How To Use Crystals: The Basics

If you’ve visited the Ohana boutique or perused our online store, our extensive collection of crystals has probably caught your attention. No longer reserved for hippies or relegated to obscure metaphysical shops, crystals are ubiquitous and are enjoying their proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. And it’s not just yoga teachers and healers that are obsessed with these gems – everyone from kids and teens to parents and busy professionals are intrigued by their beauty and purported benefits. 

Despite their induction into New Age culture, many of us are still wondering, what do these rocks actually do? How do I use them? And, are they really healing? This blog post will explore those questions and more as we take a deep dive into crystals, their meaning and functionality. Because let’s be honest, even those of us who own crystals, may not fully understand how they work or how best to leverage their power.

The Basics: What Is Crystal Healing?

The first step to using crystals is deciding which stone to use! With so many crystals to choose from, how do you know which one is right for you? 

Each crystal is made with different materials, in a unique process, and therefore holds its own specific energetic blueprint. This blueprint vibrates at an energetic frequency (measured in Hertz) that is associated with a certain quality of our human experience. (This is a super fascinating concept. If you’re curious, here’s more on that.)

How do we see this play out in real life? Rose Quartz — a stone famous for its heart-opening qualities — has an energetic frequency of 350Hz — which has been long associated with the heart chakra. This is the basis of energy work and healing, of which crystals play a huge role. All of our emotions have an associated energy, which is why energy work is helpful to heal our emotions.

Every crystal has its own frequency and associated qualities, just like Rose Quartz. And this is how they become known for certain traits. The world of crystals is diverse, but here’s a glimpse of popular common crystals and their traits:

Amethyst: Awareness + Clarity

Known as “the all purpose stone”, Amethyst is a protective stone that helps to relieve stress and anxiety, and the symptoms that accompany it like headaches, fatigue, and anxiety, and promote awareness and clarity.

Clear Quartz: Manifestation + Amplification

Perhaps the most versatile stone, clear quartz is multipurpose and powerful due to its unique helical spiral crystalline form. It’s considered the “master healer” as it amplifies energy and thought, as well as the effects of other crystals. It absorbs, stores, releases, and regulates energy.

Tourmaline: Protection + Clearing Negative Energy

Tourmaline helps to create a protective shield around a person or a room to keep negative energies away. It is also a grounding stone that helps balance the chakras. Tourmaline can even dissolve negative thought patterns, transmuting them into more positive energy and beliefs.

Pyrite: Confidence + Abundance

Pyrite is valued for promoting physical well-being and enhancing mental strength and willpower. It also helps protect the wearer from negative energy and environmental pollutants. Wear or keep Pyrite close when you need to invoke confidence and vitality and ward off stress. Traditionally, Pyrite was known as a stone of luck, helping to attract abundance, wealth, and prosperity.

This is merely scratching the surface in terms of the many benefits crystals possess and when you start looking at powerful crystal pairings you can really go down the rabbit hole as there is so much to learn. So the next natural question is, how do you know which crystal is right for you?

How To Work With Crystals

There is no right or wrong way to purchase a crystal, but there are generally two approaches:

1. Choose the crystal that speaks to you. Which crystal looks most appealing or interesting to you? This could be a sign that your frequencies will work well together.
   
2. Research crystals that will help you invoke what you need. For example, if you’re going through a hard time in life, and are experiencing a lot of negative energy, you might choose Black Tourmaline.

Crystal healing, more than anything, is intuitive work. At the end of the day, you are your own healer and you know what’s best for you. You call the shots.

How to use crystals:

Just as there is no wrong way to select a crystal, there’s no wrong way to use a crystal either. From healing to balancing chakras to improving sleep and skin conditions, there are countless ways to incorporate gem stones into your daily life. Here are a few of our favorite ways to use crystals:

Set An Intention

We’ve already talked about how crystals work with energy and frequency. When you set an intention, you’re working with the same principles. Invoking an intention of some kind, let’s say “inner peace,” has a specific frequency. Take hold of your new crystal, find a seat, and close your eyes. Hold your crystal gently, and start to think of your intention. Keep your intention in your awareness for as long as is comfortable, and trust that your crystal is absorbing your intention. As you move forward, this crystal will now be “charged” with your intention.

Meditation

Use your crystal to ground you during meditation. You can hold it in your hands, your lap, or simply place it nearby. As you move into meditation, trust that your crystal’s frequencies are very much a part of your experience. As we said, crystals are powerful, and absolutely influence the energy of the room they’re in. When you’re meditating in that room, you’re going to be grounded and influenced by their energy.

Decoration

While crystals are powerful in meditation and intention setting, you can also wear your crystals via crystal jewelry (like mala beads) or decorate with them. Crystal jewelry is powerful for obvious reasons — you can take the healing frequencies with you wherever you go. But one of the most popular decorative uses for crystals is to place them around your house. It’s especially useful to set them in places where energy comes and goes: doorways, windows, and sinks. Crystals are kind of like plants — they’re great company!

