15 crystals and gemstones, their properties and benefits?
Previously in my last blog What are gemstones?, I explained what gemstones are, where they came from, how to cleanse them and how they benefit us.
Now I want to go into further detail about my research into crystals and gemstones. I will describe what different benefits each one has, so that you can get an idea of which crystals are out there and what they can do for you.
There are so many types of crystals and gemstones out there with so many different personalities, energies and properties so I am not going to list them all, but I will talk about 15 crystals that I have been drawn to and have researched a lot about so far on my quest for knowledge on this subject.
There are lots of sources online to find out more about the crystals you are drawn to and how they can help you. Judy Hall’s The Crystal Bible Books are good sources to invest in if you are learning about crystals.
These books are great crystal reference guides with an index to make it easy to look up crystals based on what you want to know. You can search for the crystals by name or appearance or by the spiritual, emotional, psychological or physical effects of the stone.
There are many benefits for using crystals to assist physical health problems, however I have focused on the benefits crystals have on our mental health. For me I feel it is important to have a healthy mind because your mind is extremely powerful and can create your life, your happiness, your pain, and it can even heal your body. I feel that working with crystals has the best natural effect on healing and strengthening my mind and soul.
Firstly, crystals and gemstones are not the same thing. Crystals are formed in dark, cold places such as caves and gemstones are formed from heat and magma. The majority of gemstones are in fact crystals but not all of them.
They are both used to make jewellery and for their healing energies. Spiritually they can have an amazing beneficial effect on your life. I have a strong love for them as they help us, ground us and connect us, reminding me that we are all one, connected to mother earth and the universe. They are truly magical and can help you to remember you have great power within you.
Aventurine is known as the opportunity stone. It stimulates our mind, creativity and motivation. Attracting luck, abundance and success. It balances your emotions and protects the heart, helping also to attract luck in love. Aventurine is a manifestation stone that can help you bring your dreams into reality.
Chakra: Heart
Amethyst is a calming, stress reliever that encourages inner strength and spiritual growth. If you own this crystal it will bring you clarity of the mind so that you become more in tune with yourself, your feelings and your intuition. Amethyst crystals repel negative energy and attract positive energy, making this stone great for protection, especially when travelling. Also known for sobriety, it assists you to resist all types of addictions.
Chakra: Third Eye & Crown
Rose Quartz opens up your heart for true love of self, friendship and romantic love. Allowing you to express unconditional love, forgiveness and compassion towards yourself and others. Wearing Rose Quartz brings inner peace, clearing out stress from anger and resentment. It is excellent for healing emotional wounds, removing negativity and restoring harmony in relationships.
Chakra: Heart
Howlite stills the mind bringing calm and relaxation making it excellent for sleep or meditation. Because this stone is so calming it assists you to become truly comfortable being your true authentic self. It strengthens positive character traits, helping you overcome tendencies to be judgemental or selfish. It teaches patience and tact, helping to eliminate rage and keep you calm when faced with confrontation.
Spiritually, Howlite prepares the wearer to receive wisdom and attunement from the Higher Self and the Divine. It is also used for dimensional travel.
Chakra: Crown
Goldstone is made from quartz sand glass, infused with copper flecks to give it its sparkles. This makes Goldstone symbolic of light that can always be found in the darkness. It helps you stay calm and emotionally stable, helping you attain your goals. It heals and revitalises your energy field and deflects unwanted energies, making it a protection stone.
Chakras: Gold- Sacral, Blue- Throat
Onyx is a balancing, grounding, protective stone that can absorb and transform negative energy. It helps to calm your fears, leaving you feeling stable and secure. Onyx is a great stone to wear if you are setting out on a new journey, whether that journey is a personal one, a business venture, or a relationship. It will give you strength to make decisions and see it through. Those who have difficulty with commitment can benefit from this stone.
Chakra: Root
Lapis Lazuli opens the third eye and stimulates enlightenment, enhancing psychic abilities. A great stone for dream work and to enhance your spiritual power and growth. Lapis Lazuli harmonizes all levels, mind, body and spirit, bringing deep peace and inner self-knowledge. This stone encourages self-awareness and self-expression; you may be more honest, have more compassion and say it how it is without holding back. Lapis Lazuli strengthens relationships and friendships and relieves anger and stress quickly bringing serenity into your life.
Chakras: Throat or crown
Malachite is a powerful stone and should be cleansed after every use. It amplifies energy, absorbs negative energy and pollutants, it also protects you from radiation and electromagnetic pollution.
This stone clears and activates the chakras. Malachite placed on the third eye activates psychic vision and placed on the heart opens the heart to unconditional love. It can assist in receiving spiritual guidance and insights from the subconscious or the future.
