Infusing Rocks with Your Problems

A and I met at our favorite vegetarian cafe, Good Karma, to discuss my most recent crystal healing class based out of a small shamanic practice in Santa Monica. She and I have spoken about our spiritual and homeopathic practices many times before, but soon we started discussing use and cleansing methods for crystals. Her father, a practicing shaman, has this habit of infusing problems into stones by blowing on them. There is this running joke in their family that she and her mother always try to talk things out, but he appears with rocks and says that they ought to blow away their problems into the stones.

A: So my dad has this thing about rocks. He went on some retreat to South America and when he came back, he started doing this really strange blowing into rock habit. He said that he learned it while there and it helps cleanse him of negative energy. In our shamanic tradition, there is a reverence for stones. Each person has a pseudo-medicine bag of thirteen stones that you work with; you get them through various events in the tradition, but you end up with thirteen. One rule, you can never put them under water. We cleanse with fire or burying underground.

L: That’s interesting. In my tradition, we purify strictly through water. It’s considered super taboo if we use any kind of fire. We also have the in the ground purification, but water is much more prevalent. It can be either a stream of water from a sink or an overnight  soak. I prefer the soak post moonlight as that strengthens the water’s power and recharges the crystal at the same time.

A: You must be from a water based tradition; ours is definitely fire based. We burn a lot of things and use fire/ smoke quite regularly. Back to the whole rock blowing. You can’t just decide to blow on any rock at any time. You have to pick a stone that calls to you at that moment. Then, sit with the stone and set your intention for blowing away the problem. Once you blow once, the problem or fear or whatever disappears as it becomes trapped in the stone itself. To get rid of the trapped bad energy, we burn the stones in a fire pit.

L: It’s curious you blow on them to infuse negative energy. In the crystal healing practice, once you finish a body grid, I was taught to blow the receiver’s energy off of the stones. You want to blow away the bad vibes that infiltrate the crystals during the healing session. After a few times, you clean the crystals with either sage, palo santo, or water.

We continued to talk more about healing practices for the rest of the lunch, varying from meditation to other fire-based traditional healing.