Posts Tagged ‘crystals’

In most every culture, shamans embarking on a vision quest and other spiritual healers honor the tradition of their ancestors and teachers by carrying and using something known as a medicine bag. Medicine bags are various-sized pouches containing sacred objects, especially crystals, bones, feathers, and stones, but they can carry any small object of significance to the shaman.

Amulet bags have been made in African nations, for the indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, and in Europe and Asia, too. It is rare to find a practitioner of any nature religion, such as Wicca, without his or her personal medicine bag.

When used with an attitude of honor and respect, the bag and its contents are able to bring the shaman in touch with powers of his or her innermost being. Very often, a shaman will carry one or more crystals or other objects that accompanied him or her on the vision quest and will use the stored energy to enhance healing and other ceremonies and sacred rites.

Medicine bags are usually hand stitched and constructed from leather, with beaded adornment. They are small bags, usually hung like necklaces from a cord around the neck, but they can be worn on a belt or carried in a pocket or purse. The exterior designs often act as protective influence, but the bag itself usually contains additional protection inside in the form of sacred objects, crystals, feathers, shells, or herbs that have meaning for the shaman, thereby helping him or her to focus intention.

Medicine bags are meant to give guidance, good luck, good health, abundance, and even love to their wearers. They act as a means of personal energetic protection and can be held to help invoke healing and protection. For instance, a shaman consulting with a person in need of balancing may have a medicine bag embroidered or painted with balancing symbols and containing some obsidian stones used for protection. A lay individual who might carry a medicine bag could include a person going to a stressful job interview or other important business meeting. He or she would wear or carry a small medicine bag containing malachite for success and prosperity.

The crystals placed in your bag should represent a part of yourself or your life that you wish to develop or empower. For example, if you want to be more loving, you could place a small piece of rose quartz in your medicine bag.

Various cultures felt that if one wore the medicine bag close to the body, the sacred power of the bag was stronger and one’s personal power was enhanced. In this book, medicine bags are designed for protection from seen and unseen things and are worn to enhance the wearer’s positive attitude and keep negative energy away from the wearer’s physical and spiritual self.

A person may have several medicine bags, each carried for different reasons.  One bag may be for dealing with stress, one for happiness, one for specific healing purposes. The bag itself should be as attractive as possible. It can be decorated with a symbol of your personal deities, signs of protection or health, or a design of your own creation.

The creation of your personal medicine bag is a pure example of “spiritual crafting,” as it is a process in which you can nurture your art and soul, find inner peace, and enhance your well-being. To benefit from the spiritual crafting lessons that are in Healing Crystals, all you need are a few simple supplies and a desire to connect to a mystical state of grace. (c) Amy Zerner & Monte Farber, from “Healing Crystals: A Shaman’s Guide to Making Medicine Bags & Using Energy Stones (Enchanted World)

Our new book,

“Healing Crystals-A Shaman’s Guide to Making Medicine Bags & Using Energy Stones”

is out! It’s a is a One Spirit Book Club Alternate Main Selection:

http://www.onespirit.com/ecom/pages/product/productDetail.jsp?skuId=1045832347

More About Monte Farber and Amy Zerner:

Internationally known self-help author Monte Farber’s inspiring guidance and empathic insights impact everyone he encounters. Amy Zerner’s exquisite, one-of-a-kind spiritual couture creations and collaged fabric paintings exude her profound intuition and deep connection with archetypal stories and healing energies. For more than thirty years they’ve combined their deep love for each other with the work of inner exploration and self-discovery to build The Enchanted World of Amy Zerner and Monte Farber: popular books, card decks, and oracles that have helped millions answer questions, find deeper meaning, and follow their own spiritual paths.

Together they’ve made their love for each other a work of art and their art the work of their lives, with over two million books in print in fourteen languages. Their other best-selling titles include The Chakra Meditation Kit, The Tarot Discovery Kit, Karma Cards, The Enchanted Spellboard, Secrets of the Fortune Bell, Little Reminders: Love & Relationships, Little Reminders: The Law of Attraction, Goddess, Guide Me!, The Animal Powers Meditation Kit, Astrology Gems, True Love Tarot, The Instant Tarot Reader, The Psychic Circle, Wish Upon A Star, The Pathfinder Psychic Talking Board, The Truth Fairy, Spirit of the Ancestors Altar Kit, Vibe-Away!, The Mystic Messenger, The Breathe Easy Deck, The Healing Deck, and The Ghostwriter Automatic Writing Kit.  More info at: www.TheEnchantedWorld.com

Do you have a favorite crystal or gemstone? Do you ever find yourself drawn to certain crystals? Have you ever noticed if what you’re drawn to changes from time to time? If so you should listen to that little voice in your head.  You may start to notice that what you are drawn to or what you call your favorite changes during certain periods of your life.  You might want to pay attention to what calls to you now and learn a little about that particular stone- your higher self may be trying to tell you something.  To me it’s much like having a craving for a certain food.  I find that, more often than not, if my body is craving something then I’m probably lacking that something in my diet. The craving is my body’s way of telling me- “Hey, you’re body needs this, eat it now”.  It’s that same idea when you’re drawn to a particular stone. It’s your higher self’s way of saying- “Hey, you need this, spend some time with this stone”.

At this time in my own life I find that I am particularly drawn to rose quartz.  As a geologist I know that rose quartz is part of the silica dioxide family (along with amethyst, citrine, and Tiger’s Eye, among others).  I also know that it gets its beautiful pink color from small amounts of “impurities” like iron or manganese.  As a geologist, I have found that what we call the imperfections in a stone are what typically make it so beautiful.  And as a woman, I have found the same, that what we describe as our imperfections are actually what make us so beautiful and unique.

