In the following pages are detailed profiles of the seven chakras, showing how they affect us emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually, with crystals to work with to best experience their powerful healing benefits.
Healing the Solar Plexus Chakra
The base chakra, also known as the first chakra, is located at the base of the spine. It is the survival center, supporting strength, determination, and the things that nurture us such as our friends and family. In certain traditions, such as ayurveda and hatha yoga, it is regarded as the place where the resting kundalini is stored. It is the center through which we experience our connection to the earth and the earth plane while we are living this life. A healthy base chakra will keep you grounded and help you move forward in life.
LOCATION: Base of the spine (coccyx)
CRYSTAL: Red jasper
COLOR: Red
FRAGRANCE ASSOCIATION: Patchouli
KEYWORDS: Survival, health, abundance, connection to the earth, change, strength, family, security, nurture, assertiveness, determination, passion, practical matters, tradition, endings and new beginnings
EMOTIONAL/MENTAL HEALING: An unbalanced base chakra can prevent you from advancing in life. When it’s blocked, nothing seems to happen. The lack of balance prevents the release of grief and other restricting emotions that hold you back. Everyone needs time to grieve, but this should always be a process of release rather than something to hold on to. Death is about change—not just for the person who dies but also for the relatives and friends they leave behind. All change brings opportunity and a fresh start. Without releasing grief and holding onto feelings such as sorrow and guilt, any new projects you start may never quite work or come to fruition. This prevents abundance—not only material but abundance on a deep soul level, of sensitive feelings and happy emotions. You feel unfulfilled. Slowly this has an emotional effect. You start to feel as if nothing is working or worthwhile and no one is on your side. You become stressed, a myriad of apparently unrelated physical symptoms begin to appear, and low-level depression sets in. You can feel as if you have lost a connection but to what you often are not sure. The dysfunction of your base chakra prevents you from appreciating the nurturing things in life. You can feel distanced from family and friends and unsettled. As you start to feel alone, insecurity can set in, leading to anxiety and panic attacks. In extreme circumstances, addictions, phobias, and obsessions can develop.
A healthy base chakra will strengthen your connection to the home, family, and friends.
PHYSICAL HEALING: When the base chakra is out of balance, common symptoms appear, such as chronic lower-back pain, varicose veins, sciatica, water retention, rectal and anal problems, constipation, diarrhea, some fertility issues such as impotence, and immune disorders. The base chakra also affects the health of the groin, hips, pelvis, lower end of the digestive system, legs, knees, ankles, and feet.
SPIRITUAL HEALING: The base chakra connects you to the earth. In one sense this is rational, mental grounding, as in your link to the planet; keeping your feet on the ground rather than your head in the sky. In another way, it’s bringing all your spiritual knowledge and experience into your everyday life, living in the present moment and experiencing every second of your existence. Part of this process can involve development workshops and classes, but many people go to these, have enlightening experiences, and then simply go back to their everyday lives, maybe tell their friends about the weekend, and… nothing. A healthy base chakra enables you to take the experiences and skills you have acquired and use them in your everyday life. This brings positive change in small manageable doses, leading to happiness.
LIFESTYLE: A balanced base chakra can help you move forward in life, change career, accept opportunities, and run with the ball when it falls in your hands. It promotes a healthy sense of security and confidence, allowing you to give and receive nurture, stand up for yourself when you need to, take advantage of all that life offers, and succeed in whatever you do.
ALTERNATIVE CRYSTALS: Hematite, black obsidian, smoky quartz, snowflake obsidian, red calcite, falcon’s eye, zircon, mookaite, black banded agate, jet, black opal, petrified wood
How to Tell If Your Base Chakra Is Out of Balance
When the base chakra is out of balance, energy doesn’t flow or moves very slowly, leading to a stagnation of life’s movement. You can feel stuck in a rut and find it difficult to release emotions that become trapped. Sometimes a loss, such as a death or broken relationship, has occurred, and a failure to release the associated emotions leads to dysfunction in this energy hot spot. Common symptoms include:
Healing Benefits
Balancing the base chakra stimulates the flow of energy through the body’s whole energy system, which can have a beneficial effect on many chronic conditions throughout the body. It also helps to build up energy that is stored in the sacral chakra for when it is needed. By removing anxiety and stress, this healthy flow of energy allows positive changes to occur in your life. It facilitates the release of unwanted and unneeded emotions and thoughts that can block your path and prevent you from following your destiny.
You can work with crystals to balance and heal the base chakra by placing the crystal directly on the energy center on your body (see page 40), carrying it with you all the time or, if suitable, taping it to your body with surgical tape. You can also try meditating with your chosen crystal and putting it by your bed or under your pillow at night. For more information on these and other healing techniques, refer to Chapter 5.
Red Jasper
Hematite
Black obsidian
Smoky quartz
Snowflake obsidian
Red calcite
Falcon’s eye
Zircon
Mookaite
Black banded agate
Jet
Black opal
Petrified wood
Red opaque variety of quartz colored by iron oxide inclusions.
COMMON SOURCES: Brazil, India
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Taurus, Aries
CHAKRA: Base
HEALING QUALITIES: Aids rebirth—that is, the idea of death and rebirth, or the end of something leading to a new beginning, bringing fresh opportunities and a fresh start. Promotes the survival instinct and boosts dream recall and astral travel. It is particularly helpful in meditations, helping to reduce stress, worry, and anxiety. Offers protection, especially in combination with jet.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: General tonic for the body, helping to prevent illness.
Red jasper
Hematite
Metallic silver-gray when polished, black and reddish brown masses, botryoidal forms, rosettes, layered “plates,” rhombohedral and black tabular crystals.
COMMON SOURCES: Brazil, Morocco, UK
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Aries, Aquarius
CHAKRA: Base
HEALING QUALITIES: One of the most grounding crystals, hematite helps things happen. It deflects negativity, bringing courage and strength in times of need, allowing mental processes to function and encouraging clear thinking. This allows you to make choices and move forward with confidence, reducing stress in the process. Failing to make choices is a common cause of both insomnia and poor memory recall, so hematite will help with both these conditions. It also helps the yin and yang energy balance—the male and female energies within each of us—enhancing personal magnetism and attracting love. In meditation hematite aids grounding, letting you bring the meditative experience into your everyday life. It can also be helpful for anyone involved with numbers, such as accountants and the self-employed.
Hematite
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for blood and spine. Helps anemia, blood clots, cramp, disorders of the spleen, multiple sclerosis, backache, jet lag, fever (when drunk as an elixir), and sunburn (when applied as a topical elixir). Assists healing of bone fractures. Eases travel, sea, and air sickness. Improves mental dexterity with numbers.
Pure black natural volcanic glass.
COMMON SOURCES: Mexico, USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Sagittarius
CHAKRA: Base
HEALING QUALITIES: Boosts intuition and creativity, promoting psychic abilities, in particular scrying. By improving awareness through intuition, it is also protective, grounding, and a focus for male energy. It connects with and enhances all types of shamanic healing.
Black obsidian
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for stomach and digestion; helps digestive disorders.
Smoky Quartz
Brown or black variety of quartz colored by natural radiation from the earth.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAME: Carnigorm
COMMON SOURCE: Brazil, Madagascar, USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Capricorn, Sagittarius
CHAKRA: Base
Smoky quartz
HEALING QUALITIES: Perhaps the key crystal for releasing pent-up emotion such as grief, fear, anger, resentment, or frustration. It aids the flow of energy, both through your own energy system and to others through any energy-healing modality, such as Reiki or spiritual healing. This flow of energy through the body enhances many aspects, from mental activity to physical expression, often releasing depression and negativity, which leads to a relaxed state. In turn, this allows your life to advance. Smoky quartz is a protective crystal, sending back negative thoughts and feelings to their source, and so it can be viewed as speeding up the laws of karma. It is employed extensively to bring protection during ceremonies and to boost intuition and male energy, increasing survival instincts. A grounding crystal, it aids dream interpretation and meditation. It also discourages obsessive behavior such as overspending.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for legs, knees, ankles, hands, feet, vitality, and sexual energy, and helps treat nervous speech impediments.
Black obsidian with inclusions of white phenocryst.
COMMON SOURCE: USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Virgo
CHAKRA: Base
Snowflake obsidian
HEALING QUALITIES: Helps to release anger, resentment, and unhelpful behavior patterns and reduce loneliness, bringing peace of mind. It facilitates meditation and assists in purification of the body’s energy system, detoxing the body, mind, and emotions.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Unblocks the meridian linking the stomach and sinuses. Also helps with eyes (when drunk as an elixir), eyesight, veins, bones, and skin (when drunk as an elixir). Helps acalculia and dyscalculia.
Red Calcite
Red variety of calcite found in masses; the building block of lime and marble.
COMMON SOURCE: Mexico
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Cancer
CHAKRA: Base
Red calcite
HEALING QUALITIES: A grounding crystal that calms physical energy, reducing anxiety and panic attacks. Helps in the treatment of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder).
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for kidneys, pancreas, and spleen.
Falcon’s Eye
Quartz has replaced asbestos while retaining the fibrous structure of the original asbestos crystal, giving the characteristic chatoyancy effect shown by all the tiger’s eye family.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAME: Red tiger’s eye
COMMON SOURCE: South Africa
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Capricorn
CHAKRA: Base
Falcon’s eye
HEALING QUALITIES: Brings heated emotions under control, thereby promoting practicality in all areas. When you become calm and start to deal with the things around you, you automatically grow in confidence, which boosts self-esteem and sexuality.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for the reproductive system. Helps sunburn.
Zircon
Short, square prismatic crystals, often octahedral; colors include red, brown, green, gray, yellow, and colorless.
COMMON SOURCE: Pakistan
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Virgo, Leo, Sagittarius
CHAKRA: Base
Zircon
HEALING QUALITIES: Zircon’s calming energy brings out the best in you, boosting self-esteem, personal magnetism, wisdom, toughness, stamina, dependability, and easing depression. It helps to attract soul mates, leading to better, more intense, and lasting relationships. Zircon also enhances the quality of purity in your life and can be beneficial in the treatment of insomnia.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for the pineal gland, aura, bones, and muscles. Helps allergies, sciatica, vertigo, and poisoning.
Mookaite
Patterned red and cream variety of jasper.
COMMON SOURCE: Australia
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Leo
CHAKRA: Base
Mookaite
HEALING QUALITIES: Helps change how you see the world around you, allowing you to move forward while staying grounded. A protective and calming crystal, it boosts creativity and self-esteem, assisting the flow of new ideas and making it easier to make decisions. Mookaite promotes friendship and communication, dispelling loneliness, depression, and fear. It enhances both the dream and meditative states. It is particularly helpful for young mothers trying to balance life’s stresses, seeking a new job, or coping with childbirth.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Helps with thyroid imbalance, weight loss, stomach conditions, hernia, water retention.
Variety of agate showing black and white banding.
COMMON SOURCE: India
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Capricorn
CHAKRA: Base
Black banded Agate
HEALING QUALITIES: Brings balance to the female and male aspects of your energy system. With equilibrium between these yin and yang energies you can see things differently, remove bias, and find new answers to old problems, effecting change and promoting new beginnings. It also boosts endurance.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for digestion; eases death and the dying process.
Jet
The fossilized remains of trees
COMMON SOURCES: Canada, UK
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Capricorn
CHAKRA: Base
Polished jet
HEALING QUALITIES: Promotes energy with calmness, enhancing the yin and yang energy balance and sexual energy, and giving protection from illness, violence, and, in combination with red jasper, psychic attack. This expels depression and fear, allowing you to move forward into abundance. Jet is valuable in the acquisition of wealth.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Helps migraine, epilepsy, swollen glands, stomach ache, and the common cold.
Black Opal
Forms black masses. Sometimes shows iridescence (fire) in various colors.
COMMON SOURCES: Australia, Hungary, USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Scorpio, Sagittarius, Cancer
CHAKRA: Base
Black opal
HEALING QUALITIES: Gets you moving but keeps you grounded at the same time. It helps fight depression and is beneficial in scrying and iridology.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for digestion, eyesight, and fertility.
When Jane arrived for her first healing session, she was suffering from lower-back pain, which she accepted was her “weak spot,” and insomnia. She felt constantly tired and lethargic, which she put down to the pain and lack of sleep. After a brief discussion I learned that she was trying to change her career but things kept getting in the way, such as her partner losing his job and her mother becoming ill.
With her lying on her stomach, I placed red jasper on her base chakra with a quartz star (see page 132) around it. I arranged all the other base chakra crystals in a circle around this. I worked with the master quartz crystal first for pain relief and then on the red jasper and quartz star. She reported that the pain in her lower back had gone and she felt heat around the whole base area but specifically below each crystal.
She was given red jasper and hematite to work with during the week, keeping them near her all the time—placing them on her bedside table or in her bed at night—and holding them whenever she felt the need. Where possible, she used a focused meditation while holding them, and when this was not practical she simply played with them in her hands and held them to any areas of discomfort. Each morning she cleansed them under running water.
The following week she returned, reporting that the pain had returned after five days but that she was sleeping significantly better and felt less tired. I repeated the treatment, but this time without the additional base chakra crystals, and I gave her black obsidian to work with during the week.
The third week she reported that she was pain-free, was sleeping well, and had a job interview (she later accepted the job). I applied a basic chakra crystal set (see page 41) to help maintain the newly found balance throughout her body and energy system.
Petrified Wood
Fossilized trees, in which organic material has been replaced by one or more minerals. These are usually agate, chalcedony, and quartz, or sometimes opal, but many other minerals can be present. May be brown or any color of natural wood.
COMMON SOURCES: Worldwide, especially Madagascar, USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Leo
CHAKRA: Base
Petrified wood
HEALING QUALITIES: A wonderful crystal for dealing with stress—it is grounding, soothes the emotions, and helps to bring mental balance, allowing you to relax and look at the bigger picture. It also helps you to access past life experiences.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Helps arthritis, infection, allergies, hay fever, and conditions caused by pollutants. Good for bones and promotes longevity.
