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

How to Prepare for the Exercises in This Book

YOU WILL NEED THREE SMALL CRYSTALS to do the exercises in this book. Though you have until the end of chapter 9 to get the crystals, I strongly suggest doing this step first, for once you begin to connect to your intuition, you won’t want anything keeping you from doing these exercises.

Crystals in the size you need are typically called “tumbled stones” or “pocket stones” and range in price from very inexpensive to very expensive, depending on their rarity. But how much they cost doesn’t matter. What matters is keeping the identity of these crystals secret for the exercises. This means sending someone else to pick up the stones for you. Alternatively, you can purchase a premade kit of concealed crystals especially created for the exercises in this book from my online crystal shop at place8healing.com.

If a friend is picking the stones for you, have them visit a metaphysical or crystal shop in person or online and buy three pocket-size stones. They do not need to know what stones you already own, as it does not matter for this exercise. Twenty dollars should be sufficient to purchase a set of pocket stones.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR YOUR FRIEND:

1 Purchase three different pocket stones from the list that follows.

2 Designate each crystal as “A,” “B,” or “C,” and on a piece of paper write a key that lists the letters and corresponding names of the stones.

3 Conceal the crystals by separately wrapping each stone in a blank sheet of paper. Try to wrap all packages thickly and make them about the same size (you want to do your best to conceal the shapes of the crystals). Then clearly mark each package with its matching designated letter. Securely tape the packages closed.

4 Seal the key in an opaque envelope.

5 Give your friend the envelope along with the three packages.

STONES TO CHOOSE FROM:The following is a suggested list of stones that have been selected for their wide availability. If possible, choose stones from this list.

· Amazonite

· Amethyst

· Angelite (aka blue anhydrite)

· Aquamarine

· Black tourmaline

· Blue lace agate

· Green aventurine

· Hematite

· Kyanite (blue colored)

· Lepidolite

· Malachite

· Mangano/manganoan calcite

· Moonstone

· Obsidian (black or mostly black colored)

· Prehnite

· Pyrite

· Red jasper

· Rhodochrosite

· Rhodonite

· Rose quartz

· Selenite

· Smoky quartz

· Sodalite

· Tiger’s eye

ONCE YOU HAVE THE STONES:Don’t squeeze the packages to feel the shape of the stones! The less you know about the stones, the better your results will be. So keep it a surprise! Save the stones for exercise 5.

“This above all: to thine own self be true.”

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Calcite concretion (aka Fairy Stone)

EXERCISE 1

Making an Intention with the Crystals

I once sat with a Hopi elder and asked him if there were any spiritual teachings of his people he would like me to help communicate to the world. Without hesitation, he simply stated he wished for people to know “the importance of ceremony.”

If you think about it, many of the significant moments in our lives are associated with ceremony. Graduation ceremonies, wedding ceremonies, and even the act of blowing out candles on a birthday cake serve to make us more conscious of the moment and the deeper meaning it signifies. For it is the action of ceremony that brings a focus to a particular moment, compels those involved to be present with it, and results in the creation of a sacred energy in a particular time and space.

But what this Hopi elder was also implying was that ceremony needs to be carried out in all aspects of our lives. Saying grace before a meal is a small ceremony we do to honor the food we eat. Saying grace means that you are giving thanks that you have food to nourish your body; that someone prepared this food for you; that someone worked to provide this food, and that someone farmed or gathered it; for the plants, minerals, and animals who gave their bodies to feed you; for Mother Earth, who created the environment for all the food to be able to grow; and for the Universe that served as the genesis for all of these actions to happen. This is what saying grace is for: to be present in space and time and to honor and appreciate all that is helping you to live.

In this way, the practice of ceremony becomes more than chapter headings marking the big occasions of your life. It becomes a way to honor all the seemingly minor moments in your life as well. For every moment of your life is sacred and holds within it a potential for power, but only if you are present enough to honor it.

