve to make your intuitive insights clearer to you. It will also show you the massive amount of intuitive information that can be found at any time and in any place, even in the tiniest of details. And your continual exploration of your symbols will help you better trust your own intuitive abilities. Though it takes more effort, your personal symbol dictionary will always be vastly more useful than some generic dictionary of symbols.

UNDERSTANDING YOUR INTUITIVE STRENGTHS

Look at your list of observations from exercise 2 again. In addition to your visual observations, did you find that you wrote a lot about sounds you heard, like the music coming out of someone’s car or the sound of the leaves in the wind? Or did you observe how warm and humid the air felt or that the bus bench across the street looked hard to sit on? Or did you perhaps smell cinnamon pastries baking in the shop next door?

If you noticed that you favored one sense over another in your descriptions of the world you observed, this can give insight into which of your clairs, or intuitive abilities, you are likely to be most dominant with. Again, it’s important to know that you have abilities with all your different clairs but that some may be stronger than others. Being aware of what kind of symbols you tend to pick up will help give you an indication of which of your intuitive clairs you most gravitate to.

Distinguishing, and then developing, your intuitive strengths helps you understand what your psychic forte happens to be. For not only do you have a strength with a certain sixth sense, you also have particular psychic gifts. You may discover you have a natural affinity for psychically communicating with animals or the ability to psychically diagnose medical issues. Perhaps you discover you have a special affinity for communicating with spirits who have crossed over or an ability to communicate with angels. Maybe your strength is reading and interpreting tarot cards or finding lost objects. There are hundreds of psychic specialties that you could discover you have a talent for.

You can always acquire skills in any psychic specialty you have interest in, even if it’s not your natural strength. In the same way that one can get better at playing guitar, speed reading, whittling wood carvings, or playing Ultimate Frisbee, one can better one’s skills in any psychic niche, including understanding, communicating, and working with crystals!

PSYCHOMETRY

Psychometry is the intuitive reading of the energy and information about an object through physical touch. It is a psychic specialty most often associated with gathering information about an object’s past history or the person who owned the object. But psychometry can also be used to sense the metaphysical energies an object produces—like the energies of crystals!

The psychometric information you pick up from the crystals will be more abstract than what you would receive by intuiting historical information about an object. Historical information will be more literal, while crystalline information will be more ethereal and symbolic. So it’s important not to prejudge your responses. More often than not, the intuitive impressions you blow off as being insignificant or something you think you’ve made up will be the most accurate and insightful. The exercise that follows is one I teach in my workshop, and I can’t tell you how many times someone didn’t write down an impression because they assumed it wasn’t compelling enough—only to find out their intuition was right on target! So write everything down!

Also, utilize all your different clairs. Follow every thought, feeling, and sound you hear in your head and see where it takes you. Write down each seemingly random thought and memory that pops into your mind. Write down how you feel emotionally, even if the feeling is fleeting. Write down what you feel in your body and where you feel it. If you feel a gesture moving through your body, explain what it feels most like. Sometimes all you will get is a word. Write it all down!

This next exercise is about developing your intuition and making it sharper. Worrying about getting information “right” defeats the purpose, as intuition does not work in that way. Instead, developing your intuition means becoming more accurate, detailed, and clear about the impressions you are receiving. If you happen to find this exercise difficult, it means that you are trying too hard to get the “right” answers instead of allowing your impressions to move through you. Don’t worry about being wrong or about whether or not you have psychometric abilities. Remember, this is a practice to develop your abilities, so be gentle on yourself. Relaxing will actually make you more receptive to your intuition.

Ready to discover how you connect with the crystals?

EXERCISE 5

Training with the Stones

WARNING: If you have not acquired the stones (see Instructions for your friend) and done the previous exercises, go back and do them all in order. You’ll be forever changed by what you learn here, so make the most of the surprise for yourself. It will be worth it!

You will need:

• The three unknown stones, separately wrapped and marked A, B, and C

• The sealed envelope identifying your secret crystals

• A timer

• A notebook

PART ONE

1. Place the package marked “A” in your hand. It doesn’t matter which hand you hold the stone with. But do not squeeze the package to estimate the shape or texture of the stone.

2. Set a timer for five minutes, and begin writing down your intuitive impressions. Write down in a single column anything and everything that comes to you. A few tips:

• You don’t necessarily want to write down the purely physical impressions you have of the stone (e.g., how heavy or light it feels). Instead, you want to write down your intuitive impressions of the stone. Again, these impressions will come through as a seemingly random stream of thoughts, feelings, and memories. Go with it and remember not to censor yourself.

• If after a few minutes you find yourself tapped out of thoughts, switch the stone to your other hand. This may trigger more information to come through to you.

• If you still seem out of thoughts, just sit quietly with the stone. You want to reach a point where you are no longer overfocusing on the stone. Relaxing allows for more information to come through.

3. Create your glossary. Next to the impressions you wrote, write down what they mean to you. Go through the impressions just like you did with the symbols in exercise 4.

4. Repeat steps 1 through 3 with the additional packages.

5. Open only the sealed envelopes identifying the stones. Leave the stones sealed for now. Turn to the Crystal Index for a summary of each stone’s properties. Keep the information handy for the next step.