The second chakra is the sacral chakra, located just below the navel. It is the center of creativity, desire, sexual emotion, and sexuality, stimulating the creative life force required for existing in the physical world. Some traditions say that this force is the basis for life itself. This is where we store healthy energy for future use when needed. (This creative life force is not the same as the body’s fatty tissue, which can be converted to physical energy.)
LOCATION: Just below the navel
CRYSTAL: Carnelian
COLOR: Orange
FRAGRANCE ASSOCATION: Ylang-ylang
KEYWORDS: Connection to other people, creativity, energy, stamina, innocence, sex, fertility, personal control, relationships, surprise, independence, confidence, joy, negotiation, self-employment, happiness, natural cycles
EMOTIONAL/MENTAL HEALING: The key to the sacral chakra is its ability to store instantly usable energy. It’s like a switch, providing energy on demand, and it takes only a little practice or a few crystal chakra treatments to tap into this ready source of inner strength. It makes your creativity flow so you touch everyone around you with your warmth, because that is what happens when you say someone is a “warm person”—it’s the energy radiating out from within them that makes them attractive. This brings new relationships, friendships, and opportunity into your life, promoting joy, happiness, and fertility, and dispelling sadness. It can have a profound effect in the treatment of ME, addiction, and eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. This added power gives you self-confidence, which helps you to control your emotions.
PHYSICAL HEALING: The energy store is released naturally when the body needs it. This increases stamina and prompts wide-ranging effects throughout the body, so that almost anything from muscle cramps to infections may be relieved. The health of the sacral chakra affects the intestines, spleen, kidneys, and gallbladder. Chronic lower-back pain, sciatica, gynecological problems, disorders around the pelvic girdle, sexual potency, and urinary problems may be the result of an unbalanced chakra. Conception, pregnancy, fetal development, and the health of mother and newborn baby are all enhanced by a healthy sacral chakra. It helps to regulate the menstrual cycle, and when this doesn’t happen it shows as cramps, excessive bleeding, an erratic cycle, or PMS (premenstrual syndrome). Working on your sacral chakra can also help allergies, arthritis, and rheumatism. It can strengthen the immune system and aid cleansing and detoxing.
The sacral chakra represents the creative life force within you.
SPIRITUAL HEALING: The energy stored in your sacral chakra, ready for you to draw upon, is not just physical—it can be used for anything. It connects you to your natural cycles and those of the universe, like an innocent child, allowing you to experience living in the moment full of surprise and wonder. Taoism refers to this state as the “uncarved block,” as it is possible to make anything from it. Spiritual pursuits such as meditation become easier—many meditations ask you to breathe down into this area of your body. All psychic abilities are enhanced as you connect unimpeded to spirit, God, the universal creative life force, or whatever you believe is out there. The extra energy gives you a sense of peace, bringing calmness to all you do. In the same way, the sacral chakra affects the symbolic digestion of creative ideas and spiritual energy.
LIFESTYLE: Whether it’s washing the dishes or running a marathon, if your sacral chakra is in balance and you focus on it, you will find any physical task easier. It facilitates the flow of creative and artistic energies, freeing you to be inspired at home, work, and play. You will notice changes to yourself and to those around you. You affect everything and everyone you touch, and the state of your energy is decisive in these interactions. The old adage that first impressions count is true and a balanced sacral chakra will help you to quickly connect to anyone you meet.
ALTERNATIVE CRYSTALS: Orange calcite, copper, pink banded agate, moonstone, pearl, gray banded agate, vanadinite, chiastolite, crocoite, sardonyx, Picasso marble, halite
How to Tell if Your Sacral Chakra Is Out of Balance
If the sacral chakra is blocked, energy moves very slowly or doesn’t flow at all, leading to a lack of stamina. You can feel lethargic, lonely, and sad. ME (myalgic encephalitis) is a severe problem that may result from an imbalance in the sacral chakra. Imbalance in this chakra is often related to sexual issues, which may arise from imagination or beliefs but can derive from a single incident or repeated experiences. Common symptoms include:
Healing Benefits
When the sacral chakra is balanced, you feel energized in every area of your life. You are free to take advantage of opportunities as they arise, so that you move forward, making your decisions as you go. Life seems to flow. Everything you do becomes calmer and easier, allowing you more time and freedom to enjoy whatever the world has to offer.
Crystals for the Sacral Chakra
You can work with crystals to balance and heal the sacral chakra by placing the crystal directly on the energy center on your body (see page 40), by carrying it with you all the time or, if suitable, taping it to your body with surgical tape. You can also try meditating with your chosen crystal and putting it by your bed or under your pillow at night. For more information on these and other healing techniques, refer to Chapter 5.
Carnelian
Orange calcite
Copper
Pink banded agate
Moonstone
Pearl
Gray banded agate
Vanadinite
Chiastolite
Crocoite
Sardonyx
Picasso marble
Halite
Variety of chalcedony forming orange pebbles; can also be red, pink, or brown.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAMES: Cornelian, sard
COMMON SOURCES: Worldwide, especially Brazil, India, Uruguay
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Taurus, Cancer, Leo
CHAKRA: Sacral
Carnelian
HEALING QUALITIES: This “feel better stone” boosts personal power and self-esteem. It gives you both courage and compassion, helping to dispel negative emotions such as anger, envy, fear, rage, sorrow, and jealousy. By bringing focus and balance, it enhances your connection to spirit and inspiration. This leads to confidence and inquisitiveness, beating away confusion, apathy, lethargy, and laziness, and it is helpful in the treatment of ME (myalgic encephalitis) and eating disorders. Carnelian helps you see the links between dis-ease and emotions so you can deal with the emotions and prevent dis-ease. It is good for anyone who undertakes live performance such as actors and musicians as well as people involved in meditation retreats or study.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Boosts appetite, vitality, and memory and is good for digestion, the gallbladder, lungs, liver, kidneys, pancreas, spleen, thyroid gland, spine, tissue regeneration, and the voice and speech. Helps asthma, hay fever, bronchitis, neuralgia, the common cold, infection, and liver conditions such as jaundice. Traditionally carnelian is sucked to reduce thirst and is also made into a topical elixir for minor cuts and grazes.
Orange Calcite
Bright to pale orange rocks.
COMMON SOURCE: Mexico
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Cancer, Leo
CHAKRA: Sacral
Orange calcite
HEALING QUALITIES: Helps to balance energy, bringing vitality and calm and reducing feelings of aggression and belligerence. Promotes inspiration and creativity. Balances sexuality, enhancing it when needed.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Calms excessive physical energy, helping to alleviate stress related-symptoms, especially those associated with digestive disorders, such as IBS (irritable bowel syndrome).
A metal found in free-form shapes, dendrites, plates, and rhombohedral crystals.
COMMON SOURCE: USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Taurus, Sagittarius
CHAKRA: Sacral
Copper
HEALING QUALITIES: This “feel better stone” balances emotions and boosts chi, giving vitality and banishing exhaustion, lethargy, and tiredness. This also helps to prevent mood swings and reduce impatience and excitability. In addition, it is a lucky stone.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for the circulation and stimulates the metabolism. Aids detoxing and helps general malaise, infected wounds, and joint conditions such as inflammation, bursitis, arthritis, and rheumatism.
Pink Banded Agate
Agate variety with pink, white, and sometimes gray banding and patterns.
COMMON SOURCE: Botswana
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Scorpio, Taurus
CHAKRA: Sacral, heart
Pink banded agate
HEALING QUALITIES: A very feminine stone that helps both women and men connect to their female side. Promotes femininity, creativity, nurturing, finding solutions to problems, attention to detail, universal love, and seeing the whole picture. Helps to relieve depression and stress.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for the nervous system. Aids detoxing.
Moonstone
Variety of feldspar exhibiting chatoyancy. Colors include white, cream, yellow, brown, blue, green, and rainbow (white with a blue color flash).
COMMON SOURCE: India
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Cancer, Libra, Scorpio
CHAKRA: Sacral
Moonstone
HEALING QUALITIES: Helps you get in touch with your inner self, bringing calm, balance, and control to your emotions. Helps healthy energy flow by releasing blocks throughout the energy system. A soothing crystal, promoting compassion, peace of mind, wisdom, sexuality, passion, intuition, insight, creativity, confidence, composure, protection for travelers, good luck, and a happy home. It banishes pessimism and oversensitivity and encourages change and new beginnings, helping and breaking bad cycles and repeated patterns.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for the circulation, pituitary gland, eyes, a youthful appearance, fertility, pregnancy and childbirth, female hormones, menstrual cycle, and menstruation. Helps PMS (premenstrual syndrome), period pains, menopausal symptoms, constipation, water retention, swelling, insect bites, and anaphylactic shock. A topical elixir of moonstone is good for the hair and skin.
Pearl
Formed within the shells of oysters or other mollusks, pearls can be white, black, gray, pinkish, or yellowish.
COMMON SOURCES: China, Japan
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Cancer, Gemini
CHAKRA: Sacral
Pearl
HEALING QUALITIES: Promotes emotional control and focuses the mind, benefiting feminine qualities, sexuality, wisdom, fidelity, chastity, and purity. Reduces irritability and antisocial behavior.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for fertility and childbirth, and also for digestion, reducing biliousness, bloating, and discomfort.
Gray Banded Agate
Gray and white banded or patterned variety of agate.
COMMON SOURCE: Botswana
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Scorpio
CHAKRA: Sacral
Gray banded agate
HEALING QUALITIES: Enhances the release of usable stored energy in the sacral chakra, benefiting many conditions on all levels.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for digestion and helps general malaise, reducing fatigue. Helps in the treatment of ME (myalgic encephalitis).
Barrel-shaped and hollow prismatic crystals and masses.
COMMON SOURCE: Morocco
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Virgo
CHAKRA: Sacral
Vanadinite
HEALING QUALITIES: Helps the thinking process and goal-setting. Reduces compulsive behavior such as overspending and OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). Benefits meditation and reduces exhaustion.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for lungs, improves breathing and breath control, and helps asthma. Also good for bladder.
CAUTION: No elixir.
Chiastolite
This variety of andalusite forms fat crystals that exhibit a cross pattern in cross section; may be brown or green with black “cross” markings.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAMES: Cross stone, andalusite
COMMON SOURCE: China
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Libra
CHAKRA: Sacral
HEALING QUALITIES: This is traditionally a sign of the Christian Cross and so is associated with its healing energies and with ideas such as love, peace, devotion, understanding the dying process, death, and rebirth, as well as with change and astral travel. It helps creativity, problem-solving, and practicality. Perhaps the phrase “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” is apt to describe this crystal’s potential.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for the circulation and for increasing milk production in nursing mothers. Helps to reduce fever and may help chromosome damage.
Chiastolite
Prismatic orange crystals, masses, and aggregates.
COMMON SOURCE: Australia
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Aries
CHAKRA: Sacral
Crocoite
HEALING QUALITIES: Eases the distress of change, especially major changes such as divorce (it is known as “the divorce stone”), calming emotions and boosting intuition and creativity. Helps you cope with death or any loss. Balances sexuality.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Helps disorders of the reproductive system.
CAUTION: No elixir.
Sardonyx
Variety of onyx that contains carnelian and shows a combination of black, red, brown, white, and clear bands.
COMMON SOURCE: India
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Aries
CHAKRA: Sacral
Sardonyx
HEALING QUALITIES: Encourages balance in marriage and other cohabiting relationships, and is also good for socializing. Reduces hesitation, promoting courage. Brings good luck and helps protect against crime.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for strength, muscle development, and all types of sports training.
Picasso Marble
Patterned marble in color combinations of black, brown, yellow, and white.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAMES: Picasso stone, Picasso jasper
COMMON SOURCE: USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Sagittarius, Cancer
CHAKRA: Sacral
Picasso marble
HEALING QUALITIES: Good for creative pursuits such as art and music. A grounding stone, it calms the mind, alleviating unsettled and subconscious thoughts, reducing anxiety, worry, and stress, easing change, and promoting perseverance.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for the circulation, digestion, metabolism, weight loss, and detoxing. Helps carpal tunnel syndrome.
My clients Tom and Sarah had been wanting to have a baby but had been unsuccessful, despite being in a loving relationship. They had seen counselors and doctors, who had been unable to find a physical or psychological reason for the failure to conceive. The couple approached me, as is all too often the case, as a “last resort.”
After a long discussion we started a series of treatments, beginning with a general crystal chakra healing for each of them. I noticed that Sarah was very stressed, perhaps through concern about the fertility issue, but I suspected that there was something else she wasn’t talking about or didn’t even realize.
Their second treatment the following week was enlightening. I focused on the sacral chakra, placing moonstone on the chakra and arranging two pearls and two pink banded agate stones alternately to create a cross around it, interlinked with four mini quartz crystals. Each crystal was energized with my quartz master crystal. The treatments were the same for each of them, but Tom found his treatment calm and relaxing, while Sarah experienced great discomfort and emotional distress—which, although unpleasant for her at the time, was the real start of her healing process. We talked and I discovered that she worked as a complaints manager at a call center. All day long she would deal with only the worst of the complaints, which her staff couldn’t deal with. She felt permanently under threat and bereft of energy.
Clearing the sacral chakra allowed Sarah to understand what her issues were. Tom was given a rose quartz pendant to wear to help him cope with his wife’s predicted emotional releases.
Sarah had several more weekly treatments before she felt ready to change her job. Soon after this she conceived, and she then worked with chrysocolla and moonstone, placing them on her stomach each evening for 20–30 minutes. Eventually she gave birth to a healthy girl.
Halite
Salt crystals, massive or cubic. Colors include orange, colorless, whitish, yellow, red, purple, blue, and green.
COMMON SOURCES: Australia, France, Germany, Poland, USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Cancer, Pisces
CHAKRA: Sacral
HEALING QUALITIES: Boosts endurance and reduces mood swings, bringing a more even balance to life.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Balances body fluids and helps reduce water retention. Good for small and large intestines.