Mentally Malachite sharpens the mind and helps alleviate mental disturbances and illness. It encourages empathy, expression and confidence. It releases negative experiences and traumas by getting to the core of the problem.
Chakra: Heart
Peridot assists in rebirth and renewal of all kinds. It is brilliant for healing and is known to make a shield of protection around the body of any wearer. Peridot helps you to move past your own ego and deal with the situation at hand with compassion and love. It brings harmony to relationships of all kinds, particularly marriage. Filling you with energy, this stone is useful for those dealing with stress or mild depression.
Chakra: Heart
Turquoise is known as the “master healer,” and is said to be the bridge between Heaven, Sky and the Earth. Turquoise was used an amulet for protection and symbolized wealth in ancient cultures. As an amulet, it was believed to protect from harm, depression, exhaustion and negative energy. Turquoise aligns all chakras bringing inner peace. It stabilizes mood swings, encourages honesty and open communication from the heart. This stone enhances intuition and meditation and promotes spiritual attunement. Turquoise is a purification stone allowing you to release old habits and realise your true power.
Chakra: Throat
Jade brings harmony and is great for attracting good luck and friendship. It sooths the mind and releases negative thoughts and emotions. It promotes self-sufficiency and encourages you to become who you really are. Jade promotes courage, compassion, generosity and longevity, helping you lead a richer more fulfilling life. It has many healing benefits, from healing wounds and kidneys, to balancing acid/alkaline levels in the body. It is also used to assist with fertility and childbirth.
Chakra: Heart
Fluorite draws off negative energies and stress of all kinds. It cleanses, purifies and reorganises anything that is not in perfect order within your body. This stone can help you overcome chaos and reorganise your mind, body and spirit. It is a great learning tool, helping you retain information and increases concentration. Fluorite promotes spiritual and psychic development. It helps you get past the “mind chatter” that can occur when you first start meditating, this then helps you achieve cosmic truth and become attuned to higher powers.
Chakra: Heart
Carnelian increases personal power and physical energy, bringing you courage, compassion and creativity. It is a great protector against yours or other people’s envy, rage and resentment. It brings focus and motivation and promotes positive life choices. Wearing or carrying Carnelian provides you with the confidence needed to approach new projects and dreams. Wear it on a job interview, as it brings good luck and opportunity, awakening your hidden talents. Carnelian is known to calm fears of life after death and bring acceptance of the cycle of life. It also has the ability to cleanse other stones.
Chakra: Sacral
Tiger’s Eye is great for achieving goals and setting clear intentions. It helps you figure out the difference between wishful thinking, what you want and what you really need. It helps to rebalance the body on all levels, it is very stabilizing and grounding, encouraging optimism and trust in the future. It brings brightness and light into all situations and problems, alleviating depression. Tiger’s Eye brings good luck, abundance and prosperity to its wearer. In many ancient civilizations, it was used as a talisman against bad luck and curses.
Chakra: Sacral
Clear Quartz enhances energy by absorbing, storing, amplifying and transmitting. It channels universal energy. Quartz also enhances thoughts, as they are a form of energy so it is extremely beneficial for manifesting, healing, meditation, protection, and channelling. It helps the wearer to think clearly, allowing them to focus and become clear about their dreams and desires. Assisting with spiritual development, Clear Quartz assists in removing blockages in the body so that energy can flow smoothly. Many colours of quartz or formations have their own names and properties, such as Amethyst for purple quartz.
Chakra: Sacral
If you wish to wear these stones as jewellery to benefit your daily life, check out my shop.
Love always,
What are gemstones?
Here’s a little bit about what gemstones are, how they are made and the benefits of wearing/using them. My next blog will continue to go more in depth of what some gemstones can do for you and how each one can benefit you in different ways.
Gemstones (also known as a jewel, a gem, a precious stone), are minerals that have been chosen for their beauty and valued by their lasting durability and rarity. They are cut and polished to create jewellery or other embellishments.
Precious stones are known in the west as diamonds, sapphires, rubies and emerald and are considered more valuable than other semi-precious stones and gemstones. However, this is not always true. This is a commercial based classification created by marketers to convince the public that diamonds are the premier gemstones through excellent advertising.
Gemstones are a product of the earth, formed below the Earth’s surface and can sometimes show traces of other minerals, called inclusions. Green Aventurine quartz is actually colourless quartzite, filled with tiny flakes of green fuchsite mica which gives it its colour. Gemstone inclusions are beautiful and interesting, like goldstone and its flecks of copper which gives a sparkle effect. They are formed by either, explosions of molten rock, heat and pressure or even crystallised slowly from hot fluids and gases which cool and turn solid into these beautiful natural gemstones.