6. Reveal the stones to yourself. Match each bag to its crystal identity. Now open each package and take a look at the crystal.

7. Look at the information you intuitively picked up for each stone. Do you see a relationship between each stone’s metaphysical properties and what you wrote down?

Here are selected impressions of a stone written by a woman who did this exercise:

• Fluid, thick like honey: It’s a good kind of thickness. Something with substance that can move.

• Soft, pale green: a color that is peaceful, calming, and nurturing.

• Outside looking in: an observer, observing.

• A cloud of green crossing my mind: A vision of a large tree in a meadow but up on a hill. A place where one can sit and read a book and look across green fields. I see a girl in a dress sitting with a book and a man that she likes. The image is like a movie or a story. It’s very lovely.

• Movement like parting clouds. A peep-hole appearing. The moving clouds could possibly be in the previous scene.

• A peaceful feeling. Lying in the grass under a tree, springtime, temperature in the 70s, air is clean and slightly brisk: This is a familiar scene from my high school and college years. Both times, I had found a place in nature that became my “special” place. Although there was a bit of heartbreak at this time of my life, I was happy during those years. (Wow! I didn’t even realize this when I was writing the symbols above. I was just going one line at a time!!!)

Complete Part 1 of exercise 5 before continuing to Part 2.

PART TWO

In one workshop I had someone who, while holding an unidentified stone, thought of a memory of being a young child, sitting outside with her father in the sunshine. In the memory, she was contented and happy, keeping herself amused as she was engaged in a childhood activity. When I revealed that the stone supported self-confidence and belief in oneself, she began choking up. She realized that within this memory she was without anxiety, doing something that was making her happy. This feeling of self-contentment created an energetic environment where her usual lack of self-confidence was unable to exist. The stone was reminding her that cultivating situations where she could feel engaged and contented naturally ameliorated any anxiety or lack of belief in herself.

It’s information like this that you seek when intuitively connecting with a crystal. Your goal is to understand how the crystal can help and support you. You do this by intuitively connecting to the stone and discovering how that stone’s energy interacts with yours. And like your personal symbols, what you pick up about the crystal will be the information that is most relevant to the energy of who you are.

Because I facilitate sessions as a crystal healer, I am able to see how the same stone affects a wide range of people. Thus I am in a position where I am better able to collate and summarize the global effects of a particular stone to share with the public. But unless you are specifically working with crystals to heal others, it’s not important to know what a crystal does for someone else. Since you are your own main client, the information you need most is how the crystal works for you!

This is why intuitive impressions are so strongly related to your personal life and can come in the form of seemingly random memories. In the response to exercise 5 given opposite as an example, the person first got impressions of texture and color. These symbols then deepened into a scene that felt like a movie she was watching. She then realized the visions she had happened to pick up were actually a very personally compelling scene with her as the central character. Though each symbol she listed had been significant enough to be interpreted individually, every subsequent impression she wrote down revealed a deeper layer of meaning and insight connected with the stone. This allowed her to profoundly experience the specific tone of happiness that had been missing from her life and begin the journey of healing with this particular stone and connecting to this feeling once again.

From a global perspective, the metaphysical purpose of the crystal she was intuiting (ulexite) to facilitate spiritual visions and the retrieval of significant memories related to one’s highest spiritual growth. And though the student had picked up these points in intuiting the stone, her experience of it was far more personal and visceral. The insights she gained from the crystal were much more meaningful because they revealed how the stone’s energies worked with her own by specifically showing her the parts of her life it could help her with. This is why people don’t pick up the global properties of a stone. Because what people tend to get from their intuitive impression is what they need the stone for.

Note: The impressions of color you receive do not necessarily mean you are intuiting the physical color of the stone. Returning again to the example, the person kept writing down colors in shades of green. But ulexite, the crystal she was working with, is a translucent white. People often beat themselves up about this, believing they can’t be intuitive when the color they get a feeling for is not the color of the stone. But what is actually happening is that you are picking up on your symbolic association with that color. For instance, if you sense the color pink, the stone itself may not be pink, but the kind of healing the stone supports feels “pink” in nature to you. Exactly what shade of pink you sensed is significant too. Perhaps the shade of pink reminds you of a favorite pair of cozy bath slippers you used to own, or it’s a shade you saw in a bouquet of flowers you were recently sent, or the shade of pink of cute baby piglets you saw on a video on the internet, or even the color of lipstick worn by your favorite outrageous aunt. Each shade of pink will have a different emotional effect on you. Some pinks will feel gentle, soft, and loving, others childish and cutesy, and still others forward, brash, and bold. But each nuance of color gives you more intuitive information to work with. You may think you know what the color pink means to you, but as you delve into its nuance it will bring up even more information about your symbols.

Now that you realize your intuitive impressions are valid and true, can you see how you already have an intuitive connection with the stones? You don’t need to have a special gift to understand crystalline energy, only the awareness of how your intuition communicates with you, along with the skills to decipher and understand the meaning of your symbols. You may not be clear about what a crystal does on a broad, universal level, but it doesn’t really matter, because you understand what the crystal does for you.

