By Xenia Mateiu
Perhaps you have noticed crystals getting increasingly popular nowadays and wondered what they could do for you. They are pretty and shiny and come in many fascinating shapes and colors. For their beauty, many use them as decorative objects, but crystals are more than just that.
Crystals, gemstones, and geodes carry their own energies and have powerful healing properties, and we can learn important lessons about ourselves through their help. If one knows how to care for their crystal collection, use them with respect and gratitude, and allow their energy to support their mental and spiritual processes, they can grow to love and accept themselves.
Learn to love and accept yourself from crystals
Loving yourself might sound generic; you’ll find many books, movies, songs, podcasts, and other types of content about how to love yourself. But self-love is vital for our social, mental, spiritual, and physical well-being, even though it can take a lot of time and continuous effort to learn how to do it.
Self-love is almost like a muscle you have to train constantly to be able to use it or a habit you have to develop and maintain for years. That’s why crystals are gifts from mother Earth that can provide us with their supportive energies and wisdom for long personal journeys like learning to love yourself.
Rose Quartz: practice self-love
Rose quartz can teach us many things about self-love and love for others. This pink crystal that carries gentle vibrations encourages us to observe ourselves non-judgmentally and with more compassion.
Although rose quartz is a reasonably durable crystal, it can easily be scratched or chipped, especially if exposed to harder stones. Learning self-love can feel like that sometimes. It uncovers sensitive and vulnerable parts of ourselves even when we feel like a fairly durable rose quartz stone. Our positive image of ourselves can easily get chipped or flawed when we compare ourselves to harder and more perfect crystals.
But even chipped rose quartz is still a stone that emanates gentle and compassionate vibrations. And we can learn to do that too. When you’re harsh on yourself and quick to compare your endeavors and skills to others’ achievements, sync your energy to the ones of the rose quartz crystal around you and learn to look at yourself with more understanding.
Rhodochrosite: treat yourself with compassionÂ
Self-love is essential as it sets the tone for the other relationships you encounter. It allows you to set healthy boundaries, heal past wounds and keep an open heart for receiving love from others. And self-compassion is a big part of learning and growing to love and accept ourselves.
Rhodochrosite can teach us self-compassion and self-forgiveness. It can teach us to embrace our inner child and validate painful feelings instead of ignoring them and hurting ourselves more. Rhodochrosite can teach us how to be warm and kind to ourselves, especially when we don’t meet our own expectations.
You can wear or hold a rhodochrosite crystal and allow it to infuse your energy fields with its energy. Allow yourself to feel and think about what hurts you. Allow yourself to make mistakes, feel inadequate, or feel sad, angry, or gloomy even though you want a perfect cheerful day.
Green Aventurine: question your negative thoughts
We all have those less pleasant days when it feels challenging to love ourselves and accept who we are at that moment. Many negative thoughts flood our minds, and we can’t stop self-criticizing.
Green Aventurine is a crystal for those who often put themselves down and fail to see their progress and personal growth. Learn from the aventurine’s energy to doubt the objectivity of your negative thoughts.Â
To learn to love yourself more with the help of aventurine, you must reflect on the validity of your self-criticism. Where are those negative opinions coming from, and why should you believe they are real?Â
Aventurine can support your efforts of dismissing negative intrusive thoughts and looking at reality with more self-confidence and a more balanced perspective.Â
Rhodonite: break harmful patterns
Sometimes, guilt and shame stop us from fully embracing who we are and loving ourselves, which often leads to self-destructive behaviors. Rhodonite is a deeply healing crystal that teaches us how to break patterns of self-harm and destruction.
If you are too harsh on yourself and often feel like impulsively punishing yourself for perceived “mistakes,” keep a rhodonite crystal close to your body and ease your soul using its energy. Self-love must start with self-forgiveness.Â
You can also practice meditation using a rhodonite tumbled crystal. Allow its nourishing energy to guide your meditation and learn how to observe your self-harming patterns. Noticing and acknowledging harmful habits is the first step toward not repeating them.
Amethyst: connect to your higher self
Amethyst can teach us how to love ourselves on a spiritual level. It carries such serene and peaceful energies that it can move us to tears. Amethyst is a fundamental crystal for your personal growth journey and for developing into the best version of yourself.
This calm purple gemstone will help you tap into your higher self, listen to your needs and intuition, and appreciate your efforts, trials, and errors. And if anxiety, fear, and a restless mind impede you from having quality alone time and reflections on yourself, amethyst crystals will help you calm all that turmoil.
Treat your crystals with care
Crystals can teach you how to treat yourself with love and care, but you should also learn how to care for your crystals. They carry their unique energies, but crystals also absorb and hold onto energy. Thus, the gemstones become heavy; they absorb energy from the environment that is not good for you or simply interferes with your intentions.
So just as you would clean your working tools, you must regularly cleanse away your crystals’ negative or unwanted energies. To do that, you can:
- Smoke your crystals with palo santo or white sage
- Cleanse your stones under running water, ocean water, or moon water
- Use visualization techniques to cleanse the unwanted energy
- Place your crystals on a bigger selenite crystal to cleanse energyÂ
- Bury the crystals into the ground for a few hours or days to restore them to their initial state
- Use sound and music to cleanse the crystals
- Let your crystals sunbathe or on a windowsill under the moon’s light
You can cleanse your gemstones regularly or when you feel their vibes get heavy or burdened. So check on your crystals and harness their powers with respect and gratitude.
About the author:
Xenia Mateiu founded Village Rock Shop in Carlsbad, California, a gift shop where you can find ethically sourced crystal products. Xenia loves to study the power of crystals and hopes to make these magical gemstones accessible to anyone. She also likes to share her knowledge and experience with crystals, gemstones, and geodes with the community visiting the gift shop.