CAUTION: No elixir.
Halite
Healing the Solar Plexus Chakra
The third chakra is located at the solar plexus, in the middle of the body just below the breastbone. It is the center of personal power, ambition, desire, and emotion. Feelings and the sense of touch are processed through the solar plexus chakra, hence the phrase “gut feeling.” Being at the physical center of the body, the solar plexus chakra is the point of “centering,” where we come to stillness.
When healthy, this chakra is said to produce a protective and cleansing energy that flows out through the body’s energy system, dispersing any negativity held in any of the other chakras. I believe that this is because when the solar plexus chakra is healthy, you become more aware of your own internal energy and how you feel about the world and events around you. This allows you to make continuous subtle adjustments to your internal energy and to your reactions to the outside world. It is also the site of your “internal pendulum,” your instinctive “yes/no response” to everything that happens to you (see page 20).
LOCATION: Behind the soft cartilage at bottom of breastbone
CRYSTAL: Citrine
COLOR: Yellow
FRAGRANCE ASSOCIATION: Neroli
KEYWORDS: Bravery, strength, confidence, self-esteem, nurturing, emotions, trust, responsibility for decisions, logic, memory, concentration, learning, adaptability, recovery after surgery
EMOTIONAL/MENTAL HEALING: If your solar plexus chakra is out of balance, you often feel drained. Typical symptoms are lack of concentration, failing memory, falling asleep during the day, and insomnia. It is particularly difficult to meditate, as you will be either nodding off or easily distracted. This chakra is greatly affected by stress, especially what I call “21st-century stress”: the idea of attempting to do too much, always running around trying to be in too many places at once and multitasking when you’re not dashing around. This leads to a lack of quality time. In fact, it doesn’t matter how busy you are if you can focus on each thing you do, but “21st-century stress” makes you unfocused and uncentered. As stress affects the weakest part of the body, imbalance in the solar plexus chakra can be manifested in almost any physical, emotional, psychological, or spiritual symptom throughout the body or its energy system. A healthy third chakra promotes versatility as you learn to adapt from one situation to the next.
The solar plexus chakra can bring you a sense of stillness.
PHYSICAL HEALING: Working with crystals on the solar plexus chakra can help digestive disorders, indigestion, food allergies, stomach ulcers, intestinal disorders, gallstones and bile, liver ailments, and eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. It promotes the healthy functioning of the lymphatic and nervous systems, enhances healthy metabolism, aids the pancreas and adrenal gland, and helps recovery after surgery. Through its role in balancing blood sugar levels, it helps diabetes. Arthritis, rheumatism, stress-affected skin problems such as eczema, and phobias can all be helped.
SPIRITUAL HEALING: This is the area that puts our beliefs, ideas, thoughts, and creative inspiration into practice and where we act on the concepts of trust and honor. When it is out of balance, either you have ideas and thoughts that go around in your head without your doing anything with them, or you are running around the whole time like a headless chicken with no direction. A balanced third chakra gives your actions purpose.
LIFESTYLE: Because the solar plexus chakra is the crossroads of the physical body, a healthy one has energy flowing through it, linking your whole body. It encourages the development of leadership skills such as bravery, confidence, self-esteem, inner strength, logic, the abilities to lead by example and take responsibility for your own decisions, and emotional control. Your “internal pendulum” (see pages 20, 70) will help you see the truth within other people.
ALTERNATIVE CRYSTALS: Imperial topaz, amber, tiger’s eye, yellow jasper, hessonite, anhydrite, ametrine, beryl, schalenblende, heliodor, sulfur, golden calcite
How to Tell if Your Solar Plexus Chakra Is Out of Balance
If the solar plexus chakra is blocked, energy moves very slowly or doesn’t flow at all, leading to a feeling of being drained and a loss of personal power and self-respect. Problems in the solar plexus chakra are often related to “21st-century stress” (see page 70). Typical symptoms are:
Healing Benefits
A balanced solar plexus chakra helps give a physical focus to everything you do. The feeling of being centered and still is beneficial to everything but particularly to study and learning new skills. You feel emotion in your heart but it is through this energy hot spot that you act on your emotions. When it’s healthy you have self-esteem and self-respect, are less sensitive to criticism, and can care for yourself and nurture others.
Crystals for the Solar Plexus Chakra
You can work with crystals to balance and heal the solar plexus chakra by placing the crystal directly on the energy center on your body (see page 40), carrying it with you all the time or, if suitable, taping it to your body with surgical tape. You can also try meditating with your chosen crystal and putting it by your bed or under your pillow at night. For more information on these and other healing techniques, refer to Chapter 5.
Citrine
Imperial topaz
Amber
Tiger’s eye
Yellow jasper
Hessonite
Anhydrite
Ametrine
Beryl
Schalenblende
Heliodor
Sulfur
Golden calcite
Variety of quartz in which the yellow, golden, or lemon color is the result of heat from volcanic and other earth activity.
COMMON SOURCE: Brazil
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Gemini, Aries, Libra, Leo
CHAKRA: Solar plexus
Citrine
HEALING QUALITIES: Keeping a citrine crystal—known as the “money stone”—in your purse, wallet, or pocket brings wealth and abundance, which is not just financial; it’s a “feel better stone,” bringing abundance on all levels. Citrine helps you make choices and decisions, aids problem-solving, increases awareness and self-esteem, helps you control anger and other unwanted emotions, balances yin and yang energies, and promotes relationships. It boosts energy and creativity and is particularly helpful for teaching, writing, studying, or learning. By helping to eliminate emotional toxins, it leads to the possibility of new beginnings. Citrine is also a wonderful tool when you want to sell your home, as it promotes abundance, making buyers feel welcome and uplifted, and creating the feeling that it would be a nice place to live. Simply place a small crystal or crystal cluster in each room and one large crystal in the entry hall or living room.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for the digestive system, heart, liver, kidneys, thyroid gland, and thymus, helping associated disorders and symptoms such as anemia, jaundice, nausea, vomiting, constipation, and diarrhea. It aids the elimination of toxins and boosts tissue regeneration and recovery after operations. It also improves eyesight and the aura.
Imperial Topaz
Golden prismatic crystals and alluvial pebbles.
COMMON SOURCES: Brazil, USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Sagittarius, Leo, Pisces
CHAKRAS: Solar plexus, crown
Imperial topaz
HEALING QUALITIES: Helps to relieve “21st-century stress” (see page 71) and brings a universal connection to everything, giving a feeling of oneness. Promotes mental energy and so is good for thoughts, ideas, creativity, relaxation, and meditation. Also increases physical attraction.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Aids all stress-related conditions, liver, gallbladder, and hormone balance.
Amber
Fossilized resin from prehistoric trees that may have inclusions of animal/plant material. Colors include yellow, orange, and brown, plus green (artificial color).
COMMON SOURCES: Baltic region including Latvia, Lithuania, Poland (copal, or “new amber,” comes from Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Madagascar)
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Leo, Aquarius
CHAKRA: Solar plexus
Amber
HEALING QUALITIES: Centuries of tradition surrounding amber suggest its protective qualities. It is worn as a talisman by warriors to bring good luck. Wearing it purifies body, mind, and spirit, and it symbolizes the renewal of marriage vows in a similar way to an eternity ring. Amber is good for the mind, improving memory and reducing absent-mindedness. Because it is calming, it allows the intellect to work, which means that decision-making is easier. Perhaps its greatest quality lies in its ability to help you recognize and fulfill your dreams, goals, and ideals. It also helps you to balance yin and yang energy, helps remove emotional blocks and negativity, and aids treatment of schizophrenia and recovery from abuse. Amber is sometimes burned as an incense to cleanse spaces and remove negativity, making it perfect for therapy rooms.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Is helpful in the treatment of bacterial infection and acne. It is also beneficial to the heart, hormone balance, postoperative healing, detoxing, throat, kidneys, and bladder, and can help asthma. Can be applied as an antiseptic topical elixir and is drunk as an elixir to relieve constipation. Its disinfectant qualities meant that in medieval times it was used as a fumigant. Historically, it was chewed by babies to relieve teething discomfort.
Quartz has replaced asbestos while retaining the fibrous structure of the original asbestos crystal, giving the characteristic chatoyancy shown by the tiger’s eye family. Colors include gold, yellow, and brown (commonly all in the same specimen), red, and blue. Color varieties are blue hawk’s eye (see page 99) and red falcon’s eye (see page 56).
COMMON SOURCE: South Africa
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Capricorn
CHAKRA: Solar plexus
HEALING QUALITIES: Brings courage and calmness to help you cope with life’s foibles. It dispels inhibitions, introversion, fear, intolerance, negativity, and prejudice, creating order out of chaos. It is supportive of intuition, balances yin and yang energy, and promotes balance between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Because it sharpens the mind, it is particularly helpful for investigators such as police, scientists, insurers, and accountants. A “feel better stone,” tiger’s eye helps to eliminate worry and depression and encourages new beginnings, leading to success and wealth. Being a grounding crystal, it is helpful in distant healing.
Tiger’s eye
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for the whole digestive system and helps associated conditions, including flatulence, nausea, and diverticulosis. Can also help treat some eye diseases and bone fractures.
Yellow Jasper
A yellow variety of opaque chalcedony
COMMON SOURCE: South Africa
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Leo
CHAKRA: Solar plexus
Yellow jasper
HEALING QUALITIES: Helps intellectual pursuits, such as research and study; provides protection, especially for travelers.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: General tonic for the body that aids digestion and increases energy.
Hessonite
Brown (from cinnamon to yellowish) form of grossular garnet.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAME: Cinnamon stone
COMMON SOURCE: Madagascar
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Aries
CHAKRAS: Solar plexus, sacral
Hessonite
HEALING QUALITIES: A crystal that gives the courage needed for new challenges. Dispels negativity, inferiority complexes, and victim mentality. In meditation, it can help you advance to the next level of awareness.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Eases flatulence and colic. Good for the olfactory and lymphatic systems and aids detoxing.
Clear, gray, ans white tabular crystals and masses.
COMMON SOURCE: Mexico
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Cancer, Pisces, Scorpio
CHAKRA: Solar plexus, sacral
Anhydrite
HEALING QUALITIES: Bringing acceptance and aiding the release of past issues, it is helpful for coping with and understanding the dying process.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Promotes strength and stamina, helps throat conditions, and relieves water retention and swelling.
Ametrine
Naturally occurring combination of amethyst and citrine, which is purple and gold in color.
COMMON SOURCE: Bolivia
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Libra
CHAKRAS: Solar plexus, crown
Ametrine
HEALING QUALITIES: Removes physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual blockages, promoting an intellectual understanding of spirituality and allowing you to bring your beliefs into your everyday life and actions. This inspiring crystal is great for creativity and creative pursuits such as art and music. It promotes change, bringing tranquility, removing worry, and reducing prejudice and ignorance. It accelerates the meditation process, so you get to your own deepest state quicker. It also boosts the aura, facilitates astral travel, and balances yin and yang energies.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Relieves muscle tension. Helps to repair chromosome damage and reduce rejection in organ transplants.
Hexagonal prismatic crystals with flat or occasionally small pyramidal terminations. Color varieties include a milky yellowish green, white, red bixbite, and colorless goshenite, as well as yellow to gold heliodor (see right), green emerald (see page 88), pink morganite (see page 90), and blue aquamarine (see page 98).
COMMON SOURCES: Africa, Brazil, Pakistan, Russia
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Gemini, Pisces, Aries, Leo
CHAKRAS: Solar plexus, crown
Beryl
HEALING QUALITIES: Brings emotional balance, helping to eliminate the effects of “21st-century stress,” and promotes initiative, wisdom, and adaptability, helping you to fulfill your potential. It is employed in ceremonies to facilitate this.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Eases belching, aids the nervous system, and is good for the pancreas. Promotes physical activity and vitality.
Schalenblende
This compact variety of sphalerite is yellow to brown in color, often with silver-gray bands of galena and marcasite.
COMMON SOURCES: Germany, Poland
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Aquarius, Pisces
CHAKRA: Solar plexus
Schalenblende
HEALING QUALITIES: Enhances magic, divination, and mediumship. Gives protection and is helpful for travel and new beginnings.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for the immune system and helps in treatment of AIDS.
Heliodor
Variety of beryl, from yellow to gold in color.
COMMON SOURCE: Brazil
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Leo
CHAKRA: Solar plexus, crown
Heliodor
HEALING QUALITIES: Aids communication, encourages compassion, promotes mental balance. It also provides protection, especially of your family, house, or car when you are away from them.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for the liver, spleen, and pancreas.
Masses, nodules, pyramidal, and tabular crystals.
COMMON SOURCE: Sicily
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Leo
CHAKRA: Solar plexus
Sulfur
HEALING QUALITIES: Aids mental balance, inspiration, and reasoning; dispels willfulness.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Boosts energy and helps insect bites, infection, fibrous tissue growths, painful joints, and swelling. Has also been employed as a fumigant.
CAUTION: No elixir.
Golden Calcite
Rhombohedral and scalenohedral crystals; also found as masses
COMMON SOURCES: China, USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Leo
CHAKRAS: Solar plexus, sacral, crown
Golden calcite
HEALING QUALITIES: Boosts mental energy, creativity and ideas, banishing self-limiting beliefs. Aids calm communication, reducing the likelihood of arguments. Also helpful for divination, past-life recall, and healing visualizations. An elixir drunk through the day can be very calming.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for physical energy, the circulation, nerves, liver, gallbladder, and endocrine glands. Helps fight infection at its onset.
Crystal Clinic
Amy was suffering from recurring headaches, which were bringing her down and causing lethargy during the day. She had lost interest in everything, and although she had previously had an active social life, she now felt no desire to go out and just fell asleep in front of the TV each evening. She was totally stressed out from her multitasking lifestyle.
