My great aunt used to keep crystals in her bra. I knew this about her before I’d even met her. The crystals would change, depending on how she was feeling or what was going on with her.
20 years ago this was very unusual, which explains why my mum whispered it to me one Christmas. Crystals didn’t disappear, but when I was growing up they certainly weren’t mainstream. These days, amongst my friends (and social media feed), it’s unusual if you’re not carrying a crystal on your person. I have two amethysts in my bedroom, one on either side of the bed. A friend of mine carries rose quartz in her pocket at all times. At night, when I scroll through the endless content stream that is Instagram stories before sleep, I see people cleansing, holding and meditating with their crystals. Hopefully they all know that you’re supposed to cover your phone with a shungite crystal to reduce the radiation once you’ve finished scrolling.
Sitting alongside luxury yoga pants, alkaline juices, sage bundles and sound baths, crystals are another example of how aspects of Eastern religions, philosophies and healing practices have been transported into Western wellness. All of this is being lapped up by younger generations who are, on the whole, more spiritual than their traditionally religious elders.
Emma Lucy is a healer who practices with crystals. To be precise, she describes herself as ‘a psychic, a clairvoyant, a clair-everything, a healer, a reader, an intuitive, a coach, a teacher’. She has been working with crystals and energy for the last 15 years, helping people all over the world to heal pain, find joy and achieve success in their lives. Her book ‘The Power of Crystal Healing: Change Your Energy And Live A High-Vibe Life’will be released next spring, published by Pop Press which is an imprint of the very mainstream publisher Penguin. They’re hailing Emma’s book as ‘the ultimate crystal bible for modern mystics’
If I’m honest, the crystals I keep at home are decorative for the most part but I’ve always been intrigued by their power and wanted to believe that they are more than rocks. I went to see Emma for a healing session to find out whether crystal healing could work for me.
‘The fluorite likes you’ she told me as I arrived at her home, walking into a room filled with candles and crystals. ‘It’s been gravitating towards you the entire time you’ve been making your way here’. As my Uber made its way towards Emma, I had been overcome by an intense feeling of drowsiness. Heavy-lidded I did catch myself wondering whether fluorite could be responsible for that as I lay down on the bed for my session. Sceptics will say I was just hungover, but I’m not normally one for falling asleep on the job so I’m going to say this was the crystal drawing me in.
‘Breathe in deeply’ Emma said counting towards and back from several times. It’s only when you’re forced to breathe like this that you realised how shallow and anxious your breathing really is day to day. I am never not shocked by how badly I breathe.
What happened next is difficult to describe, it was somewhere between Reiki and meditation. Afterwards it felt like I’d been lying down for no time at all, but during the session it was like I’d been on the bed forever. My body felt heavy and then light as Emma moved around me, I held the fluorite in one hand and a clear quartz in the other. At times they felt hot, similar to the feeling you get when you lean against a metal radiator, though never burning. And then, slowly, they were cold.
Emma laid several other crystals along the key chakra lines of my body which is intended to ‘balance the energy field’, one was between my eyebrows where the third eye is supposed to be. She then moved around my body, lightly touching me and working with my chakras. I tried to open my eyes a few times, as any journalist would, and struggled to keep them open. I was not asleep but I was definitely not completely awake.
Returning home, I felt light and positive. Emma had talked me through the energies she had sensed, it was like a therapy session but after the most wonderful massage I’d ever had. My boyfriend was on the sofa watching *Stranger Things *and when I started telling him about my experience he told me to ‘chill out’. ‘Do I sound ridiculous?’ I asked, and he gave me a look that told me he thought I had finally lost the plot. At this point in the article, perhaps you also think that. For everyone who meet who extolls the virtues of crystals and crystal healing, you’ll encounter three who are sceptical and dismissive.
Leaving my session with Emma all I can say is that I felt better, better in my body and better in myself. I needed to understand more about what had happened so I sat down for coffee with her, if there was a way of feeling how I felt that day all the time I needed to know. Indeed, Emma recalls her dad telling her ‘you’ll never make any money selling rocks’ when she first started doing energy work at the age of 21. And, while it’s true that science says ‘there is no evidence that crystal healing works over and above a placebo effect’, there’s certainly something in all of this that is making people feel better.
And so, somewhere in the grey area between science, spirituality and mysticism there are reasons why we feel certain things when we interact with crystals. Quartz, for instance, is piezoelectric. It conducts electricity which is why its used in watches. Piezoelectricity is also how voice recognition software works, when you speak into the microphone on your phone it turns the sound energy in your voice into electrical signals your phone interprets and turns into text. Emma explains that different people believe different things about how crystals work but, generally speaking, the simplest way to describe it is that your body generate electricity which interacts with the crystal. ‘It’s different for everyone because spirituality is different for everyone’, she says, ‘that’s what I want to get across in my book. When you walk into a bar and look around you to decide if you fancy anyone you think about what they’re wearing and how they look. That’s how our relationship with crystals should be, it’s about spending time with them, working out what feels good and nurturing that. I don’t want to be prescriptive.’
‘At the end of the day’, Emma says, ‘all any of this is is about understanding yourself…it’s about connecting with yourself. I like to think of it as unravelling. We over complicate everything. Meditation, at its simplest, is just controlling your breath. We’re constantly telling ourselves we’ve got to get shit done, invoking the fight or flight mode. Because of this we are never thinking about our breathing, about how our ego is making us feel’.
So, back to the big question, does crystal healing work? That depends how you define ‘work’. For me, it worked. In the same way that massage, meditation or talking therapy works for me. It might work for you, but it depends what you want to achieve and how open you are to using the time you have to achieve it. I wanted to relax, connect with myself and stop my negative anxious thought cycle from leading my brain to eat itself. For a while, I managed all of those things with Emma’s help and felt the effects for days afterwards.
Call crystal healing placebo if you want, perhaps it is. But, a placebo that makes you feel good is surely better than nothing at all. In any case, there has been research into the ‘placebo effect’ which found that some people actually respond to a placeboeven though, according to science, it shouldn’t have an effect on their body. This is because they believe they are being treated and expect to feel a certain way. If you are open to crystals, if you want them to work and believe that they can make you feel better about your love life/North Korea/work stress then, in my experience, they probably will.
When all is said and done, I’ve certainly heard people suggest far more ridiculous ways of dealing with the above than sitting down with a crystal in your hand and trying to clear your mind. If it’s good enough for Adele, it’s good enough for me.
The Power of Crystal Healing: Change Your Energy And Live A High-Vibe Lifeby Emma Lucy Knowles is published by Pop Press and available to pre-order now
Connect directly with Emma here
Like this? You might also be interested in:
The Astrological Concept Of Saturn Return Could Explain The Changes Of Your Late 20s
Follow Vicky on Twitter @Victoria_Spratt
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.