So, to start your journey, we begin with a simple ceremony by making an intention with the crystals.

THE CEREMONY

The definition of intention is “an aim or plan,” and the word comes from the Latin root words in-, meaning “toward,” and tendere, meaning “stretch.” So when it comes to the crystals, what is your intention of what you would like to learn about them? In which direction would you like to stretch your knowledge? And what is the result you are aiming for?

Think of your intention as a seed you are now sowing so that it can mature into the larger plant you wish for. Perhaps your intention is to understand how crystals work or how the crystals can help you become a happier and more fulfilled person. Perhaps you want to use crystals to help you discover your life’s purpose or to be able to work confidently with crystalline energy. Consider the deepest desire you wish to be fulfilled when it comes to the crystals. And if you don’t have any grand aspirations with the crystals and are merely curious about them, what is it that you most want to know? This too is an intention you can have.

Just as you might imagine what kind of plant your seed will turn out to be, it is important to think of the attributes you wish to experience as a result of achieving your intention with the crystals. The best way to do this is to define the resultant feeling you hope to achieve when you reach your goal. Is it the feeling of happiness? Is it feeling more loved and whole? Is it feeling wiser than you did before? Is it feeling more grounded? Pinpointing these feelings is a far more thorough way to define your intention than anything that you would think of. This is because thinking results in concepts and physical descriptions that can be limiting when setting intentions.

For example, think of how you would describe a cozy room and make a quick mental list of its attributes. Your list may have included items like “soft cushions and throw blankets on a pillow-top bed,” “a glowing fireplace,” “bookshelves filled with books,” and “big windows looking out into nature.” But if I were to ask you what a “cozy room” feels like, you would immediately know, even if you couldn’t exactly articulate what it was. In fact, there may be rooms that you would qualify as totally cozy though they don’t have any of the physical attributes you initially listed. Maybe you stumble upon a “cozy room” with a “giant TV” with your “favorite movies” across from a “comfy couch” with a “purring cat.” It may not be your prototypical idea of a cozy room and in fact may be entirely different than anything you would think of, but the room, with its feeling of intimacy, comfort, relaxation, and safety, would fit perfectly within your feeling of a “cozy room.” Thus, the feeling of a cozy room better encapsulates the idea and expands the range of what is possible than any physical list of attributes you could think up. So returning to our exercise, focusing on the feeling prevents you from having a vision that is too specific, while both summarizing and encompassing the totality of your intention without eliminating other potential outcomes that would make you equally satisfied.

The feelings you choose then act as signals to let you know you have moved toward your intention. As you progress and get closer to it, you will feel different than when you began. And as you continue, this feeling will deepen, becoming more prominent and clear to you.

Though you may have aimed to get a specific result, it’s important to recognize that your intention will have an open-ended quality and no true, clear goal to reach. Instead your intention acts as a focus for you to move toward in your ongoing journey.

Following are the steps to take for your intention ceremony. Read through them to familiarize yourself with the process, then sit down, close your eyes, and follow the ceremony as best as you can remember. This ceremony is less about precision and more about being as present and clear as you can in this specific space and time with your intent.

1. Find a quiet place to sit down. Sit either cross-legged on the floor or in a chair with your feet on the ground.

2. Close your eyes and take three deep breaths. Make these breaths slow, long, and as deep as possible.

3. Turn your attention inward toward your body. Imagine your head and spine glowing softly with a golden light. Then expand this glow to a bubble of golden light that generously surrounds your entire body.

4. Once you have a firm vision or sensation of your golden bubble, think of your intention and its feeling. Imagine holding this feeling in your heart.

5. Once you have the intention’s energy held in your heart, call upon any of your spirit guides, crystal guides, angels, and any additional teachers of light to be with you. Ask them for their help and support in your journey in understanding the crystals.

6. Take three more slow, deep breaths, and then gently open your eyes.

Congratulations on completing your first exercise!