I gave her one complete crystal chakra healing treatment and asked her to work with imperial topaz for two weeks, keeping it with her all the time, and meditating with it for half an hour each morning and before she went to bed at night. After two weeks she reported that she felt refreshed and had found a new purpose in her life. She’d started a new relationship and said she was going to mount the imperial topaz crystal into a pendant so she could wear it and show it off to all her friends and colleagues.
Located in the middle of the chest, the fourth chakra is the center of love and compassion. It relates to your connection to everyone and everything around you. Spirituality, in the sense of “a connection to everything,” is the key concept of love. Without this connection we are unable to share the love we all have inside us. This energy hot spot is the deepest point inside us, where the outside world meets our inner being. With each breath we take, we inhale part of the outside world and exchange energy with it, through the physical process of gaseous exchange in the lungs. With this comes a sense of connection with our environment. When we exhale, we share our own internal energy with the space and people around us. This connection is the motor that sends love through the energy system, resulting, for example, in a bridge between the analytical mind and the feeling heart.
LOCATION: Center of the chest
CRYSTAL: Malachite
COLOR: Green
FRAGRANCE ASSOCIATION: Rose
KEYWORDS: Love, safety, trust, adventure, relationships, faithfulness, commitment, forgiveness, compassion, hope, seeing beauty, harmony, kindness, gentleness, sleep
EMOTIONAL/MENTAL HEALING: When the heart chakra is out of balance, welose touch with our emotions, relationships of all kinds suffer, and we become detached from the world around us. As we slowly become more and more insular, we lock away not only our feelings as we express them but our inner truth—our soul or spirit. We retreat into our head, which creates confusion, a “fog in the mind,” blocking mental activities. We stop expressing ourselves, and both vocal and creative expression become duller. We lack energy and can feel constantly drained. We stop advancing on our life path, whether planned by us or by fate, traveling on an ever-decreasing cycle from which there seems no escape. Almost any physical symptoms can develop, which, of course, bring us down further until we lose hope.
PHYSICAL HEALING: Benefits the chest, heart, and lungs and treats associated ailments and conditions, such as asthma, pneumonia, some allergies, breast, upper back, and shoulder problems, colds, influenza, fevers, ulcers, and stress-related illnesses. Good for breast tissue and cell growth, and general body regeneration, and reduces signs of aging.
A healthy heart chakra allows you to connect to the world around you.
SPIRITUAL HEALING: Supports not just physical love between people but a spiritual love of life itself. This is the energy that makes a relationship special, that keeps you up talking all night and gives you extra sparkle. It offers a deeper connection to your loved one and everyone else you meet and bestows a love of life. You can empathize with the suffering of others, and you can enjoy their success and happiness without jealousy or fear of your own inadequacies. All fear stems from this energy center. When we encounter something that makes us fearful, it is because of a stagnation of energy in this chakra, which in turn pushes down to the solar plexus giving that sinking feeling of your internal pendulum (see page 20).
LIFESTYLE: A balanced heart chakra allows you to share with other people. It encourages openness, which others will reflect back to you, like mirrors. All your relationships will benefit, whether partner, relatives, friends, or pets. The world will open for you, creating new opportunities, and you will feel the universe flowing around you. You can enjoy new adventures without fear but with a new sense of security and trust.
ALTERNATIVE CRYSTALS: Aventurine, rose quartz, garnet, ruby, green moss agate, amazonite, chrysocolla, emerald, jade, peridot, unakite, morganite, rhodochrosite, larimar
How to Tell if Your Heart Chakra Is Out of Balance
An imbalance in the heart center is linked to an inability to share love, to selfishness, and to feelings of detachment. The heart chakra relates to connection, and when it is blocked, energy moves very slowly or doesn’t flow at all, leading to a feeling of disconnection with people, yourself, and life in general. Common symptoms include:
Healing Benefits
The heart chakra is the key energy center in the body, the connection between the lower three chakras and the higher three. It is where thoughts are turned into actions and where your feelings are processed. It is the seat of your soul or spirit, your inner self, the bit inside you that connects you to everything around you. If, as many religions suggest, God is within each of us, then the heart chakra is where He resides. This helps you to see the beauty in everyone and everything, leading to a state of harmony, kindness, gentleness, and peace.
You can work with crystals to balance and heal the heart chakra by placing the crystal directly on the energy center on your body (see page 40), carrying it with you all the time or, if suitable, taping it to your body with surgical tape. You can also try meditating with your chosen crystal and putting it by your bed or under your pillow at night. For more information on these and other healing techniques, refer to Chapter 5.
Malachite
Aventurine
Rose quartz
Garnet
Ruby
Green moss agate
Amazonite
Chrysocollae
Emerald
Jade
Peridot
Unakite
Morganite
Rhodochrosite
Larimar
Crystalline aggregates, druses, botryoidal structures, and clusters of radiating fibrous crystals. Single prismatic crystals are rare. More common are malachite pseudomorphs of azurite, which produce a more tabby crystal. Color is green, often with bands in various shades of green and black.
COMMON SOURCES: Democratic Republic of Congo, USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Capricorn, Scorpio
CHAKRA: Heart
Malachite
HEALING QUALITIES: Promoting emotional balance, bringing calm, and relieving all forms of depression, malachite helps remove unnecessary worry. It is excellent in the treatment of insomnia, and it facilitates dream interpretation and meditation.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for immune system, heart, lungs, pancreas, spleen, pituitary gland, eyesight, and teeth, as well as tissue regeneration, physical balance, endurance, and detoxing. Eases childbirth and helps asthma, epilepsy, tumors, arthritis and rheumatism, inflammation and swelling, bone fractures, and torn muscles. A traditional remedy for cholera.
Aventurine
Quartz variety with inclusions of mica, giving a speckled or sparkly effect. Commonly green; other colors include blue, white, reddish peach, and brown.
COMMON SOURCES: Brazil, India
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Aries
CHAKRA: Heart
HEALING QUALITIES: A very calming crystal that protects and soothes the emotions, promoting relaxation. It sponsors creativity, motivation, effective decision-making, and leadership qualities. It also balances yin and yang energies, helps access spirit guides, and protects from “energy vampires” (people who drain others of energy). It is particularly helpful for reducing examrelated stress.
Aventurine
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Benefits muscles, helping muscle injuries such as tears, sprains, and strains. Good for reaction speed, adrenal glands, lungs, and heart, and the urogenital organs. In combination with hawk’s eye (see page 99), it eases diarrhea.
Pink crystalline masses and, rarely, hexagonal crystals.
COMMON SOURCES: Brazil, India, Madagascar, South Africa
Rose quartz
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Taurus, Libra
CHAKRA: Heart
HEALING QUALITIES: Known as the “love stone,” it promotes love on all levels—in relationships, romance, female energy and qualities, and sexual liberation, reducing frustration. It is like a bubble bath for the emotions, easing feelings of anger, fear, guilt, grief, inadequacy, jealousy, and resentment and reducing associated stress, tension, and phobias. Its calming qualities help in any crisis. Generally good for the emotions, it soothes upsets, emotional wounds (the feeling of being wounded), and bad memories from childhood experiences, thereby encouraging forgiveness. It also promotes imagination and creativity, such as in art, music, and writing.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Balances sex drive, fertility, and menstrual cycle, easing PMS (premenstrual syndrome), excess bleeding, and cramps. Encourages a healthy complexion and youthful appearance and reduces wrinkles. Benefits the circulation, spleen, and adrenal glands and can help asthma, heart conditions, kidney disorders (promoting detoxing), general aches and pains, varicose veins, coughs, influenza, burns, sunburn, and vertigo. The rare rose quartz crystals enhance all these qualities.
Garnet
Dodecahedral and trapezohedral crystals and combinations, masses, and layered “plates.” Colors include red, pink eudialyte, pinkish red rhodolite, green grossularite, emerald green uvarovite, black melanite, orange spessartine, purply red almandine, yellow-green andradite, yellow and brown hessonite (see page 76).
COMMON SOURCES: India, Russia, USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Leo, Virgo, Capricorn, Aquarius
CHAKRA: Heart
Garnet
HEALING QUALITIES:
Promotes courage and emotional balance, allowing change to happen. Its creative energy draws abundance, increases awareness, and supports magic and spiritual devotion. Life flows better as chaos and disruption disappear. It helps relieve depression and emotional trauma and it benefits the aura.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for the circulation and vitality, and also detoxing. Helps anemia, low blood pressure, and conditions requiring repair and regeneration of tissues. Benefits the spine and spinal fluid, bones, heart, and lungs, and balances sex drive. Can help arthritis, rheumatism, and an underactive thyroid gland. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies such as iodine, calcium, magnesium, and vitamins A, D, and E can also be helped.
Red variety of corundum forming tabular crystals.
COMMON SOURCES: India, Madagascar, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Leo, Scorpio, Cancer, Sagittarius
CHAKRA: Heart
Ruby
HEALING QUALITIES: Promotes spiritual wisdom so you can see the path to health on all levels—wealth, knowledge, balance, and abundance. It enhances the will to live, the survival mechanism, and the fight-or-flight response, providing protection. The will to live gives us passion and a creative impulse to make decisions and changes that will banish distress and suffering from our lives, and so ruby is good for mental balance, new beginnings and rebirth. It enhances the dream state, facilitates dream interpretation, and helps prevent nightmares. Beneficial for meditation, it speeds attainment of the peak experience (bliss or connection). It aids contact and understanding with spirit guides and distant healing (see page 142). Carrying a ruby crystal or placing one in your home is said to give protection from lightning strikes.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for heart and circulation, detoxing, physical energy, immune system, longevity, and brain activity. Helps low blood pressure, anemia, and fever. Benefits the menstrual cycle, menstruation, and associated blood loss. Encourages the healthy development of the embryo in the womb. Record keeper ruby crystals aid access to the akashic records and facilitate astral travel and remote viewing. Star ruby crystals (showing asterism) bring enlightenment and help energy-cleansing and focus.
Green Moss Agate
Transparent or translucent green, white, and clear mosslike patterned masses.
COMMON SOURCE: India
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Virgo
CHAKRA: Heart
Green moss agate
HEALING QUALITIES: Releases trapped emotions, relieving symptoms of anxiety, stress, and tension. Supports acquisition of wealth. Helpful for plant healing and encourages growth of new crops.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Cleanses the immune system, especially after infection, and eases cold and influenza symptoms. Good for digestion and for eyes. Can help dehydration and fungal infections, and can be applied as a topical elixir to treat skin disorders.
Green, usually opaque variety of microcline (variety of feldspar), forming crystals and masses. Color varies from yellow-green to blue-green.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAMES: Amazon jade, Amazon stone
COMMON SOURCES: Brazil, Russia, USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Virgo
CHAKRA: Heart
Amazonite
HEALING QUALITIES: A “feel better stone” that calms and soothes nerves and a troubled mind. It reduces stress, boosts the aura and creativity, and can help in the treatment of mental disorders such as schizophrenia.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for the nervous system and heart.
Chrysocolla
Forms layers, masses, botryoidal structures, and druses.
COMMON SOURCES: Peru, USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Gemini, Virgo, Taurus
CHAKRA: Heart
Chrysocolla
HEALING QUALITIES: Helps heal the emotional heartache of a “broken heart” by releasing negative emotions such as guilt. A “feel better stone,” it promotes creativity and female sexuality, helping you let go of tension, phobias, and stressful situations. When you feel better about yourself, you feel no need for gossip. It promotes earth healing and helps revitalize relationships.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for digestion, joints (helping arthritis and rheumatism), metabolism, thyroid gland, and menstrual cycle. Reduces period pains and helps PMS (premenstrual syndrome). Improves oxidation of the blood, which can ease breathing and increase lung capacity, and helps lung conditions such as asthma, bronchitis, emphysema, and TB. It helps to prevent ulcers and aids the treatment of stress-related conditions. During pregnancy it promotes healthy development of the fetus. In the pancreas it supports insulin production and so helps control blood-sugar levels and diabetes. Benefits muscles and helps prevent muscle cramps, especially in the arms and legs. Helps restless leg syndrome and also high blood pressure. Drusy chrysocolla speeds the effects of any other crystal.
Green gem variety of beryl.
COMMON SOURCES: Colombia for gem quality, Brazil for commercial grade
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Taurus, Gemini, Aries
CHAKRA: Heart
Emerald
HEALING QUALITIES: Helps to heal the emotional heart, replacing jealousy, dishonesty, and bad temper with honesty and patience.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Helps asthma. Good for vitality, growth, bones and teeth, fertility, eyesight, and balance. Benefits heart, helping angina and high blood pressure. Boosts immune system, fighting bacterial and viral infections and helping inflammation, sores, and insect bites. Benefits kidneys, liver, and bile ducts, helping jaundice and biliousness, and, I almost forgot, aids memory.
Jade
Masses that are commonly green but can include orange, brown, blue, cream, white, lavender, red, gray, or black. Types of jade include jadeite and nephrite. (Note that “new jade” is actually bowenite.)
COMMON SOURCES: Canada, China, Myanmar (Burma), USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Aries, Gemini, Taurus, Libra
CHAKRA: Heart
Jade
HEALING QUALITIES: Brings emotional balance and grounding, boosting confidence and courage, and giving a sense of justice, modesty, and compassion. It removes negativity and is helpful in the treatment of mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When placed under your pillow, jade promotes nighttime dreaming and dream recall. It also encourages dreams, goals, and ideals in life, offers inner and outer peace, assists problem-solving, and gives protection, especially from accidents. It provides a connection to the wisdom of ancient civilizations and offers shamanic access to spirit worlds.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Helps asthma, bacterial and viral infections, high blood pressure, eye disorders, and general malaise. It can assist the heart, immune system (especially the lymphatic system), kidneys, gallbladder, spleen, and bladder, as well as the bones, joints, and muscles, and balance. It is good for the female reproductive system, including the menstrual cycle and fertility, and can help period pains and PMS (premenstrual syndrome). A jade elixir can benefit hair and skin and help skin conditions such as acne. It is said to promote longevity.