But the interesting thing is that what you pick up about a stone’s energies will be tangential to what others get too. Like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, if you compare your notes with other people’s or with crystal references (including the Crystal Index), you will often be able to see a through line that connects what they have picked up with what you got about the crystals. Your intuitive impressions may pick up on only a fragment of what others have written about the stone, but what you intuited may expand and go deeper than what they have written. Comparing notes is also a great way to determine if a person writing about crystals is someone you resonate with energetically. If their metaphysical interpretation of the crystals aligns with yours, you’ll get more out of what they teach than the work of other crystal teachers. And this helps you suss out any writings on crystals that are completely off the mark and not useful to you.

The most important thing to get from this exercise is the knowledge that you ultimately don’t need a book or somebody else to tell you which crystal to work with. Though you may compare notes with others, you are able to pick up and interpret the energies of the crystals yourself. This means that all you need to choose the right crystal for yourself is your intuition, for through it you will be able to understand the healing powers of any crystal you encounter. And, in the following chapters, you will continue to use your intuitive abilities to understand how and where to choose your crystals, along with how exactly you will work with them.

Smoky Quartz

Pyrite ball

“There is the music of Heaven in all things.”

—Hildegard of Bingen

Green fluorite on quartz

Determining the Authenticity of a Crystal’s Metaphysical Description

Many metaphysical descriptions of crystals, like those found in books and online, have been paraphrased from another source. But each time a description becomes rephrased, the original meaning deteriorates. This unintentional outcome is often the result of a writer’s attempt to communicate someone else’s metaphysical information in their own words. If the writer does not have a true connection with the crystals, they will not have firsthand understanding to convey, and their resultant description will be a simulacrum—the surface appearance of what a crystal’s properties are. It is as if Person A saw a movie and described it to Person B, and then Person B told you about the movie as though they had seen it themselves. Everything they would tell you about the characters, the emotions, the plot, and the way the movie looked would not be from their own experience but an interpretation of someone else’s truth. In this same way, as the rephrasing of a crystal’s metaphysical description continues from person to person, it breaks down even further into an oversimplified mess. This is why you find so many crystal descriptions with very basic statements like “balances your chakras,” “guards against psychic attack,” “transmutes energy,” “promotes calm and peace,” “helps with physical ailments,” and other banal and overly generalized attributes. Lacking the potency of direct experience, the information, both distorted and watered down, no longer describes the true power of the crystals.

It also could be that the writer has firsthand experience but that what they pick up is not very deep. This is often a reflection of where the author is in their spiritual growth. If someone is spiritually wise, they will understand the karmic responsibility that comes with communicating metaphysical information and how important it is that this information comes from a place of service, integrity, and love. However, if what is being shared about the crystals is superficial, one has to question the motive of the author. If the author lacks experience and is a spiritual baby, they will not understand the gravity of the responsibility that comes with teaching spiritual information. They may not know how karmically important it is not to share misleading or inaccurate information. Another possible reason for the superficiality of their information could be that the writer wants to let others know how “spiritual” and “psychic” they are. Led by their egos, their metaphysical descriptions may bear little relation to the actual properties of the crystal itself and may instead be vaguely focused on the esoteric aspects of the crystal in a grandiose way.

One way to tell if a crystal description has been written by someone with a genuine relationship with the crystals is to see how specific their descriptions are. They will not write oversimplified explanations but will indicate in detail how the crystal is able to help you. The description should also relay how the crystal’s properties help to heal some aspect of a core spiritual issue, rather than focus on material results that can be gained. Most importantly, the description should always convey, at least in an indirect or subtle way, an understanding and compassion for human beings and the human experience, so the tone of these descriptions will always be down to earth and grounded, with a feeling of love.

You also want to see if the message within the crystal description is consistent to a theme. If the description seems disjointed and randomly bounces across many subjects within a short space, I would question how deeply the author knows the crystal. The description should also help you clearly understand how the crystal specifically helps with some kind of soul issue. If the author has not precisely defined this, then depending on what they wrote, I would take what they have written lightly or not at all.

If the author has recommended artificial or enhanced crystals, you will also want to see if they are transparent about this fact and, if so, why they still recommend them. Although the recommendation of artificial and enhanced crystals is something I consider frightful, ultimately this book is about learning about your own intuition with the crystals and coming to your own conclusions about how crystal energies work with you.

Developing your intuitive abilities is less about being “right” than it is about learning how to gauge when something is energetically true to you. By comparing what you intuitively pick up with what someone else finds, you will get a sense of whose crystal information resonates with you the most. As you deepen your spiritual practice and become more aligned with your spiritual integrity, your intuitive recognition of what is spiritually real and true will become more sensitive and accurate, and whether or not someone is writing about crystals in a truly connected way will become more apparent.

Remember that your experience connecting to crystalline energy and understanding will be an ongoing journey without a finish line to cross. And it will take time to hone your spiritual radar so that you are able to discriminate between false and true teachings. So be gentle with yourself. No matter what you learn or how you learn it, you will always learn something, and it will contribute to your overall spiritual growth and healing.

Smoky Quartz