Beauty

Today, gems are making their way into beauty tools like crystal rollers and gua sha, commonly made from jade and rose quartz stones. Crystal infused products like tonics, toners, face mists, and moisturizers claim to improve skin problems like dryness, wrinkles, and acne. Many holistic estheticians and healers use crystals as part of their facials, energy work, massages, or acupuncture treatments. Like we said, crystals are ubiquitous and finding their way into mainstream products and practices.

Self-Care

Crystals can be a powerful addition to your self-care routine too. By using them daily, we are able to discharge unwanted energy, such as stress, anxiety, or fear in a gentle and natural way. Incorporating crystals when you journal or bathe can enhance the experience and benefits of these practices. 

Certain crystals, such as Clear Quartz and Serpentine, work directly with the higher self and can be a powerful addition to your journaling practice. These stones help with self-development and support self-discovery, which helps express and bring attention to how we feel and what we think. Crystals enhance our awareness and make everything we write down more potent, helping us accept and love ourselves more just as we are.

Relaxing baths have a cleansing property, as do crystals, making them a great addition to your self-care practice. Healing gemstones are meant to eliminate and absorb negative energy stored in our aura, so adding them to your bath water will raise the vibration of water and our own vibration. Choose crystals from the Quartz family, particularly Rose Quartz, to help embrace self-love and feel nourished. Smoky Quartz is a great choice if we want to eliminate stress and ground ourselves.Adding crystals to the water for foot soaks can help alleviate health issues, particularly those related to tiredness, aches, and pains felt in the physical body. Placing stones in the water helps draw out stagnant, negative energy from our body, and help refresh our aura. Crystals amplify the healing properties of water, while also targeting specific weak points in our energetic body, helping us to relax.

How To Cleanse Your Crystals

As little energetic beings, crystals absorb energy — and we’re grateful that they do! – but they also need to be cleansed of negative energies periodically. Some crystals are known for clearing negative vibes and protecting us from harmful energy frequencies. Smokey Quartz, for example, is amazing to combat electromagnetic waves. Like anything in nature, these crystals can only take on so much before they’re “full,” hence the importance of cleansing crystals. Generally speaking, you should plan to clean your crystals once per month; however, if you feel that they are being influenced by negative energy, you may consider cleaning them more often. 

Moonlight 

The full moon is the best time to let your crystals charge, remove unwanted energies, and recharge them to be used again in healing practices. To cleanse your crystals, simply place them outside on the night of a full moon as the natural light from the moon cleans your stones.

Sunlight

The good news is that the sun is also an effective way to cleanse and charge your crystals so you don’t need to wait for the light of the full moon to spring clean your crystal collection. Place your stones in direct sunlight outside, or on a windowsill, for at least 30 minutes to give them a quick cleanse and boost of energy. 

Salt Water 

You can physically clean your crystals with salt water. Simply add sea salt to water, or if you live near the ocean you can use sea water. Soak your crystals overnight in the salt water and give them a good rinse with clean water in the morning. As you hold your stones under running water, ask the Universe to remove all negativity from the crystals. 

Set an Intention

Another approach to activating your stones when they feel heavy or have lost their luster is to lend them some of your own energy. Try talking or singing to your stones to send them some of your vital life force energy via your breath. When communicating with your crystals you want to be very clear and specific with your intention. Transmit your intention onto the healing crystals with your emotions and energy to create synergy between you and the stone. Communicate or visualize your intention embodied in the crystal to infuse the stone with the power of your intention. Here are four examples of affirmations you can use to infuse crystals with your intention:

• 1. Rose Quartz (Self-Love)
  “I program this crystal to amplify self-love”
   
• 2. Amethyst (Intuition)
  “I program this crystal to activate my intuition”
  
• 3. Clear Quartz (Clarity)
  “I program this crystal to clear my mind”
   
• 4. Tourmaline (Grounding, Protection)
  “I program this crystal to protect me against negative emotions”
  

Your Crystal Collection

Once you get started with crystals, you’ll naturally pick up on how they add value and meaning to your life. Mostly, they do it through the meaning of intention. Crystals are all about intention: they are what you make them to be. Will crystals solve all of your problems, put money in your bank, and give you a fairytale ending? Probably not.

But they will help you stay in touch with the seeds of intention you’re planting in your life. Even if it’s just a glance at the Citrine on your desk that reminds you of abundance — that’s powerful. Our surroundings have an impact on our thoughts, and our thoughts create our reality. Operating on the most simple level, crystals can be a positive force in our life.Crystal healing is an ancient and sacred practice that is now, in modern times, applied in a variety of ways. Crystals are a miracle of nature, each unique, each powerful — as it turns out, crystals are a lot like us. To get started, shop our full collection of crystals in our boutique or online.

This post was originally posted in January of 2021 and has since been updated.