Small green prismatic crystals and masses.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAMES: Chrysolite, olivine
COMMON SOURCES: Afghanistan, Brazil, Canary Islands, Pakistan, Russia, Sri Lanka, USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Virgo, Leo, Scorpio, Sagittarius
CHAKRA: Heart
Peridot
HEALING QUALITIES: A “feel better stone” that offers protection from outside influences, reducing stress and removing the need for ego, anger, and jealousy. It releases emotional blockages, eliminating addictions, especially alcoholism, and negative repeated cycles and behavior patterns. It combats depression by taking away lethargy and laziness and is beneficial for mental health and healing. Helps you reach enlightenment through meditation.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: The cells surrounding all cancers become acidic, and because peridot balances acidity it is the primary crystal recommended for all cancer treatments—always in combination with other crystals beneficial to the affected areas. It is a general physical tonic for the body. Has been known to stimulate birthing contractions. It is good for the digestive system and so helps gastroenteritis, Crohn’s disease, IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), and ulcers. It can support weight gain and so helps eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. It benefits the gallbladder, liver, pancreas, spleen, heart, and lungs, is good for detoxing, and helps sunburn, astigmatism, and near-sightedness.
Unakite
Mixture of epidote, feldspar, and quartz.
COMMON SOURCE: South Africa
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Scorpio
CHAKRA: Heart
HEALING QUALITIES: Works on the heart center, relieving grief—especially for the loss of an idea, dream, or goal, whether or not associated with the loss of a loved one. It connects the base and heart chakras, “allowing you to move forward from your heart,” removing blocks you put in your own way, letting go of unsettling past experiences and trapped emotions, and allowing you to be in the present moment. It also helps to balance yin and yang energies and aids past-life recall and understanding the causes of dis-ease.
Unakite
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for weight gain. Associated with fertility and the healthy development of the fetus.
Pink variety of beryl.
COMMON SOURCES: Brazil, Pakistan
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Libra
CHAKRA: Heart
HEALING QUALITIES: Fills the space left in the heart by loss, such as a broken relationship or death. It promotes love and calms the mind, leading to clearer thoughts and allowing you to see things from a different perspective. This brings wisdom, which helps to remove prejudices such as racism and sexism. It promotes contact with spirit guides, aids meditation, and creates a sense of sacredness during rituals. Working with morganite can help improve time management.
Morganite
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for all physical healing. It is especially helpful for chest conditions such as asthma, emphysema, and TB, and it improves oxygenation of the blood.
Rhodochrosite
Masses, druses, botryoidal structures, and rare small rhombohedral crystals. The color ranges from pale pink through deep red, yellow, and orange to brown. The massive material commonly has pink and white banding when polished.
COMMON SOURCE: Argentina
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Scorpio, Leo
CHAKRA: Heart
Rhodochrositee
HEALING QUALITIES: Eases “21st-century stress” and emotional trauma, making life flow better, giving courage, and improving memory, thus relieving or preventing a nervous breakdown. Balances yin and yang energies, increasing passion and promoting sex. Supports creative pursuits such as art and music.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for the circulation, heart, kidneys, and spleen, and also combats signs of aging. Helps ME (myalgic encephalitis) and also promotes the healthy development of infants.
Jan, a 28-year-old woman, was brought to see me by her mother. She suffered from asthma, but her mother was more concerned that she had no friends, didn’t really do anything, and seemed depressed. She was also prone to catching whatever bug was going around at the time.
I began a standard crystal chakra healing treatment, but as I worked over the heart chakra Jan let out several sighs—an indication that a blockage in the energy flow is being released. When the treatment was concluded, I gave her a large rose quartz crystal to keep with her.
The following week I worked only on the heart center for the whole treatment. I also placed chakra crystals on the other energy centers, but only to hold them in whatever state of balance they were already in. After placing malachite on the heart surrounded by a quartz star interspersed with four more malachite stones, I held my pendulum over Jan’s heart and watched. Slowly it began to shake, vibrating in my hand. Then it started to move in a counter-clockwise circle, which suggested that it was drawing energy out. After a while I sensed that something was happening in the aura. With the side of my quartz master crystal, I gently combed the aura over the heart chakra, at which point a single tiny tear trickled down her cheek. After the treatment, I gave her malachite and asked her to place it under her pillow that night.
When Jan arrived the next day, she immediately started talking, explaining that ever since her father died six years previously, she had felt she couldn’t grieve, because she didn’t want to upset her mother. Jan had become more insular by the day, and developed asthma. She couldn’t accept the love she was being offered because she had blocked her grief for her father. In fact, this was the first time she had even told anyone her father had died.
I gave Jan a crystal chakra set and explained how to place the crystals on her chakras, telling her to do a self-healing treatment each night before she went to sleep. Over the next few months her life went back to normal. She contacted her old friends and met new ones, felt generally better, went back to work, and stopped having to use her inhaler several times each day.
Larimar
Massive variety of pectolite often found in radial groupings. Colors include blue, green, gray, and red, all possibly with white.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAME: Pectolite
COMMON SOURCE: Dominican Republic
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Leo
CHAKRA: Heart
Larimar
HEALING QUALITIES: Emanating a soft, gentle healing energy, its soothing vibration helps you to see who you really are. It removes guilt, aggression, and an addiction to materialism, and it facilitates earth healing.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for cartilage, hair, and feet.
The fifth chakra, located in the middle of the neck above the collarbone, is the center of communication and creative expression. It relates not only to verbal communication, but also to physical communication (body language) and mental contact (telepathy). It’s the energy hot spot that tells the world how we are feeling and allows us to “talk our talk,” express our beliefs, and share the teaching we each have to give.
LOCATION: Center of the throat
CRYSTAL: Blue lace agate
COLOR: Blue
FRAGRANCE ASSOCIATION: Lavender
KEYWORDS: Communication, expression, responsibility, freedom, choice, willpower, following dreams, creation, addiction, justice, faith, knowledge, ability to make decisions, leadership
EMOTIONAL/MENTAL HEALING: When the throat chakra is out of balance we can lose focus easily. This is commonly identified in children as attention deficit disorders, often linked with hyperactivity, but is found in many adults, too. It is the lack of concentration, the need always to be doing something, and the inability to relax. Emotional trauma can have a severe effect on the health of the throat chakra, leading to a blockage and, in extreme cases, inability to express any emotion at all. The brain’s reasoning processes can be obstructed. This leads to inhibitions in almost any area of life, causing feelings of unease, nervousness, anxiety, and panic attacks. It can even make you believe you are under “psychic attack” from others. All this may lead to a variety of speech impediments.
PHYSICAL HEALING: Working on the throat chakra can benefit the nose, sinuses, throat, tonsils, esophagus, eustachian tubes and related aural problems, hearing, jaws, teeth and gums, mouth, tongue, neck, nervous system, physical trauma such as whiplash, spine, and thyroid gland. It can also help skin rashes, especially in children or when linked to frustration or emotions, and stammering. Common symptoms of throat chakra dysfunction include sore throat, loss of voice, laryngitis, inflammatory disorders of the pharynx, tonsillitis, overactive or underactive thyroid gland, mouth ulcers, teeth and gum conditions, headaches, and ear infections.
The throat chakra represents all forms of communication.
SPIRITUAL HEALING: The throat chakra is strongly linked to communication, but this is not just in the physical world. Communicating with spirits, the universal source, God, or whatever you want to call what you feel is out there, is a fundamental aspect of a healthy throat chakra. Ideals, a sense of justice, sacred knowledge, and wisdom all come from this contact, whether conscious or not. Sometimes an idea just seems to pop into your head, but only if your throat chakra is healthy does it express itself.
LIFESTYLE: A balanced throat chakra full of healthy, flowing energy can help to advance your career, improve communication on all levels, strengthen leadership skills, and develop a strong and sustained marriage or partnership. It can particularly help actors, singers, teachers, and anyone who depends on effective communication and the ability to pass on experience through teaching others. Both our communication with the outside world and how it is reflected back to us are important. This cycle affects how others communicate with us and how we communicate with the outside world.
ALTERNATIVE CRYSTALS: Apatite, turquoise, kyanite, angelite, hemimorphite, aquamarine, hawk’s eye, blue chalcedony, aqua aura, cobaltoan calcite, blue quartz, azurite, blue opal, blue fluorite
Healing Benefits
Communication is one of the keys to life, affecting everything we do. Our communication with the world around us is reflected back to us, determining how others communicate with us. Speech is one of the things that make us uniquely human, allowing us greater expression than all other animals. It comes with a responsibility to be truthful to ourselves and others, and brings freedom of being, mind, intellect, and emotions. The throat chakra is associated with communication. If it is out of balance and energy flows very slowly or not at all, communication becomes less meaningful and insubstantial. This can lead, in time, to the development of stressrelated conditions, from skin rashes to heart attacks, and from a bad back to digestive problems like IBS or Crohn’s disease. The lack of communication may have been the result of force of habit through upbringing, or may stem from a single traumatic incident, either known or locked deep in the subconscious. Either way, balancing and healing the throat chakra can help to alleviate both communication issues and many stress-related conditions. It can lead to a happier life, full of selfexpression and freedom, which will allow you to cope better with all types of responsibility.
How to Tell if Your Throat Chakra Is Out of Balance
If the throat chakra is blocked, then energy moves very slowly or doesn’t flow at all, leading to inadequate self-expression. Poor communication can eventually lead to the development of many stress-related conditions, including the following:
Crystals for the Throat Chakra
You can work with crystals to balance and heal the throat chakra by placing the crystal directly on the energy center on your body (see page 40), carrying it with you all the time or, if suitable, taping it to your body with surgical tape. You can also try meditating with your chosen crystal and putting it by your bed or under your pillow at night. For more information on these and other healing techniques, refer to Chapter 5.
Blue lace agate
Apatite
Turquoise
Kyanite
Angelite
Hemimorphite
Aquamarine
Hawk’s eye
Blue chalcedony
Aqua aura
Cobaltoan calcite
Blue quart
Azurite
Blue opal
Blue fluorite
Pale blue and white banded variety of agate.
COMMON SOURCE: South Africa
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Pisces
CHAKRA: Throat
HEALING QUALITIES: Very gentle and calming, providing balance and emotional stability. It raises your spiritual level and improves communication on all levels, but especially of spiritual ideas. It can increase the power of attunement to spiritual energies such as Reiki.
Blue lace agate
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for eyesight, speech, nails, and the pancreas. Helps stammering, arthritis, fluid retention, trapped nerves, skin growths, and bone fractures. Made into an elixir, it soothes tired eyes.
Apatite
Yellow, green, blue, gray, white, purple, brown, or red-brown prismatic crystals and masses.
COMMON SOURCES: Canada, Pakistan
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Gemini
CHAKRA: Throat
Apatite
HEALING QUALITIES: Boosts creativity and its expression and calms the throat chakra, leading to clear communication—it is good for communicators of any kind, including healers, teachers, trainers, journalists and writers, publishers, presenters, and performers such as actors and singers. It promotes the intellect and clears mental confusion, allowing you to see the truth. It stops aloofness and negativity. Good for endings, marking a “full stop” after an undesirable chain of events. It balances all the chakras and promotes all psychic abilities, past-life recall, and meditation, leading to a better understanding of your inner self. It balances yin and yang energies.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Drunk as an elixir, it focuses healing energy on the appropriate body area and is excellent for tissue regeneration and repair. It aids weight loss, acting as an appetite suppressant, and also helps arthritis.
Blue, green, or turquoise masses, crusts, and, rarely, small, short, prismatic crystals.
COMMON SOURCES: China, Myanmar (Burma), Tibet, USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Sagittarius, Pisces, Scorpio
CHAKRA: Throat
Turquoise
HEALING QUALITIES: Aids communication, especially in public speaking and creative expression. Gives protection to travelers (a journey can be anything from a trip around the world to a walk to the grocery store) and is good for travel and air sickness. It brings spirituality, courage, and emotional balance, enhancing friendships, love, and romance. In meditation it grounds peak experiences, enhancing spirit contact, all psychic abilities, and wisdom, and brings mental and spiritual clarity to see your own path and “walk your walk.” It helps you to see the beauty in everything, bringing peace of mind and compassion while removing negativity and suspicion. It protects property, helps prevent accidents, balances yin and yang energy, and encourages writing and astral travel.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Multipurpose healer that is good for the circulation, lungs, throat, muscles, tissue regeneration, weight gain, detoxing, and postoperative recovery. It aids absorption of nutrients and helps general malaise, headaches, backache, whiplash injury, arthritis, rheumatism, asthma, bronchitis, influenza, allergies, conditions caused by pollutants, cataracts, wounds, and discomfort from gas. As an elixir, it benefits stress-related skin disorders.
Kyanite
Blade-type crystals, fibers, and masses. Colors include blue, black, gray, white, green, yellow, and pink.
COMMON SOURCE: Brazil
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Taurus, Libra, Aries
CHAKRA: Throat
HEALING QUALITIES: An excellent aid to communication, it helps you “talk your talk.” It can align all the chakras, releasing energy blocks to bring tranquility, calm, perseverance, and reason, and create the perfect internal space for getting started with meditation. It aids connection to spirit guides and promotes dream recall and understanding, attunements, and sacred ceremony. It increases both mental stamina and psychic awareness and it helps to balance yin and yang energy.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for the throat and improves vocal quality, so is especially useful for your singing voice. Benefits muscles, urological system, all glands, and brain.
Kyanite
Blue/white nodules and masses.
COMMON SOURCE: Peru
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Aquarius
CHAKRA: Throat
HEALING QUALITIES: Creates a feeling of security, giving comfort in grief. It balances emotional wobbles, reducing anger. It increases awareness and communication on all levels, including spirit, channeling, and telepathy, helping you to connect to your angels, guardians, and totem animals; it makes astral travel and rebirthing easier. Encourages psychic and spiritual healing and provides protection on these levels when it is drunk as an elixir. It is also good for people who work with numbers, such as accountants.