What I didn’t learn as a geologist (but learned much later through various means) is that rose quartz is the quintessential crystal of love.  It’s associated with the heart chakra and represents many types of love including romantic love, love for friends & family, love for humanity and, most importantly, self love.   If you find yourself drawn to this stone you may want to look around your life a little. Are you looking for love? Are you trying to heal a broken heart? Are you trying to learn to love yourself?

If you, like me, find yourself drawn to rose quartz I encourage you to find something either made with it or simply a crystal itself.  I have a beautiful tea light holder cut from a large rose quartz crystal that sits by my bed. It creates a warm and loving energy that is perfect to meditate by.  Heart shapes cut from rose quartz are also very popular and can help you connect to that heart chakra energy.  As I began to create my company, Serene Bath and Body, my vision was to create products that would take care of both the physical and spiritual body. Because I was so drawn to it, rose quartz was the first stone that I considered when choosing to embed stones into my products. Each stone is charged with love and the intent is that each time you bathe or apply the lotion, you are connecting with that loving energy from the rose quartz and covering not just your body, but your auric field with this loving intention.

Next time we’ll be talking about another personal favorite- Moonstone, the crystal of the Goddess energy. We’ll also start talking about how to properly prepare crystals before using them.

More About Niki Fountain….

Serene Bath & Body was the vision of its owner and founder, Niki Fountain. As a young woman, Ms. Fountain, like many girls her age, found herself with a poor body image and did not treat her body with the love and respect it deserved. Through the years she was able to overcome this and realized that everyone, especially young women, needed to learn to care for and respect their bodies. This eventually inspired Celestial Farms. The inspiration was one of creating products that would help young girls and women learn to love their bodies and treat them well by using high quality products that nourish the body, the mind, the spirit and the soul.  Ms. Fountain earned her Masters Degree in Hydrogeology and has a professional background in developing and perfecting soaps. She spent two years in a university laboratory as a hydrogeologist developing soap formulations to be used to “clean-up” chemicals that had been spilled into groundwater. She has been applying this experience and knowledge ever since while working in the environmental industry, cleaning up sites that have been contaminated with chemicals. She has since taken this knowledge and experience and applied it to developing and perfecting formulations of soaps for people. Additionally, being a geologist, she is intimately familiar with crystals and gemstones and both their physical and metaphysical properties. She uses this knowledge while creating new formulations that include various combinations of soaps/lotions with the appropriate crystals to obtain an array of desired outcomes (relaxation, invigoration, etc) More info at: www.theserenestore.com

Even as a small child I loved to play with rocks. We had a big pile of them out behind our house that I would sit and play on for hours. I daydreamed about what I would do when I grew up. I even plotted my escape from that tiny town in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t realize it then but in all of those hours I spent on that rock pile, I was feeling and drawing on the energy of those stones.

Many years later I earned my Masters Degree in geology where I spent the majority of my days (and as a graduate student many a night) with rocks and minerals. As a geologist you are expected and required to know, in painstaking detail, a multitude of physical and chemical properties of rocks and minerals. While I enjoyed this on some level I knew my attraction to the field had to be deeper. Sure, it was interesting to know how different minerals formed; to understand how water moved below the earth’s surface so that we could access it for drinking purposes; to find fossils and consider the theory of evolution. But I knew for me there was more to it, a deeper calling.

One day, years later, I found myself standing in a bookstore reading a book on crystals and gemstones. To my surprise the book didn’t come from the science section of the store. This book was talking not about the physical properties of crystals gemstones but the metaphysical ones. It was then that I understood my calling to the field. It was important for me to have the science background, to understand the physical nature of rocks and minerals but to combine that with what I was learning about the metaphysical.

Since that day many years ago I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to take my knowledge and experience with both the physical and metaphysical properties of minerals and gemstones and apply that to a metaphysically-inspired bath products line called Celestial Farms (found at TheSereneStore.com) where crystals are actually added and embedded to all of the products.

Watch for upcoming guest blog entries on some of my favorite gemstones and their metaphysical properties, including which gemstones are best for certain situations and how to properly prepare them for use.
More About Niki Fountain….

Serene Bath & Body was the vision of its owner and founder, Niki Fountain. As a young woman, Ms. Fountain, like many girls her age, found herself with a poor body image and did not treat her body with the love and respect it deserved. Through the years she was able to overcome this and realized that everyone, especially young women, needed to learn to care for and respect their bodies. This eventually inspired Celestial Farms. The inspiration was one of creating products that would help young girls and women learn to love their bodies and treat them well by using high quality products that nourish the body, the mind, the spirit and the soul. Serene Bath & Body became an LLC in 2005. Ms. Fountain earned her Masters Degree in Hydrogeology and has a professional background in developing and perfecting soaps. She spent two years in a university laboratory as a hydrogeologist developing soap formulations to be used to “clean-up” chemicals that had been spilled into groundwater. She has been applying this experience and knowledge ever since while working in the environmental industry, cleaning up sites that have been contaminated with chemicals. She has since taken this knowledge and experience and applied it to developing and perfecting formulations of soaps for people. Additionally, being a geologist, she is intimately familiar with crystals and gemstones and both their physical and metaphysical properties. She uses this knowledge while creating new formulations that include various combinations of soaps/lotions with the appropriate crystals to obtain an array of desired outcomes (relaxation, invigoration, etc).

Watch for an upcoming interview with Niki on The Explore Your Spirit with Kala Show in February 2009.

More info at: www.theserenestore.com