Crystal Healing Is the Deepest Healing

The type of crystal healing I practice takes clients on an encompassing inner journey. Lying down, the client closes their eyes, and as I place crystals on their body they begin to see visions.

At first they may only see faint colors and shapes, but soon enough they see distinct images and find themselves in landscapes that they experience in a surprisingly visceral way. As they explore their surroundings the client and I have a back and forth, as if we are having an ordinary conversation, except that the client is also immersed in an interior world, interacting with the beings and objects within it.

My job is to hold space; that is, to create an environment both physical and energetic that keeps the client safe and protected while encouraging any energies needing to be healed to play out and be processed. This means I must be fully present, my energy tethered and grounded, and my total attention focused on facilitating the client’s journey. I monitor the client’s energies as they shift and change while also intuitively keeping tabs on what is happening within their visions. I ask them questions to help them along.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in a forest.”

“What do you see?”

“I see a cave.”

“Would you like to go in the cave?”

“No!” they emphatically reply.

“Why?”

“Because it’s dark.”

“Hold on—” I say, rearranging some crystals and placing a new one on them. “What do you see now?”

“I can see inside the cave.”

“What do you see in the cave?”

“I see a fur bed, a warm fire, and paintings on the wall.”

“Would you like to go in now?”

“Yes.”

And so they enter the cave to discover the information waiting inside for them.

My job is also to function as a kind of tour guide to the client’s inner worlds. Though exactly what kind of world the client will enter is always a surprise, I do know how to navigate these alternate realities. Since the environments and people they encounter can be quite unusual, clients are often perplexed by situations they find themselves in. But because I hold the space, I can be both “outside” of their experience and have a bird’s-eye view of what is happening to them within it. This allows me to have a wider perspective on what the client is experiencing as well as an understanding of the significance of what they are going through. This enables me to ask the kind of questions that help the client make better sense of what is happening to them. Though ultimately it is the client’s choice to decide where they will go and how they will proceed in their visions, as an experienced tour guide I can make the most intriguing suggestions on where they may go to reach the kind of healing they are yearning for.

While the client is having adventures in their inner worlds, I sit by them, adding, removing, and shifting crystals on and around their body depending on what is happening with their energies. I often say my experience of facilitating a crystal healing session feels akin to that of an audio engineer on a sound board adjusting levels (“More bass! Less treble! Less reverb all around!”). But instead of calibrating with switches, sliders, and knobs, I help calibrate the energies of the client by using the energetic patterns produced by a variety of crystals. Depending on the kinds of adjustments a person needs, I can use the crystals to give a lift to any energies that could use a boost, realign energies that have become skewed, and/or coax out any supportive energies that may have been previously submerged.

When the inner part of their journey is completed and it’s time for the client to open their eyes, I hand them a mirror so that they can see themselves and the crystals that have been laid on their body. Upon seeing their reflection, with perhaps the hundred or so crystals on and around themselves, they often remark that they had no idea so many had been used. Having been so deep in their inner journey, they never even felt the crystals being placed upon their skin.

The interior worlds experienced in a crystal healing session have a dreamlike quality. Situations and environments morph and change in a fluid way and are seen from a perspective that feels far more aware and expanded than anything experienced in ordinary life. But although the visions have an ephemeral quality to them, the experience itself is profoundly visceral. In addition to feeling definite sensations in their body, a person is able to hear, taste, and smell objects in their inner environment. Emotions are profoundly felt because of how intensely and clearly they are experienced. A client will find themselves speaking with people who have personalities distinct from their own, while also discovering they are able to telepathically communicate with objects and animals. Sometimes they have conversations with loved ones no longer physically present or with children yet to be born. Sometimes they recall what they had believed to be an insignificant memory, only to discover that their experience had a far deeper impact on their life than they previously realized. They may even recall an event that as an adult they fully understand but may find the child who initially experienced it still within themselves, in deep hurt and pain. And sometimes clients travel even further back, into their past lives, discovering ancient traumas that continue to affect them in their current lives. In these ways and more, crystal healing allows unfinished energetic pieces to be surfaced, attended to, processed, and healed. And each healed piece becomes significant in understanding and resolving the challenges the person has been experiencing within their present life.