Angelite
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for blood vessels and hemoglobin production, and it is useful in fighting infectious diseases. Benefits throat, thymus, and all five physical senses. Applied as a topical elixir, it makes an effective insect repellent.
Hemimorphite
Various masses, including “fans” and botryoidal formations, and tabular crystals—blue, green, gray, white, and colorless
COMMON SOURCE: China
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Libra
CHAKRA: Throat
HEALING QUALITIES: A “feel better stone” boosting self-confidence and creativity, making you feel lucky, and helping to maintain health. It banishes ego, selfishness, and anger.
Hemimorphite
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for the blood. Helps ulcers, poisoning, pain, vomiting, and venereal diseases. Benefits dieting and weight loss.
Aquamarine
Blue-green variety of beryl.
COMMON SOURCES: Afghanistan, Brazil, Namibia, Pakistan, USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Gemini, Pisces, Aries
CHAKRA: Throat
HEALING QUALITIES: Relieves stress by giving courage, bringing calm, and aiding peaceful, clear communication. Stimulates the brain, boosting intellect and learning. It gently washes away blocks in chakras to enhance energy flow. A centering crystal, it is excellent for meditation as it aids spiritual awareness and development, exploring the truth about your inner self and your higher self. As well as encouraging you to take responsibility for your own actions, it promotes compassion and tolerance and dispels judgmental attitudes. It also protects travelers.
Aquamarine
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Promotes healthy teeth. Good for lymph, blood, and other body fluids, mucous membranes, eyes and eyesight, and kidneys. Helps water retention, swollen glands, and swelling. It is cooling in hot climates. Visualization with aquamarine can help conditions caused by pollutants.
Blue variety of tiger’s eye.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAME: Blue tiger’s eye
Hawk’s eye
COMMON SOURCE: South Africa
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Capricorn
CHAKRAS: Throat, brow
HEALING QUALITIES: Brings focus, combating disarray and boosting psychic abilities.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for the throat, pharynx, and larynx. Benefits peristalsis in digestion and, when combined with aventurine, helps diarrhea.
Blue Chalcedony
Light blue variety of chalcedony.
COMMON SOURCE: South Africa
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Cancer, Sagittarius
Blue chalcedony
CHAKRA: Throat
HEALING QUALITIES: Excellent for dealing with childhood issues as it eases communication and promotes emotional expression. It helps in the treatment of alcoholism and is good for letting go of “stuff,” losing the need to surround yourself with material things.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for weight loss.
Aqua Aura
Quartz crystal bonded with gold, giving beautiful, mostly clear blue crystals and clusters.
COMMON SOURCE: USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Leo
CHAKRAS: Throat, brow
HEALING QUALITIES: Boosts the aura, giving protection, and enhancing all psychic abilities. A “feel better stone,” it dispels negativity and depression and eases sadness, loss, and grief. It is very good for treating shock and emotional trauma.
Aqua aura
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Benefits throat and helps physical trauma, such as whiplash, headaches, and tension in the neck and shoulders.
Drusy crusts, spherical masses, and, rarely, crystals often found with, or near, malachite.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAME: Cobaltocalcite
COMMON SOURCES: Democratic Republic of Congo, Morocco
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Cancer
CHAKRAS: Throat, heart, brow, crown
HEALING QUALITIES: Encourages you to see the beauty in everyone, every thing, and in every situation you encounter. Helps you learn each lesson on your path to finding your inner truth and life purpose. It draws out inner hurts and emotional pain, allowing the expression of emotions and attracting your desires.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Helps all stressrelated conditions.
Cobaltoan calcite
Blue Quartz
Clear or white quartz with blue tourmaline (indicolite) inclusions. Note that there are several other minerals called “blue quartz,” which are not included here.
Blue quartz
COMMON SOURCE: Minas Gerais, Brazil (only current source)
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Libra, Taurus
CHAKRA: Throat
HEALING QUALITIES: Enhances the connection to those around you, the universe, spirit, and God, giving a sense of bliss. Aids communication on all planes and helps you to express what’s in your mind. It brings “stuff” such as issues, thoughts, judgmental attitudes, and “isms” to the surface, allowing them to clear while keeping you grounded, easing the energy shift often associated with healing. Brings a sense of well-being, emotional balance, and happiness. While promoting awareness, self-reliance, and spontaneity, it dispels anger, introversion, apprehension, and anxiety. Good for telepathy, it gives deeper insight into all forms of divination, such as tarot card readings.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for the spleen, endocrine system, blood, and metabolism, boosting vitality.
Masses, nodules, and, rarely, tabular and prismatic crystals of azure or paler blues.
Azurite
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAME: Blue malachite
COMMON SOURCES: China, Morocco, USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Sagittarius
CHAKRA: Throat
HEALING QUALITIES: Known as the “Stone of Heaven,” it enhances creativity and psychic abilities, promotes compassion and empathy, and helps you to express feelings, thoughts, and psychic information.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for blood and the nervous system, and helps arthritis.
Blue Opal
Blue masses sometimes showing iridescence.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAME: Andean opal
Blue opal
COMMON SOURCES: Canada, Peru
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Cancer, Taurus
CHAKRA: Throat
HEALING QUALITIES: Promotes communication, the courage to speak your mind, and connection with other people, as well as boosting creativity and problem-solving skills. It is known as the “stone of thieves” as it bestows invisibility.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Aids metabolism and iron balance, relieving anemia and fatigue. Helps prevent hair loss.
Blue Fluorite
A blue variety of fluorite forming cubic or octahedral crystals.
Blue fluorite
COMMON SOURCE: China
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Capricorn, Pisces
CHAKRA: Throat
HEALING QUALITIES: Is calming for the emotions and improves communication with spirit.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for tear ducts, mucous membranes, nose, inner ear, balance, throat, and speech.
The sixth chakra is the brow chakra, also known as the third eye, which is located in the middle of the forehead above the eyebrows. It is the center of intuition, intellect, personal magnetism, and light. This is where creativity and inspiration combine, and psychic abilities and gifts are also focused here. When it is healthy and balanced, the sixth chakra helps to remove negative and selfish attitudes and facilitates intuition and wisdom.
LOCATION: Center of forehead, above eyebrows
CRYSTAL: Lapis lazuli
COLOR: Indigo
FRAGRANCE ASSOCIATION: Sandalwood
KEYWORDS: Mind, ideas, thoughts, dreams, psychic abilities, honesty, truth, intellectual abilities, feelings of adequacy, openness to new ideas and ideals, teaching
EMOTIONAL/MENTAL HEALING: When the brow chakra is dysfunctional, the mind can become unbalanced, negative ideas set in, and thoughts tumble aimlessly through our mind. This clogs up the creative paths, forming a fog in our mind that is difficult to see through. Our awareness drops and we lose touch with our senses. Intellectual and psychic abilities suffer, and we can feel blocked to new ideas and stuck in an emotional and mental rut. In extreme cases, mental illness can set in.
PHYSICAL HEALING: An imbalance in the brow chakra can result in headaches and migraines, learning difficulties and seizures, autism and Asperger’s syndrome, neurological disorders, mental illness such as neuroses and personality disorders, also spinal conditions, sciatica and problems with nerve endings and synapses, sinusitis and all mucous problems, disorders of the eyes and ears, and problems with scalp and hair.
SPIRITUAL HEALING: The brow chakra is linked to our psychic and spiritual skills. We can all access these, as they are natural abilities everyone has. They work to enhance our physical senses, and denying them stunts our ability to experience in full the world around us. The brow chakra acts as a receiver for a whole host of information flowing into our energy system every second of the day. Most of the time this stream of data is processed subconsciously, rather like a program running in the background of a computer. As in a computer, in which we can bring a window to the front or open a new window, the brow chakra can be brought forward to bring extrasensory information into our conscious mind. This promotes clarity, inspiration, and innovation.
The brow chakra is linked to intuition, wisdom, and psychic abilities.
LIFESTYLE: A balanced brow chakra allows us to absorb and process information on many levels. It promotes the ability to learn from experience and pass this teaching on to others. This is the center of our nighttime dreams and also the dreams, goals, and ideals we have in life. It opens the door to possibilities.
ALTERNATIVE CRYSTALS: Sodalite, sapphire, moldavite, prehnite, cavansite, celestite, dumortierite, pietersite, tanzanite, fire agate, apophyllite, rutile
How to Tell If Your Brow Chakra Is Out of Balance
If the brow chakra is blocked, energy moves very slowly or doesn’t flow at all, leading to imbalance in the mind and a fog of confusion. Also, events stemming from the loss of a dream or goal can often lead to detachment, causing an imbalance in this energy hot spot. An imbalance of the brow chakra can lead to symptoms such as the following:
The brow chakra is the thought center that clarifies and processes your everyday experiences—where your mind connects to the outside world and to your inner energy system.
This chakra maintains your mental health. By integrating your experiences, it keeps you sane when everything around you seems chaotic.
The brow chakra is the vital center of creative thought. It is where our inspiration, ideas, dreams, and goals begin; where eureka moments happen when the mind is still and quiet.
Mental stillness can be promoted by meditation; many traditional schools of meditation focus on the brow chakra to bring peace and tranquility to a troubled mind. By stilling the mind through crystal meditation (see page 33) you can release worry and ease stress, freeing tension within the body. This promotes a quiet confidence, lifting depression and feelings of negativity and encouraging both mental and physical action.
Through the brow, or third eye, your psychic gifts act, enhancing your appreciation of the world around you. It connects your link to spirit, (drawn down through your crown chakra via the brow to the throat) allowing you to express yourself truthfully. This simple ability releases stress and pent-up emotion, bringing order and clarity to your thoughts.
You can work with crystals to balance and heal the brow chakra by placing the crystal directly on the energy center on your body (see page 40), by carrying it with you all the time or, if suitable, taping it to your body with surgical tape. You can also try meditating with your chosen crystal and putting it by your bed or under your pillow at night. For more information on these and other healing techniques, refer to Chapter 5.
Lapis lazuli
Sodalite
Sapphire
Moldavite
Prehnite
Cavansite
Celestite
Dumortierite
Pietersite
Tanzanite
Fire agate
Apophyllite
Rutile
Massive rock, cubic, and dodecahedral crystals—specimens almost always include lazurite, calcite, and pyrite.
COMMON SOURCES: Afghanistan, Chile
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Sagittarius
CHAKRA: Brow
HEALING QUALITIES: A “feel better stone” boosting all psychic abilities, natural gifts and skills, and bringing relaxation within its protective cocoon, lapis lazuli aids creative expression and wisdom. It enhances and brings clarity to dreams, boosts mental endurance, and helps to relieve insomnia. It dispels disorganization, lifting the depression that this can cause. It also promotes balance between yin and yang energies, which improves relationships.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Boosts immune system and vitality. Benefits bones and bone marrow, throat, thymus, thyroid gland, and eustachian tubes. Helps dizziness, vertigo, hearing loss, and backache; good for detoxing. Lapis lazuli crystals help prevent illness and aid the repair of muscles and bone fractures.
Rutile
Sodalite
Blue or blue and white masses, nodules and, rarely, dodecahedral and hexagonal prismatic crystals. May also be gray, green, yellow, white, red, or colorless.
COMMON SOURCE: Brazil
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Sagittarius
CHAKRA: Brow
HEALING QUALITIES: A calming crystal that also boosts self-esteem, perception, creative expression, and endurance while easing mental unrest, oversensitivity, fear, confusion, and feelings of inadequacy. It is good for insomnia, mental health, and healing, and helps autism. It helps you to communicate feelings and ideas and is constructive in group situations.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for balance, the lymphatic system, and the metabolism. Helps to combat signs of aging and calcium deficiency. Also helps diabetes and high blood pressure and is good for the healthy development of infants.
Sodalite
Gem variety of corundum found in any color except red (which is ruby). Colors include yellow (oriental topaz), green (oriental emerald), violet (oriental amethyst), black, purple, pink, and white.
COMMON SOURCES: India, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Thailand
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Virgo, Libra, Sagittarius
CHAKRA: Brow
Sapphire
HEALING QUALITIES: Promotes the fulfillment of ambitions, dreams, and goals. Helps emotional balance, control of desires, joy, fun, intuition, wisdom, spiritual connection, and contact with spirit guides. It helps you see the beauty in everything, relieving depression, narrow-mindedness, and unhappiness.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for heart, hormones, stomach, and all glands. Helps glandular fever, backache, nausea, infection, boils. Helps reduce bleeding and signs of aging. Has astringent properties. Record-keeper sapphire crystals help access the akashic records and enhance astral travel. Star sapphire (showing asterism) enhances all the healing qualities above.
Moldavite
This is green tektite, that was originally created from a meteorite hitting the earth’s surface, melting, and fusing with the earth. This is the resulting reformed natural glass material: part earth, part space.
Moldavite
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAME: Valtava
COMMON SOURCE: Czech Republic (only source)
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Scorpio
CHAKRAS: Brow, heart
HEALING QUALITIES: Promotes mental balance and opens the mind to new possibilities and experiences. Good for altered mind states, such as meditation, dreams, and hypnosis. Enhances clairsentience.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: General tonic for the body. Aids balance.
Prehnite
Massive botryoidal and globular structures, layered “plates,” tabular, and prismatic crystals. Green, yellow, white, and brown colors.
Prehnite
COMMON SOURCE: Australia
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Libra
CHAKRAS: Brow, heart
HEALING QUALITIES: Helps you find your own true spiritual path through life. Aids prophecy, divination, visualization, meditation, dreams, and dream recall. Allows you to let go of emotions and thoughts you no longer need, bringing a state of calmness that permits inspiration. Lets you find that things flow around you, removing any sense of frustration.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for kidneys, bladder, and connective tissue. Helps anemia and gout.
