whips your hair around your face? Do you feel relaxed submerged in a pool of Dead Sea mud, heated by hot springs and surrounded by a gentle snowfall while you tip your head back and cover your eyes with cucumber slices? Draw the mental image of that relaxation into your mind, but don’t stop there. Imagine you can feel it emotionally and sense it physically, too, and tell yourself you can return to this feeling and sensation anytime you like by revisiting your stone.
Emotional and physical imagination are key factors in centering work as well as manifestation, and the more detailed your imagining of the experience, the easier it will be to manifest later. If you have trouble imagining sensations, try taking an improv or yoga class to attune more acutely to your sensory reactions. For emotional awareness, consider counseling or a poetry class. The more vividly you can conjure up an emotional and sensational experience, the more likely you can manifest it into reality. The number one trick to manifestation is to connect your future goals to something tangible: connect the joy you hope to feel with the sensations of joy you once felt in the past. Draw up those joyful emotions and inject them into the goal you are targeting. Picture yourself feeling that joy in the new situation. Make it tangible, and use the crystal as a reminder of that goal.
If you are having difficulty focusing on what you want to manifest, try asking yourself. Literally ask yourself out loud, “What do I want?” Or you may choose to write it in a journal, like crafting a letter to yourself, and then await the response. If you feel blocked, try focusing instead on what you want to feel emotionally or as a state of being. Love? Connection? Success? Health? Hope?
One way to prepare your mind is to flip the script upside down. Instead of asking yourself what you want, try to remember what you want as if you are remembering an event that hasn’t happened yet. It may seem weird to use the word “memory” here when you’re trying to remember something from your future, but we all know time isn’t linear, right? We can remember future states, even if they are fictions. In fact, sometimes fictions become the future, like when a fiction writer like Ray Bradbury imagined retinal scanners and flat-screen televisions for his book Fahrenheit 451 during a time when locks were mechanical and televisions used cathode rays. This fiction became a reality when scientists engineered these devices more than fifty years later. Don’t be afraid to dream or remember a new future—this is the heart of manifestation. Dream it. Become it.
Use the stone to amplify your experience and do some of the work for you. You might think of stones as programs you script and run on your computer as you prepare them with your intentions. Stones operate like scripts, working beneath the surface to make things run smoothly. A script can be as simple as just the word “relax” said once or repeatedly over the stone. You might feel guided to hold the stone very close to your mouth and speak into it as if you are telling it your deepest, darkest secrets. Some crystal workers take a more alchemical approach and write the intention on a slip of paper that is then wrapped around the stone with ribbons. Infuse the crystal with your intentions to pair its own inner strength with yours as you ground, center, and relax.
Vibrations and Intentions to Manifest Wellness
You can work with a myriad of available gemstones and minerals. No list of gemstones (including the one later in this book) is ever truly complete, because you yourself have significant agency over how you choose to use them. Though we may recommend indigo stones like Lapis Lazuli or Iolite to enhance your intuition, you might find you are more drawn to red or yellow stones like Citrine or Ruby for this work instead. In fact, you may find that color has no significance at all, or that one stone in particular, such as Quartz Crystal, resonates so richly with you that it is the only one in your collection. When it comes to crystal intentions, what matters most is your attunement to your own sense of being. Listen to your stones. Pay attention to how they speak to you. Develop your own unique rapport with your stones.
Even with a list of stones and their correspondences for manifestation, new varieties of stone are still being catalogued, such as the ocean-dappled Larimar, which was rediscovered just a few decades ago in the Dominican Republic. And labels for stones change over time, too, so the Quartz Crystal of one generation is the Ice Crystal of another. These new discoveries and labels make it impossible to establish any kind of definitive guide to stones. In fact, we would emphasize the word guide here and remind you that guides do not dictate so much as suggest. It may seem helpful to have an idea of what others think of a stone’s so-called purpose, but you will find stones resonate with you uniquely. You have your own energetic vibration and a unique body chemistry. In this book, we may offer our experiences with the frequency of each stone as we know it, but it is always important to remember that stones will resonate uniquely with you and what works for one of us may not work for you.
One person may find Amethyst calming or supportive as it helps him to fall asleep when placed under his pillow at night. Another person may feel “buzzy,” restless, and destabilized when she holds a piece of Amethyst before bed. Until you hold a stone in your hand, you cannot clearly sense how it makes you feel or if it is the right choice for you at the moment. Ground, center, and attune to your stone to hear or sense if it is the right one for you right now.
You can carry a grounding stone like Jasper in your pocket or as jewelry, or you can incorporate it into a meditation to support your vibrational energy and stabilization. In this case, the Jasper becomes the tool you will use to create the foundation on which you build your sense of comfort and support. If you are looking to manifest a desire such as the completion of a creative project, you might be inspired to pair Jasper with something you feel resonates with your desire or goal, such as the creative stone Yellow Fluorite. If you are trying to build love or romance on the grounding foundation of Jasper, then you might choose Rose Quartz or Rhodochrosite to attract and support that love. And if you are developing your spiritual senses and intuition, you might select an Anhydrite or Amethyst to build a spire off the ground of the Jasper straight into the metaphorical clouds.
Intuitive Crystal Drawing Exercise
The following exercise is a beautiful way to exercise your ability to sense energy and attune to your intuition. This is the Intuitive Crystal Drawing Exercise. Begin by laying out your collection of gemstones and minerals before you, either on a large tabletop or on the floor, whichever is more comfortable to you. Sit for a moment and set an intention for yourself that you will choose the stone which will best support your highest good for the day. If you’ve never set an intention before, there are a number of ways you can do this. One way is to simply take a moment to make a statement in positive language that articulates your goal or desire. Another way to do it is to follow the SMART acronym, which first appeared in the early 1980s in a management magazine. A SMART goal is a goal which is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. Creating an intention for your stone involves creating a statement which is all of these things. For example, I might intend to attract love, and so my intention might be a statement I either write or say to myself like so: “I infuse this stone with my desire to attract love, which I will know by feeling light and connected to another person or people before the end of today.”
This method of setting an intention, however, may not resonate with everyone. You can also simply remember a time you felt the way you are hoping to feel, such as a time in the past when you felt joyful and loved. You can also imagine what it might feel like to experience that emotion. Get as detailed as you can, pulling in the physical sensations and emotional vibrations you imagine go along with that experience—maybe you imagine you’d taste cookies and smell roses, for instance, or your skin might tingle; whatever it is, really feel it. If these methods still do not resonate with you, you can also simply clear your mind and ask the stone to help you release that which doesn’t serve you and attract that which does.
Setting