What are the benefits of wearing gemstones?
Every gemstone has the power to draw energy from its respective planet and channel it into the wearer’s body.
A known way to achieving your purpose is to keep your intentions in your mind, regularly think about what you want and why you want it. Wear your gemstones to enhance these affirmations and use them when doing spiritual practices such as meditation.
In ancient Egypt and other cultures, people believed gemstones had many different health benefits and it continues today that people feel the healing effects and benefits of gemstones.
- The energy of the gemstone neutralizes the energetic blockages that cause poor health.
- Make you feel more connected to earth and your intentions.
- Give you positive energy and inspire you to live the life you deserve.
- Restore energy fields, gain peace, and promote love and safety.
- Promote healing when placed on certain areas of the body, called chakras.
How to cleanse your stones?
Gemstones and crystals must be cleansed because they are believed to have an extensive memory. They remember all forces and energies attached to the places they’ve been or the things they’ve touched. In order to increase the effects of their metaphysical energies, stones need to be cleansed of any unwanted energies that they may have collected from you, from others, or from the environment.
Basically, what cleanses your stones is your intention to do so. It is an act of love. Take your time and enjoy it. Personally, I feel these are the safer and easier ways to cleanse your stones. There are many other ways that you can cleanse a stone that I have not listed here.
- Visualisation – visualise a stream of water flowing through your crystal, or a column of pure white/ golden light coming down and surrounding the stone, deeply cleansing the it’s negative energies into positive ones.
- Smudging – carefully pass the stone through the smoke of a white sage smudge stick or incense several times until you intuitively feel it has been cleared.
- Moon light – place the stone in moonlight for at least one night under a full moon, longer if the moon is not full.
- Amethyst/Clear quartz – is excellent for magnifying, focusing, and, in this case, transmuting energy. Small stones can be left overnight on a larger crystal cluster of clear quartz and Amethyst to be cleansed.
- The Earth – Bury your stones in the ground and leave them for a day, they are energised and comforted in the earth as it is where they formed and grew.
- Breath – hold the stone to your heart whilst breathing in. Then bring the stone to your mouth and keeping in mind your intention, blow on it as if you’re blowing all the negative energies out of the stone. Repeat several times until your intuition tells you it’s cleansed.
So remember to choose a method and cleanse your crystal/gemstone:
- As soon as you receive the stone
- Before you programme it with your intention
- After each use, or daily if you wear or carry it
- When you feel it has become drained or dull
- Monthly, if it’s used for environmental healing such as in your home.
Love always,
How I found out that you must love what you do to have a happier life
I was always told as a child…”you must find a trade, a ‘proper’ career, you will never make any money dancing unless you are Beyoncé’s back-up dancer.” When really all I wanted to do was dance, it was the one thing I felt confident and happy doing, but as the insecure teenager I was I assumed the adults knew more about my ability to succeed and I listened to those scary words of advice, not realising that they were only projecting their fears onto me. So… I bounced from one thing to another, studying hairdressing, then beauty therapy, worked in pretentious fashion stores, working my way up, selling my soul. Never really feeling happy or fulfilled until my journey seriously took a turn onto the spiritual path a few years ago. I look back and see so many signs throughout my life, guiding me spiritually from a young age, however I was blinded by fear, doubt and trying to conform. Now I realise I was always destined to take this path to enlightenment and I am so grateful for my journey so far.
I still love to dance at Zumba class, parties and especially whilst at home doing the cleaning, pretending I'm in a music video! I try to do what I love whenever and however I can.
We are capable of incredible things. When we begin to do what we love, with love and belief in ourselves, the determination, passion and success come naturally.
I see fashion as a way of expressing myself and feeling good in whatever I choose to wear, not always following the latest fashion or buying designer gear, but being inspired by trends and choosing how and what I want to wear freely. I make some of my own clothes and I love a bargain.
The first business that I started was in fashion, but mainstream, up market fashion. My target audience was wealthy women who dress to impress. Now this is where I went wrong from the off, this is not me. I was doing it for the money. I was chasing money. I wasn’t doing something that I loved, I was doing something that I thought people wanted and that I assumed would create the most income. Although I am so glad I started my previous business, because without doing that I would not be where I am today with the knowledge I have now. For that I am so grateful. However, now I am so much happier. I am doing something that I truly love, something that I feel makes a difference in the world. And I have learnt so much more interesting things, met many like-minded people and have had great opportunities. As soon as I stopped chasing money and began to only do what I loved and what made me happy, then the money came, the unbelievable support was there and I feel like I have finally found my place in this world. To spread love, peace and positivity through the best way I know how. I have worked in retail and fashion nearly all of my working life and I feel like my whole life has been unfolding for this very moment and it all makes sense as to why things have gone the way they have in my life.