Orthorhombic crystals, sometimes in “flower” formation.
COMMON SOURCE: India
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Aquarius
CHAKRA: Brow
Cavansite
HEALING QUALITIES: Enhances psychic abilities and protects healers from picking up empathetic pains from clients and taking home their “stuff” at the end of the day. It is a “feel good stone” that promotes new ideas.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for eyes, teeth, and blood. Helps osteoporosis.
Celestite
Tabular orthorhombic crystals, nodules, and masses, principally in pale blue shades, but also in white, yellow, orange, red, and redbrown.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAME: Celestine
COMMON SOURCE: Madagascar
Celestite
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Gemini
CHAKRA: Brow
HEALING QUALITIES: A crystal linked very strongly to angels, promoting love with respect, creative expression, relaxation, music, art, and meditation. Helps dreams, dream recall, and astral travel, and banishes nightmares. Because it relieves stress and worry, allowing for clear thinking, it is good for mental activities involving complex ideas. It enhances natural abilities and balances yin and yang energies.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Helps in the treatment of eye conditions, hearing problems, and speech impediments; relieves discomfort and pain. Good for detoxing.
Dumortierite
Blue and pinkish brown masses.
COMMON SOURCE: Madagascar
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Leo
CHAKRA: Brow
HEALING QUALITIES: Produces quiet confidence and patience that diminish excitability and stubbornness. Helps you to speak your mind and understand the cause of dis-ease.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Boosts stamina and is good for healing damaged ligaments and tendons.
Dumortierite
Variety of tiger’s eye, from gold to brown and shades of blue-gray, often in same specimen.
COMMON SOURCES: Namibia, South Africa
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Leo
CHAKRA: Brow
HEALING QUALITIES: Helps you to see the beauty in everything and aids visualizing during guided meditations and creative visualization. It is grounding, banishes fear, and aids access to the akashic records.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Combats the tiring effects of computer screens. Good for digestion, pineal gland, pituitary gland, endocrine glands, growth, sex drive, metabolism, blood pressure, and temperature balance (for example, in cases of fever or hypothermia).
Pietersite
Tanzanite
Variety of zoisite forming masses and prismatic striated crystals. Colors include blue, yellow, shades of blue-gray, and purple.
COMMON SOURCE: Tanzania
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Sagittarius, Gemini, Libra
CHAKRAS: Brow, throat, crown
Tanzanite
HEALING QUALITIES: Good for communication, it enhances all psychic abilities, contacting spirit guides, meditation, visualization, and magic.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for skin and eyes. Helps exhaustion.
Fire Agate
Agate occurring as pebbles in brownish colors with flashes of “fire” owing to thin layers of limonite.
COMMON SOURCE: Mexico
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Aries
CHAKRA: Brow
HEALING QUALITIES: Aids connection to spirit and gives a sense of spirituality. Enhances clairvoyance and acts as a psychic shield, giving protection and emotional control to conquer fear. It’s an inspiring crystal that pushes you into action—doing and completing things.
Fire agate
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for everything to do with eyes such as sight, night vision, and treating eye disorders.
Cubic and pyramidal crystals, druses, and masses. Commonly white or colorless, with a rarer green variety.
COMMON SOURCE: India
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Libra, Gemini
CHAKRAS: Brow, crown
HEALING QUALITIES: Boosts brain power and mental activity. Promotes connection to spirit-enhancing psychic abilities such as scrying and clairvoyance, helping you see the truth, and also aids astral travel. A reflective crystal that helps to continue the meditative state after the meditation is finished.
Apophyllite
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for eyesight, and the natural crystal pyramids can aid body rejuvenation.
Rutile
Needlelike crystals, often penetrating quartz, rutilated quartz (see page 121), and prismatic crystals. Colors include bronze, silver, shades from red to brown, black, yellow, gold, and violet.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAME: Angel hair
COMMON SOURCE: Brazil
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Gemini, Taurus
CHAKRA: Brow
Rutile
HEALING QUALITIES: Boosts the aura, creating a protective shield, and enhances astral travel and remote viewing. Helps you see the cause of dis-ease often seated within the aura. Brings mental balance and an acceptance of one’s sexuality.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Helps bronchitis, tired eyes, milk production in nursing mothers, veins, and wounds when it is applied as a topical elixir.
John was a professional driver who suffered from severe migraines, resulting in blurred vision and temporary hearing loss, which could threaten his career. He wasn’t very communicative—other than to say that he didn’t think that crystal healing treatments would work, and to ask whether he had to believe in them. I’m often asked this question, to which the answer is no, you don’t have to “believe”—just as you don’t have to believe that bread will toast when you put it in the toaster and switch it on.
The first thing was to deal with the migraine symptoms, as this is so easy to do. Holding a dark amethyst crystal to the site of pain and doing all the things he would normally do during a migraine attack, such as lying down quietly in a darkened room, John soon discovered that the intense pain went away in about the same time that it took a well-known pharmaceutical migraine relief product to work. I explained that the more often he did this with the same dark amethyst crystal, the quicker it would work, and if he carried it with him all the time, then the frequency of attacks would reduce. He found this also to be true for him.
The first treatment focused on the brow chakra, with lapis lazuli placed on the brow surrounded by four small crystals; apophyllite, cavansite, celestite, and fire agate. Amethyst was placed on the crown and blue lace agate on the throat chakra, and I energized each crystal with my quartz master crystal. I gave him a lapis lazuli crystal as well as the amethyst to work with during the week. The second treatment was similar but I placed fire agate on his eyelids instead of the four crystals around the brow chakra. The third treatment included the full crystal chakra set with quartz star on the brow. He reported feeling nothing in particular either during or after any of these treatments.
Before he arrived for the next treatment, I was considering recommending that John should try a different therapy that might be better for him. However, recalling his skeptical approach, I thought we should keep going as I was certain that in his case changes were happening slowly. I repeated the previous treatment but changed the brow crystal to sapphire, hoping that it would open his mind to possibilities. He again said that he didn’t feel anything, and he decided not to book another treatment.
About a month later he telephoned and booked a treatment. When he arrived, it was as if he was a different person. He had a new bounce in his step and a smile on his face. He told me that he had been an artist, designing posters and artwork for many theatrical shows, but had been severely criticized for a flop because “everyone” felt his publicity designs were awful on this particular show. He couldn’t get any more work in the industry so had become a taxi driver. That’s when his migraines had started.
Since he had come for the first treatment, both the severity and frequency of the attacks had greatly reduced. In the last four weeks he had started painting again and had designed magazine ads for a friend. Although he was still driving taxis, he remembered he was only doing this to make ends meet and had found a new and original surge of creativity. His eyesight and hearing were normal again.
John loved the idea of working with crystals himself and went on to train with me as a crystal healer and then a teacher. He still doesn’t “believe” crystals work—but he has no need to because he “knows” they do.
Located at the top of the head, the seventh chakra, or crown chakra, is the center of spirituality, enlightenment, and dynamic thought. It facilitates the flow of wisdom to you from the universe and connects you to the cosmic consciousness of all that is. All that can be known is already out there—we just need to tap into it. When it’s healthy and balanced, this source of knowing helps you to distinguish between truth and illusion, and between ideals and self-defeating materialistic pursuits. It helps you see how to balance spirituality in the physical world. Self-limiting concepts, pride, and vanity are eliminated. It allows you to detach yourself from your emotions and experience genuine self-awareness.
LOCATION: Top of the head
CRYSTAL: Amethyst
COLOR: Violet
FRAGRANCE ASSOCIATION: Frankincense
KEYWORDS: Spirituality, connection to the universe and God, awareness, trust in life, seeing the bigger picture, values, ethics, courage, selflessness, inspiration, devotion, optimism, enthusiasm, originality, invention, perfection, fulfillment, completion, connection to angels and your unique potential
EMOTIONAL/MENTAL HEALING: When the crown chakra is out of balance, we feel unconnected. It can seem as if we are lost, wandering through life without purpose or direction. It feels as if our body, mind, and spirit are discombobulated. This is emotionally and mentally disturbing and can lead to lethargy and extreme physical dysfunction such as ME (myalgic encephalitis). We lose sight of the bigger picture and find ourselves focusing on insignificant detail. We get bogged down, stuck. Any optimism or enthusiasm evaporates as this energy sinks down through the other six chakras, producing almost any symptoms in the body. Where there appears to be no cause for a physical disorder, no specific emotional upset, and no sign of previous injury, the dysfunction of the crown chakra is almost certainly the cause.
The crown chakra connects you to the universe and cosmic consciousness.
PHYSICAL HEALING: Working with crystals on the crown chakra can help to relieve energy disorders, depression, and extreme sensitivity to your environment. It will aid whole-body healing, help maintain health, benefiting the brain, spine, and nervous system in particular, and will provide pain relief. It helps to relieve neurological and autoimmune disorders, skin conditions, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis.
SPIRITUAL HEALING: The crown chakra is your connection to all the energy in the universe. The universe in this sense is God, Goddess, or a combination of several deities, Universal Energy, the Tao, Krishna, Buddha, Christ, the Source, or whatever you choose to call it. The name doesn’t matter, but the connection does. It is the source of everything in life, our inspiration to go further, our guide providing the route map of our life plan, and our light that shows us the way.
LIFESTYLE: A balanced crown chakra full of healthy flowing energy can help bring out your uniqueness, your originality. It’s what makes you special and can help you advance in just about every sphere of life, from career to relationships, from leisure and sport to spiritual pursuits.
ALTERNATIVE CRYSTALS: Charoite, spirit quartz, sugilite, labradorite, white calcite, danburite, Herkimer diamond, howlite, magnesite, petalite, rutilated quartz, selenite
How to Tell If Your Crown Chakra Is Out of Balance
Imbalance in the crown chakra is often the result of extreme trauma on any level. Traumatic experiences tend to have opposite effects with different people. Some experience a sudden and great connection, whereas others lose any connection they ever had. If the crown chakra is blocked, energy moves very slowly or doesn’t move at all, leading to feelings of disconnection, pessimism, and lethargy. Common symptoms include the following:
Healing Benefits
With the crown chakra in balance, you feel you understand your life and environment. It gives you an optimistic outlook, promoting action via the flow of energy through the other six chakras.
Each balanced energy hot spot supports and nourishes the next with this flow of healthy energy. The energy flows both ways, from the base chakra up to the crown chakra and down again. Once all your energy centers are balanced, it is easier to maintain the energy equilibrium throughout your body in times of stress. You have less “down time” and more “up time,” leading to a healthy and fulfilled life. Your ego diminishes, allowing you to find an understanding that you are unique and at the same time part of everything else, giving you a humanitarian vision of society.
In an ideal world, all your chakras would be balanced all the time, bringing physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. But life happens, and so your chakras go in and out of balance. Regularly working with crystal chakra healing can bring and maintain this healthy balanced state.
You can work with crystals to balance and heal the crown chakra by placing the crystal directly on the energy center on your body (see page 40), by carrying it with you all the time or, if suitable, taping it to your body with surgical tape. You can also try meditating with your chosen crystal and putting it by your bed or under your pillow at night. For more information on these and other healing techniques, refer to Chapter 5.
Amethyst
Charoite
Spirit quartz
Sugilite
Labradorite
White calcite
Danburite
Herkimer diamond
Howlite
Magnesite
Petalite
Rutilated quartz
Selenite
Variety of quartz found as crystals or masses. Its classic purple color is the result of manganese and iron inclusions. Some rare varieties are almost black. Other varieties are chevron amethyst, with purple and white bands, and prasiolite, a green amethyst colored by mineral inclusions.
COMMON SOURCES: Worldwide, especially Brazil, India, Madagascar, South Africa, Uruguay
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Pisces, Virgo, Aquarius, Capricorn
CHAKRA: Crown
Amethyst
HEALING QUALITIES: Calming and purifying, it improves temperament and alleviates addictions such as alcoholism and drunkenness, and addictive behavior such as OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). It reduces anger, combats violent tendencies, and calms passion, promoting chastity. It boosts the aura, giving protection, and promotes selfesteem and skills in decision-making, public speaking, and negotiation. This helps you to cope with responsibility, dispelling nervousness, tension, and oversensitivity. It supports emotional energy and aids emotional and mental balance, easing insomnia, while feelings such as grief and homesickness can also be relieved. Amethyst connects to Reiki and helps spirituality, spirit contact, purification for ceremonies, and meditation. It promotes flow and moving forward in life, making changes, business success, and the acquisition of wealth. It also magnifies the energy of other crystals and heals the cause of dis-ease.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for the circulation, heart, and immune system, treating blood clots, and fighting bacterial and viral infections and cancer. It’s also good for the stomach, liver, hormones, pineal, pituitary, and endocrine glands, skin, bones, and teeth, hearing and balance, posture, and sympathetic nervous system (the fight or flight response). Aids detoxing, improves posture, and helps headaches and migraines, acne, asthma, and ME (myalgic encephalitis). Drinking an amethyst elixir can help arthritis.
Violet masses, sometimes with inclusions of white quartz and black manganese.
COMMON SOURCE: Russia
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Sagittarius, Scorpio
CHAKRA: Crown
Charoite
HEALING QUALITIES: Brings your spiritual experiences into your physical world and breaks cycles, releasing old relationships. It aids the mind by supporting analysis and attention span, and can help autism and ADHD. It promotes being in the moment and seeing opportunities, meditation, clairvoyance, intuition, and moving forward in life.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for eyes, heart, and pulse rate; useful for detoxing (as an elixir); helps headaches, general aches and pains, and pancreatic and liver damage, such as sclerosis of the liver.
Spirit Quartz
Amethyst (purple) or quartz (white), sometimes with brownish orange iron inclusions or surface staining.