This occurs because crystal healing, like other kinds of energy work, affects the subtle bodies. Although you have likely spent your whole life identifying yourself by what you have seen in the mirror, this is not all of who you are. What you have seen is a reflection of your physical body, but you are far more than just that.

Perhaps you believe your identity also consists of a thing you have called a soul, but this is a bit of a misnomer as well. This is because your soul is not something you possess; your soul is the most essential part of who you are. You are a soul that has a body, not the other way around! Your soul is not something you have. Instead, it is actually your physical body that you “borrow” and “have” for this lifetime, while your soul can exist independently outside of your physical form.

But you have other “bodies” that make up who are you are as well. There are many different ways to categorize them, but generally speaking, you have four major bodies— the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. While the physical body is what you see in the mirror and your spiritual body is your soul, your mental and emotional bodies are additional nonphysical portions of your being. Together, your nonphysical bodies (the mental, emotional, and spiritual) are collectively known as your subtle bodies.

Unlike your physical body, which has a density that is material, your subtle bodies are so much lighter, finer, and more “subtle” in form that they cannot be perceived by any physical means. Just like your physical body, each one of your subtle bodies is contained in a contiguous form. Emerging from deep within you and expanding past your body, the subtle bodies surround you in layers of increasingly lighter energy. While your physical body is your densest, most material layer, surrounding it is a layer of lighter energy known as your emotional body. Extending past the emotional body is your mental body, whose energy has even lesser density than that of the emotional body. But it is your spiritual body (aka your soul) that has the lightest and most encompassing energy of all. Not only does your spiritual body surround all your layers, sheathing and holding them, it also emerges from the deepest and most core part of who you are. It is your spiritual body that is most essential to your being.

Combined, your subtle bodies make up what is known as your aura, a field of energy that radiates beyond your physical self. While your physical body has been adapted to interact with the physical dimension, your aura exists beyond the constraints of fixed space and time. But although your aura is multidimensional, you still experience your subtle bodies all the time in the physical dimension. This is because your subtle bodies, along with your physical body, each govern a different part of you, distinguishing themselves by communicating to you with their own particular “point of view.” This is why you are able to have wildly disparate reactions to the same circumstance, all at the same time.

For example, perhaps something happens to you that makes you want to cry. Though the feelings are welling up inside of you, you hold back the tears because you believe it’s an inappropriate time to cry, yet your eyes start to glisten and the tears begin falling from your eyes. In this case, your emotional, mental, and physical bodies each have their own particular way of responding to the same situation. Meanwhile, your spiritual body, whose aim is to gain experience and wisdom, has a more neutral approach to the dramas of daily life.

While the rest of your bodies do all the conversing, debating, negotiating, and comparing with each other, the spiritual body steps back and takes a role more akin to that of an observer. For out of all the bodies, the spiritual body is the most connected to the truest understanding of timelessness, so it is in no rush to resolve any imbalances it experiences. Instead, knowing that you are already destined to move toward enlightenment, it allows any experience you go through to fully play out.

But what your spiritual body does do is consistently impel you toward an even greater state of balance and truth by quietly beckoning you in a deep and steady way. This is why, despite any protests or disagreements from any of your other bodies (like “logical” arguments prepared by your mind or emotional fears of abject failure), you can still always feel something pulling at you, calling you, constantly letting you know, like a cosmic game of Marco Polo, that there is more to know—and more to yourself—than you have settled for. And because the journey of the soul is everlasting, no matter what truths about yourself you uncover, there will always be another, even deeper part of your soul still to be found.

