Excellent article by Benjamin Dean on Healing gemstones and crystals.

Benjamin Dean is one of many holistic healers.  As I have said many times you take to yourself what is good for yourself.  DBLorgan   How in the world can a rock help us to heal? The idea of a stone healing a human being must seem ridiculous to anyone who has yet to experience it. There was a time when I was also skeptical—not just skeptical, but would laugh if you even suggested that rocks, minerals or metals could do anything but just sit there. It could maybe look pretty. It must have been quite a while ago. I have been a practicing gem therapist (for myself, mostly) since the early eighties.

I have a pile of raw gems next to my bed, and sleep with a beautiful ocean jade under my pillow almost every night. Next to my bed are aragonite, quartz, amethyst, and copper—to name a few. I can absolutely understand how it would seem absurd that these stones actually do anything outside of appeal to the eye. A skeptic would likely chalk all this “healing business” up to imagination—which, hey—imagination is a good thing too, so if it works, go for it! It is true that gemstones can heal us. Anything and everything is a potential healer. To understand this, it is important to first have some sense of how the natural holistic healing process works. First off, when we speak about the body, we are including the subtle bodies (i.e. the physical, mental, emotional, and even spiritual bodies). Some things are obvious, and some things are subtle (less obvious). “Subtle bodies” is just another way of referring to the experience that surrounds your thoughts, feelings, nuances, and emotions. Keep in mind that our entire bodily system is nothing more than energy that shows up in various patterns and densities. Our thoughts and our feelings are connected to our physical bodies and have a density of their own. We are all built pretty much the same. Diversity has its place, and we are all individuals, yet nature created patterns that work the same in all of us to keep our hearts beating, our blood flowing, and so on. When these patterns of energy work together in a balanced way then we experience our health. These patterns can be disrupted. When this happens we experience poor health. This can be anything from a headache to the worst that you can imagine in terms of poor health, even disease. Hence the popular splitting of the word (dis-ease) for harmony feels good and disharmony doesn’t. Balance is easy on us, and imbalances feel not at ease, or dis-eased. Nature will heal itself if it can. It will if we let it. It is ourselves who distort this harmony with our lop-sided outlooks and behavior. Correcting this lop-sidedness one way or another is what healing is all about. Healing it in a natural way is much preferred. Anything with an inherent harmony can act like a tuning fork to our poor patterns and challenge us to retune ourselves to return to the original organic natural patterns of energy that belong to our bodies. A good piece of art can work wonders, as well as music, dance, a pleasant person, or anything else exhibiting integrity in terms of energy patterns. Anything can heal us if we are open to suggestion by external tuning fork of another’s harmony. Receptivity is a necessity. Being open to it is the key. Gemstones radiate pure patterns. Gemstones resonate with unmatched consistency. Gemstones sing their incredible songs of structure, balance, wavelength and frequency and can bring us back into harmony. Raw energy establishes patterns on an initial primal scale when it takes the form of subatomic particles. These particles combine and cooperate to produce atoms, molecules and minerals. Mother Nature ushers forth all that is possible in the natural world, building up its complexity from the mineral kingdom to the plant kingdom and on to the animal kingdom. As human beings, our bodies are an incredible and complex masterpiece of nature’s organization and balance. Plants also have their healing properties. They too perform a special magic in terms of reminding the body of harmonic patterns in regards to fluidity and flow. There energy is a moving one, while gemstones remain relatively the same and whose patterns are incorruptible. Each has its place. Herbal remedies are more connected to the sophistication of feelings with their fluid nature. Gemstones are more suited to tune the inherent pattern and are a reliable and consistent source of pure frequency and pattern. How does all this work on our bodies? Nature repeats itself over and over again. Once it finds a pattern that works, it builds on it. Every kingdom and species less complex than our human form is in a sense a testing field for patterns and systems that work. We are all us, the entire natural world built with the same patterns—the same materials. This is how we can heal each other. The patterns are the same, yet the integrity can falter. Getting close to beings with a high integrity is good for us, and helps us to align to that integrity. Each stone resonates with a slightly different pattern geometrically. These same geometric patterns reside in our systems, organs, etc. To hold a Rose Quartz up to our heart is to ask the structural patterns active in our subtle bodies to align themselves and operate effortlessly and with purity. Any unresolved heart issues will be challenged to break up, allowing us to let go of whatever is distorting our energies. One often experiences a flash of imagery around the past experience that initially caused the distortion. Gemstones are living creatures. They are active participants in nature. Protons, neutrons and electrons are flying around in an absolute bliss of balance and participation, upholding patterns of sacred geometry. Yes, geometry is sacred because nothing could be built in the natural world without it. Biology is math. Nature is an exploration of possibility through patterns that work in balance, creating the living, behaving, and interactive world that we all live in—in and through. Healing is often a matter of recovering our bodies inherent harmony by letting go of what we are holding onto— our own ideas about how, where, when, what and why—mental frameworks that have us behaving in inorganic ways. Our organic ways are right there to be expressed and experienced effortlessly. Mother Nature takes care of it all, if we can only learn to respect her and surrender to her wisdom—the wisdom of spontaneity, joy, accepting all others as equal, and together sharing in her abundance. - Benjamin Dean