COMMON SOURCE: South Africa
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Pisces, Virgo, Aquarius, Capricorn
CHAKRA: Crown
HEALING QUALITIES: Enhances meditation, giving insight into your inner self and your dark side, bestowing a sense of belonging, and dispelling loneliness and grief. It boosts self-esteem and patience, allowing you to release and revitalize emotions by removing fear of success and helping you deal with obsessive behavior. It bonds groups in work environments and sports, promoting teambuilding. It increases fertility and abundance and helps things flow well in life. Aids astral travel, dreams, past experiences, past lives, rebirthing, and extra-sensory perception, and it provides protection.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for detoxing and, if drunk as an elixir, can relieve skin allergies.
Spirit quartz
Masses and rare tiny crystals.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAMES: Lavulite, royal lavulite, royal azel
COMMON SOURCE: South Africa
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Virgo
CHAKRA: Crown
Sugilite
HEALING QUALITIES: Helps you to understand the mind–body link in disease. Aids mental balance, promoting confidence, courage, creativity, and forgiveness and releasing hostility, anger, jealousy, prejudice, and despair. Inspires spiritual love, spirit contact, and an understanding of your life path. Good for eccentricity; it doesn’t “cure” it, but helps you be who you are. It is beneficial for Indigo Children (children who possess paranormal abilities) and also for children with learning difficulties.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Because of the mind–body link, it is helpful in the treatment of most illnesses and physical discomfort, and in whole body healing. Also helps dyslexia, headaches, and epilepsy. Good for adrenal, pineal, and pituitary glands.
Labradorite
Masses of plagioclase feldspar with albite, occasionally forming tabular crystals, gray-green, pale green, blue, colorless or gray-white in color. The brilliant flashes of blue, red, gold, and green are the result of light interference within the structure of the minerals’ composition.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAMES: Black moonstone, Labrador moonstone, Labrador feldspar, spectrolite
COMMON SOURCES: Canada, Madagascar, Norway
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Sagittarius, Scorpio, Leo
CHAKRA: Crown
HEALING QUALITIES: Allows magic to happen and promotes linkage between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, increasing interaction between them. This is the mental connection between magic and science, between intuition and intellect. It stabilizes the aura and enhances the flow of energy between the aura and the chakras. Promotes mental sharpness, inspiration, and originality, allowing you to see many possibilities at once and reducing insecurity, anxiety, and stress.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for digestion and eyes. Helps the treatment of warts.
“Dogtooth” crystals
COMMON SOURCE: Brazil
White calcite
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Cancer
CHAKRA: Crown
HEALING QUALITIES: Clears the mind, helping to see through the fog of confusion. Also helps to find answers in meditation.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for kidneys, liver, and lymphatic system. Aids detoxing.
Danburite
Clear, white, pink, yellow, and lilac prismatic striated crystals.
COMMON SOURCES: Mexico, USA ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Leo
CHAKRA: Crown
Danburite
HEALING QUALITIES: Facilitates getting back into the world after an absence for any reason, such as breakdown, drug dependency, or hospitalization. Encourages socialization and alleviates postoperative depression.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Relieves muscle stiffness. Good for gallbladder and liver. Aids detoxing and weight gain.
Herkimer Diamond
Clear, stubby, double-terminated quartz crystal.
COMMON SOURCE: Herkimer County, New York, USA (only source—other “diamond-style” quartz crystals are available from Pakistan, Mexico, and Romania; these are not the same and, although they may be wonderful crystals in themselves, are not covered here)
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Sagittarius
CHAKRA: Crown
Herkimer diamond
HEALING QUALITIES: Promotes spontaneity, being in the moment, relaxation, and new beginnings; alleviates stress, tension, and fear. Helps to focus attunement processes, whether to energies, people, places, deities, ceremony, Reiki, or anything else. Aids memory and psychic abilities.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for metabolism and DNA and RNA replication. Helps recovery from most injuries, toxins, and radiation, and supports detoxing.
White or off-white nodules, masses, and, rarely, crystals. Often dyed to imitate more expensive stones.
Howlite
COMMON SOURCE: USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Gemini
CHAKRA: Crown
HEALING QUALITIES: Aids emotional expression and calm communication, helps discernment, and reduces stress, selfishness, anger, boisterousness, and vulgarity. Promotes action and the achievement of goals. Good for memory and study.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Boosts immune system, good for teeth and bones, and relieves pain.
Magnesite
Masses and nodules that look a bit like 200-million-year-old chewing gum! Usually white, but also gray, brown, and yellow. Also forms rhombohedral, prismatic, tabular, and scalenohedral crystals, but these are rare.
COMMON SOURCES: Worldwide, especially South Africa
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Aries
CHAKRA: Crown
Magnesite
HEALING QUALITIES: Aids meditation and visualization; grounds intellect; promotes passion and love.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Helps injured tendons and ligaments, convulsions, PMS (premenstrual syndrome), and body odor. Good for cardiac arteries and eases associated disorders, such as effects of high cholesterol levels, arteriosclerosis, and angina. Also good for bones and teeth. Balances body temperature and so helps fever, chill, and hypothermia. Supports cellular detoxing.
Petalite
Clear, white, pink, gray, green, white, and red and white masses
COMMON SOURCES: Brazil, Madagascar
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Leo
CHAKRA: Crown
Petalite
HEALING QUALITIES: Promotes a spiritual connection to God, angels, spirit guides, and totem animals. Enhances shamanic vision quests and astral travel and helps you to stay grounded during meditation. It helps you have peace of mind and the courage of your convictions. Reduces clumsiness. Good for the aura, development of all psychic abilities, and yin and yang energy balance.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Helps AIDS, ME (myalgic encephalitis), cancer, and tumors. Good for eyelids, eyebrows, and muscle and joint flexibility. Supports detoxing.
Quartz with silver or golden threads of rutile.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAME: Angel hair
COMMON SOURCE: Brazil
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: All star signs
CHAKRAS: Crown, brow
Rutilated quartz
HEALING QUALITIES: Brings calmness and balance, which helps mental health and healing, deep depression, despair, breakdown, emotional blockages, and negativity.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Promotes vitality and strength, boosts the immune system, activates nerves, helps neuralgia and Parkinson’s disease, and is good for tissue regeneration, weight gain, reducing signs of aging, and helping to maintain a youthful appearance.
Selenite
Crystallized form of gypsum, usually clear or white.
COMMON SOURCES: Canada, Mexico, Morocco
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Taurus. Also linked with the moon (named after Selene, the Greek goddess of the moon)
CHAKRA: Crown
HEALING QUALITIES: Good for emotions linked to cycles and repeated patterns, whether physical, such as the menstrual cycle, or behavioral. Also helps recovery from abuse.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Helps the effects of leakage from mercury amalgam fillings, light sensitivity, and conditions associated with free radicals, including cancer, tumors, and age spots. Helps skin conditions such as acne, eczema, and psoriasis, and is good for skin elasticity, wrinkle prevention, and hair loss, encouraging a youthful appearance. Also good for the spine and menstrual cycle. It boosts fertility and sex drive. Helps epilepsy and promotes longevity.
Selenite
This section deals with crystals that will work on any and all chakras. Each has its own unique properties that may be helpful in the treatment of specific conditions.
Tourmaline
Vertically striated prismatic crystals in most colors: green verdelite, blue indicolite, pink elbaite, red rubellite, yellow tsilasite, black schorl, brown dravite, watermelon (green or blue with pink center, or colors reversed), bicolors, tricolors, lime green often with white center, colorless achroite, and lavender.
COMMON SOURCES: Brazil, Pakistan
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Libra
CHAKRAS: All
HEALING QUALITIES: Gives protection on all levels, from simple accidents to psychic attack and evil curses! It brings balance in all situations, is calming, and promotes creativity, inspiration, self-confidence, new challenges, negotiation skills, awareness, psychic abilities, healing ability, and connection to your inner self, people, your environment, and spirit. It is good for mental health and healing and helps breakdown, blockages, restless mind, schizophrenia, contrariness, victim mentality, a troubled mind, negativity, fear, and worrying too much about what others think. Helps balance left and right brain hemispheres and yin and yang energies, and boosts the aura. Aids group work and laughter therapy.
Tourmaline
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for digestion, lymphatic system, and bladder. Supports detoxing and helps low blood pressure. Tourmaline wand crystals (long, thin crystals) focus energy to areas where it is most needed, support affirmations, and are excellent for aura healing.
Clear or white hexagonal crystals and masses, sometimes with inclusions.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAMES: Clear quartz, rock crystal
COMMON SOURCES: Worldwide, especially USA (Arkansas), Brazil, China, Madagascar, Russia, South Africa, Tibet
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: All star signs
CHAKRAS: All
Quartz crystal
HEALING QUALITIES: Channels any energy so will help with any condition, whether physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual. Also quartz specifically helps with meditation and focusing the mind. It is a “feel better stone,” improving your quality of life, making you feel happier, dispelling negativity, and reenergizing your zest for life in all situations.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Helps all conditions and, specifically, any pain or discomfort, general malaise, low energy, ME (myalgic encephalitis), ear problems such as infections or tinnitus, diabetes, and multiple sclerosis. Good for balance, the heart, the spine, and weight loss.
Titanium Quartz
Quartz crystal bonded with titanium and niobium.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAMES: Flame aura quartz, rainbow quartz, rainbow aura quartz, aura quartz, royal aura
COMMON SOURCE: USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: All star signs
CHAKRAS: All
HEALING QUALITIES: A “feel better crystal” that centers emotions. It helps you see another’s point of view and stimulates energy flow and change. Good for meditation, it helps you find your own true path through life and is helpful for career decisions. It also improves your ability to see auras.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for anything to do with body fluids, such as helping dehydration and water retention. Helps prevent illness, quells fever, and helps bone cancer, AIDS, and multiple sclerosis.
Titanium quartz
Octahedral, dodecahedral, and trapezohedral crystals. Colors include clear, white, yellow, blue, brown, pink, red, orange, and green.
COMMON SOURCES: Central and southern Africa, Australia, Brazil, India, Russia, Venezuela
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Aries, Leo, Taurus
CHAKRAS: All
Diamond
HEALING QUALITIES: Gives protection by emanating positive energy in any situation, repelling negativity. Acts as a spiritual detox, promoting spiritual awareness and right and left brain interaction. This clears the “fog” in the mind, helping with a myriad of issues and emotions such as love, liking yourself, relationships, purity, cowardice, anger, and childhood issues. Diamond enhances creativity, imagination, ingenuity, invention, change, and new beginnings, helping you to start new projects that will lead to abundance. It boosts the aura and increases the effects of all other crystals.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for metabolism and eyesight, and aids detoxing.
Angel Aura Quartz
Quartz crystal bonded with platinum and silver.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAME: Opal aura
COMMON SOURCE: USA
Angel aura quartz
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: All star signs
CHAKRAS: All
HEALING QUALITIES: Helps you to connect to angels and the angelic realms. Boosts the aura, creating a protective field around you. Aids karma, supports empathy, love, peace, and harmony, and keeps you well. It is recommended for people working in the caring professions. Good for accessing the akashic records.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Helps headaches, backache, and tired blurred vision.
Pyrite
Cubic and dodecahedral crystals, occasionally flattened (pyrite suns) and masses. It becomes more golden with oxidation and may replace many minerals, so it can be found in many other formations and in combination with other minerals.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAMES: Iron pyrites, fool’s gold
COMMON SOURCES: Peru, Spain, UK, USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Leo
CHAKRAS:All
Pyrite
HEALING QUALITIES: Helps thought processes, promotes leadership qualities, and gives protection, especially against negativity, accidents, and disruption from noisy neighbors.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Gives an instant energy boost. Good for the circulation, cell regeneration, digestion, brain and memory, bones, and lungs. Helps bronchitis, infection, inflammation, fever, varicose veins, conditions caused by pollutants, and radiation sickness. It also helps prevent snoring.
Tourmalinated Quartz
Quartz with black tourmaline crystal rods growing through it.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAME: Tourmaline in quartz
COMMON SOURCE: Brazil
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: All star signs
CHAKRAS: All
Tourmalinated quartz
HEALING QUALITIES: Dispels negative childhood experiences and related behavior patterns, depression, fear, and nervous exhaustion. Aids problem-solving.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Good for nervous system.
Tibetan Quartz
Clear quartz crystals, often with black hematite inclusions.
COMMON SOURCE: Tibet (only source—note that a lot of Chinese Himalayan quartz is sold as Tibetan)
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: All star signs
CHAKRAS: All
HEALING QUALITIES: A “feel good stone” that promotes a spiritual connection and helps you be more direct.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: See quartz crystal (page 123).
Tibetan quartz
Brilliant small emerald green prismatic crystals and masses.
COMMON SOURCES: Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia, Russia, USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONS: Sagittarius, Scorpio
CHAKRAS: All
HEALING QUALITIES: Aids emotional and mental balance; relieves the feeling of being oppressed and paranoia. Clears stuck emotions so you can live in the moment. Helps you understand the cause of dis-ease. Promotes change, renewal of goals and ideals, and past-life experiences. Helps yin and yang energy balance and attracts abundance.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: Boosts vitality and the immune response; encourages nutritional balance. Good for the circulation, heart, and lungs, and helps blood pressure, angina, and varicose veins. It’s also good for the stomach and digestion, helping IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), ulcers, nausea, and diarrhea. It promotes the healthy development of babies, helps dizziness and Ménière’s disease, and is reported to give increased T-cell count in AIDS patients. Taken as an elixir, it can relieve pain, especially headaches, migraines, and postoperative discomfort.
Sphene
Masses, layered “plates,” and flattened wedgeshaped crystals, in many colors.
COMMON ALTERNATIVE NAME: Titanite
COMMON SOURCES: Canada, Mexico, Pakistan, Russia, USA
ASTROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION: Sagittarius
CHAKRAS: All
Sphene
HEALING QUALITIES: Good for the study of astronomy and astrology. It is physically calming during shock and situations of extreme stress.
PHYSICAL BENEFITS: It is good for teeth, helps muscle sprains and strains, reduces fever, relieves sunburn, and boosts the immune system and red blood cell production.