The one thing I know I will always do is to encourage my children to go for their dreams, be true to themselves and follow their heart, do what makes them happy whatever it is. I will support them every step of the way. I try so hard not to put my issues and limited beliefs into their heads and I will be the first to admit that it is a challenge every day. When you are conditioned to think negatively, unhealthy habits and limited beliefs aren’t easy to shake, but you let go of blame, accept them and change them, knowing every day you try is another day closer to freedom and to a more positive, happy life.
Love the life you live, live the life you love
Nia 9 is not just a business it is an expression of myself as I grow on my journey to living a more spiritual life.
Sometimes I'm on top of the world, and other times, I'm a stumbling mess, but I do the best I can, just like you. Learning as we go!
I believe we should share our stories and experiences, so I share the things that have worked for me and hope to help people who are also setting out on this amazing spiritual journey... This is just the beginning!
Love always,
What keeps me positive in a world that seems doomed
I wanted to start by expressing how I feel about modern day life and society, how I keep positive and what I am doing to reach my goal of encouraging every soul to find real happiness.
I want to be happy just like all of us. That is the one thing we can all agree on. And that to me shows that our purpose in life is to grow and find happiness, whatever that may be to you. All I know is that I am the happiest I have ever been because I have found out about the laws of the universe, energy work, the power of mother earth, crystals/minerals and meditation. I have experienced that love is the answer. That we only act out of two things, love and fear and these thoughts may create our life.
Regardless of what the media shoves in our faces, the world IS a beautiful place with beautiful people, we must not fight and be fearful, we all want to be loved, and we are all one. I know in my heart there is a higher power guiding us, helping us remember how divine we all are. If only everyone in the world knew this and felt this...that is why I want to encourage people to think differently, to have faith that the universe is helping you, life is full of lessons and an abundance of things to be grateful for. Peace and love is the answer, not war and greed.
We are bombarded with negativity in the media. Our relatives, friends and even strangers can challenge your energy and this can be a struggle for many to stay positive. I will be honest and tell you that I have not remembered everything we already know inside us. I won’t give you all the answers to life, I am only now beginning to learn and grow spiritually myself, but I have faith that love always wins and I can share with you my experiences and you can take what you feel resonates with you. If you feel that something I believe in doesn’t quite sit well with you then research it or leave it. Don’t just believe everything you hear. Make your own mind up, listen to your inner voice and follow your intuition. We all have our own journeys to live and only you know which path to take.
We may not see the light, but the light is forever there keeping us on track. I have noticed that the more good I find in the world, the more proof I find. I didn’t realise how many like-minded, positive people there were out there in the world on a similar mission to mine. When you’re vibrating on a positive, higher frequency, you attract much more of it. What you look for is what you will see. The less attention I pay to the news, the less negative I see and the less fear I have towards the future. All I see now is beautiful, inspiring, caring, kind, selfless people making a difference, keeping the world balanced. Acknowledging that the world has pain, suffering and negativity and by taking responsibility for our roles as knowing human beings we can improve ourselves in order to help the situation the best way we can.
This is why I believe that the world is not hopeless, love is the answer and more and more people are awakening. There may be a lot of hurt and devastation in this world and to many the world is doomed, but I truly believe there are more conscious, loving, gods and goddesses here taking care of this world one small(or big) act at a time. I remember the days before I learnt the truth, when I thought “what’s the point, I can’t change the world by myself, one person won’t make a difference”. Oh how wrong I was…even the smallest act of kindness can influence others to do the same, which then causes a domino effect and that kindness spreads further than you will ever know. Encourage others to act in love by showing them how. World peace starts with you.
Instead of focusing on the world's problems, give your attention and energy to trust, love, abundance, education and peace.
Fear is advertised like it’s going out of fashion and I feel that the way to change this is to advertise positivity and love. Cancelling it out, making it more balanced, which is so healthy. If I can consciously or subconsciously influence people with my products for the greater good, then I will achieve my mission. I sell jewellery and t-shirts with positive, uplifting quotes and images. I want my designs to motivate and inspire. That’s why I love what I do. Not only do they remind the wearer but it also encourages others who cross the wearer’s path to do the same. I want to spread positivity through fashion. May these quotes stay in your powerful subconscious mind, reminding you to be kind, be happy, do everything in love, have faith and be your authentic self.
Love