Crystals are a lovely addition to anyone's bag of tricks, and have a variety of uses and ritual applications.

Don't be afraid by the term ritual, however, as you will see, rituals can simply be a more enhanced way of making things happen for you.

uses

You can use crystals as part of your every day toolkit and can apply them to as many things as you wish to from healing yourself or others, as part of your meditation exercises, with tarot readings, to enhance your home or workspace. In fact whatever you want to use your crystal for, providing the intent is good, it will be beneficial to you.

The following are a few examples to help you get started;

enhancing the home

In addition to being beautiful to look at and decorative, crystals can create a cleansing, balancing and neutralized environment. In addition you can uses crystals in your home to create a sacred space for meditation or contemplation.

Creating a sacred spot in the main room of the home can help remove negative energies and introduce a calming influence, ideal for relaxing and recharging in.

You can also add crystals to your bath, choose a crystal whose properties you feel you would benefit from and add them to your bath, with an appropriate essential oil, or on their own.

Crystals can help in the garden too, choose a quartz, emerald (not gem quality), aquamarine or jade and place them around the plants to aid growth, or heal them. House plants benefit from having the crystal buried in their soil as well.

in the work place

Use crystals to create a calm environment to work in and they can enhance your working space in simple ways. Think about what you need to change or improve in your work and use those crystals whose properties can help to aid you.

Place a bowl of crystals next to the telephone and choose crystals that will either help encourage calls to come in, or fend off unwanted disturbances, or allow you to confidently handle calls for instance.

Place a clear quartz on or next to your computer to help reduce any negative emissions that cause headaches and stress, or even eye strain.

Use your favourite crystal as a worry stone and keep it close to hand in a pocket or drawer, and use it to help calm you down in stressful moments, amethyst is ideal for this.

Use a bowl carved out of stone or crystal as a container on your desk, again choose a crystal that you like and find peaceful to look at.

As you can see there are a number of ways to introduce the properties of crystals into your work place. Be imaginative and use them in whichever way suits you.

in tarot readings

If you enjoy reading tarot for yourself or others, try using a crystal to enhance your readings. If you are doing a reading on love and relationships for instance, place a rose quartz crystal near the spread to enhance these energies, or use an amethyst to enhance spiritual energies when asking a question about your spiritual journey.

Also try storing your cards with either an amethyst or a clear quartz to enhance the deck energies, protect it and to cleanse it after each reading. Remember to cleanse the crystal regularly if you use your deck on a regular basis to read for others.

meditation

Using a crystal during meditation can be a wonderful aid to help your mind find a restful place in which to recharge.

You can introduce the crystal into your everyday, or weekly practice just by holding it in your hands whilst you enter into your normal meditation.

Alternatively you can actively use a crystal by focusing on it, instead of closing your eyes and allow the deep qualities of the crystal to enter into your consciousness. After a while, close your eyes, and notice how you feel, what your thoughts are doing and how the crystal has enhanced your emotions and state of mind.

Experiment with different crystals to find out which one does what for you, and then repeat the meditations that you found most beneficial.

divination

A crystal pendulum has amazing qualities as a divination tool, as well as being useful in healing. The most common crystals used for a pendulum are clear quartz and amethyst, and both are equally as accurate, just choose whichever feels right to you.

As with all crystals, always cleanse your pendulum after purchasing and regularly cleanse it if you use it often. After cleansing you will need to charge your pendulum in order to get the best use out of it. Look in the cleansing section for more information on both these processes.

Once cleansed and charged you can now program your pendulum. Programming is simply taking the charging process one step further. Since the crystal already has your intent charged into it, in order to program it you are simply finding out how it will work for you. To do this, hold the pendulum in your right hand, ensuring that your arm is supported, to avoid any movement, and focus on the pendulum. Ask it to show you how it wishes to move in response to questions, after a while it may swing back and forth or in a circular motion, or even both. Now ask it to stop. Then ask how it will signify YES, again once it has shown you its movement, ask it to stop, then ask for the movement that signifies NO. Lastly ask it to show you No Comment, or Not Sure.

You have now programmed your pendulum, you have YES, NO, STOP and potentially Not Sure. Test these answers out by asking questions which you know the answer to, such as your name, date of birth or sex. Remember this is a Yes/No divination tool so you will need to formulate your question accordingly.

Now enjoy your new insightful tool. By experimenting with it you will find out what its limitations are, for instance it may not tell you anything about your future husband, but it will tell you if you will get an interview or not for the job you just applied for, or if you will meet someone interesting in the pub tonight!

rituals

Rituals are simply the exercise of a regular procedure or act, performed with some degree of ceremony, this can be anything from casting a spell, saying a daily affirmation to a regular night time meditation.

Crystals are often used in rituals as they have enhanced energies and are able to focus the objective of the ritual and/or can be used to absorb the intention until the will has been done.

When using crystals in rituals, or spells, always ensure that you use the right crystal, they can create powerful effects and if you choose the wrong one then the intended outcome may not turn out as expected.

Also ensure your own purpose is purely for good, remember what you put out into the world will come back to you threefold. Ensuring that you do everything with love and goodwill is the only way to ensure beneficial outcomes.

Simpler rituals are the use of affirmations, ritually saying your affirmations out loud every morning or night, are a form of spell casting as you are putting your intention and concentration out into the universal energies for action and accountability.

Again crystals have a very powerful affect in enhancing the results of affirmations, and providing you have positive intent, using a crystal can help things happen more quickly.

With affirmations and spellcasting it is often ideal to carry the crystal you use to enhance the ritual or to be imbued with the objective of the ritual, with you until the results have been achieved.