Where the issue comes in is when a schism develops between the different “departments.” As in the example above, the feelings of wanting to cry (emotional body) and the action of actually crying (physical body) are congruent with the desire of the spiritual body, which is to honor your truth and cry. Your body is on board, your emotions are on board, your spirit is on board, but your mind (mental body) has decided that this is a highly improper circumstance to display your emotions. The mind then tries any number of methods to overwhelm the other departments in order to take control of the situation. Perhaps it pulls out a rulebook of social behavior, stating that crying in public is only for the weak, and overpowers the emotional body into feeling shame. Then the physical body responds, stopping the tears by making the teeth grit, the eyes harden, and the body tense. So the flow of emotional and physical energy that would have come to completion had you cried and honestly expressed yourself instead becomes bottled up inside of you.

If this energy does not get released, it begins to fester. But first, it looks for some sort of place it can reside. Like a pest, it searches for any suitable nook or cranny in one or more of your bodies that it can squeeze into and inhabit. Perhaps it wants to wedge itself into the mind, blending into the multitude of other social anxieties that have previously found their way in. Maybe it finds itself nestling into the emotional body, cloaking itself not as pain but as misdirected anger. Or perhaps this repressed energy finds its way into the physical body, adding just a bit more tension to the muscles of the heart. Until this energy is released it becomes stuck somewhere inside of you, and the longer it stays in your body the more aggravated it becomes. And because this energy has now found a way to take up residence inside you, like a magnet it attracts other energies just like it to join in and squat together.

At first, the pain may be vaguely noticeable, or perhaps not noticeable at all. But as time goes on the unreleased energy begins to ulcerate, and as this energy continues to churn upon itself the sensation of pain increases. Whether the pain is emotional, mental, or physical, your bodies are trying to tell you that something is very wrong. And that is simply what pain is: a signal to let you know something is not right.

No matter which body it expresses itself in, every iota of pain and imbalance is also registered in your spiritual body. This is because your spiritual body encompasses the other bodily layers. Overseeing all “departments,” it reflects any of the incongruencies happening anywhere within it. But while feeling soul pain is distressing, it comes with a great benefit. Because your spiritual body holds all the other bodily layers, it is in direct connection with each one of them at the same time, so any pain found in any layer can be influenced to heal through healing of the spiritual body.

This is how you can be healed with energy. Because the spiritual body is a subtle body, it can be affected by other subtle energies, including the energies produced by crystals. Via the aura, the spiritual body is able to interact with crystalline energies in the same parallel, nonphysical, multidimensional frequency. Then imbalances that are resolved in the spiritual body can be reflected in the layer of the body that originated them. But healing imbalances on one bodily layer also creates a cascade of other beneficial effects because of the way your spiritual body is interconnected with all other layers. So as in the previous example, if one uses a modality like crystal healing to heal pain in the mental body (letting the mind know it’s okay to cry), it can in turn release constrictions in the emotional body (allowing the most honest feelings to come forth), which then releases tension from the physical body (letting the body shed tears). This series of changes shifts the various bodies into a truer and more honest state, which consequently influences the spiritual body on the whole by allowing it to be in a greater state of balance with itself. Resonating more deeply with its own truth, the soul’s energy becomes clearer and more radiant, and this energy becomes outwardly expressed as greater happiness and fulfillment in one’s life.

This is why crystal healing and other modalities aimed at healing at the soul level are so incredibly powerful. For instead of working on separate layers one at a time, modalities like this follow the threads of energy that connect all the way to your true core—your soul—to heal you at the very deepest level of your being. And though the type of crystal healing sessions I facilitate is meant to be especially intense and cathartic, you can still get all the soul-healing benefits of crystals working with them on your own. All you need to do is to learn to work with them in sincerity, integrity, and love, and they will show you how to deeply heal your soul.

“If you want to find the secrets of the Universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.”

—Nikola Tesla

Smoky Quartz