Episode 1 - Spring Renewal Ritual

Introduction - About Intentional Spiritual Living with Brian
Two-Card Tarot deep dive - The Tower and The Star
Spring Renewal Ritual - a beautiful ritual for spring and life during the pandemic
Red Calcite - How to harness the power of this beautiful gemstone

Transcript

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Brian. Hello everyone, and welcome to intentional spiritual living with Brian. I am Brian Campbell, your host, and this is episode one. You Brian. Hello friends, and welcome to Episode One of intentional, spiritual living with Brian. I am so excited you're here. I just want to take a couple of minutes and talk about this podcast and what it's going to be all about and who may benefit the most from it. First and foremost, any one can benefit from this podcast. That's who I'm making it for, anyone and everyone. It's about spiritual living. It is about combining your love of nature crystals, rituals, gemstones, tarot cards, runes, all metaphysical items and spiritual items, and how to use them for your own well being, how to use it to manifest your every dream, your every desire. I want to always provide good content in these podcasts, and I always want to provide a little bit of education as well. Over the coming weeks and months, I will have several guest speakers talking about paranormal activity type stuff, paranormal studies, astrology, casting rooms, to name a few. And I always want to throw in some education. And so today I want to talk about the tagline for my store, Delaware, Ohio's premier metaphysical shop. A lot of us throw these terms around, but we're not quite sure what they mean. I've done that in the past, and so I like to talk about this notion of walking the walk when you practice your spirituality, and what that means. It means understanding the whys of what we do. Take, for instance, a ritual that you're throwing together because you need some prosperity in your life, and the ritual calls for seven bay leaves. I ask you not to go out and collect seven bay leaves, because a recipe said to do so, but understand the significance of not only the bay leaf and its metaphysical properties, but why seven and so I like to share that in these podcasts, and today I simply want to define metaphysical for those that may not know what that word means. It is the study of what cannot be reached through objective study. Let me expand upon that. Say that you have a ghostly friend that lives in your home, and you know this in your heart. You've walked through the part of your house and it gets cold and you smell smoke when there's no reason for it to be cold or smell smoke. You've seen a door open and shut, and you're the only one home these things, these phenomenons, cannot be explained from an encyclopedia or from a scientist. Typically think about that when you think about metaphysical when you think about this spiritual path that we're on. I also want to talk about who this is for from a practice standpoint, there are going to be Wiccan topics, pagan topics, witchy topics, druid topics, to name a few. This does not mean that to enjoy and gain value out of this podcast, you have to practice any of those paths. This is open for everyone. This is how I run my shop, Raven's cauldron, and this is how I will run this podcast. I want to share positivity and prosperity and self care through manifestation with each and every one of you, real quick. For those that don't know me and haven't been in the shop, I am Brian Campbell. I'm 47 years old. I've worked in information technology for 25 years, in the database field, and this past June, decided to throw in the towel for my good paying job, because I wanted to do something that was really important to me, and information technology was a way to get a paycheck. It was not a way for spiritual fulfillment, and so I started a Tarot reading practice called Tarot on winter. I've been reading Tarot cards for decades, but I really had the call in a non brick and mortar economy to open a brick and mortar store in my little town of Delaware, Ohio. There's. Ever been one here. The response has been huge. The support has been wonderful. I've met so many dear friends in such a short time. I've only been open for seven months. I've always been attracted to things that I can't see and touch, esoteric stuff, Arcane stuff, gemstones, crystals, tarot cards, witch balls, all this stuff, oracle cards. As a child, where my parents would take me with them, and we went to towns in Ohio, I would always be driven to go to the metaphysical store, and I would spend hours devouring everything they had. And that is where my love of this was born. And I am so excited to share it with each and every one of you. We're going to be throwing out a podcast every week. It's going to be structured pretty much the same. I'm going to do a two card Tarot draw and talk about those two cards and what they mean and how you can use that in your life. And then I'm going to get to the content of the Week. This week, we're talking about a spring renewal ritual, and I'm giving you all the specifics of what to do to enhance your lives this spring in this crazy pandemic time. And then I'm going to always pick a crystal of the week, and we're going to talk about the metaphysical properties of such a crystal and how you can use them in your life. I'm so excited to be doing this with each and every one of you. I hope you tune in weekly, and I also hope those that are local will come and visit me in the store, which hopefully will be opening soon. We're hearing the first week of May. With no further ado, let's get started. You. Ah, the Tarot, how I live my life kind of an anchor for me, if you will. I've been studying and practicing for decades, and I love sharing the wisdom of the Tarot with each and every one of you. I picked a very special combination today for our first episode one podcast, and it's very relevant to the situation that's happening not just in my town, not just in my state, not just in my country, but in the world. It's affecting each and every one of us in a very similar, if not exact, same way. And I want to talk about it, talk about the message. Talk about a little bit of the Tarot theory that makes the message come to us, if you will. For those that follow me, follow my business page on Facebook, coming to my store, you know that I pull a special Tarot Spread every week on Sunday, and I pull a major arcana card, and I pair it up with another random card from a 78 card tarot deck, and I weave together the combination, and kind of let it guide my week. And when I say guide, so the first card I pull is a major arcana card, either major arcana zero through 21 let's just say I pulled Major Arcana zero the fool, and it's all about the the carefree nature of the fool, and not carefully planning and having strategy, but letting letting things happen as they will, in a carefree, happy way. And I take that message and combine it with another card and walk through my week with that guidance. One thing that is surely true about Tarot is the cards never lie. We've proven this over and over again, and so today, the combination that I want to talk about is not a random pull, like I would normally do. I'm actually choosing to combine Major Arcana, 16, the tower with Major Arcana 17, the star for our message of hope for the pandemic that we're all living in currently. Major Arcana 16, the tower. If you're following along and not driving, perhaps open up a Google search and type in the tower tarot and click on images, and you will see a litany of different interpretations of a very similar image. I'm going to speak from the writer weight image, but the message is the same regardless of the deck you're using. You see a picture of a very solid rock foundation Tower, a beautiful castle tower, and there's a crown, not unlike a crown on top of a human being that's falling off. And there's fire shooting out the windows, and there are two people plummeting head first to the ground. Ground, or what we assume is the ground, it could be water, because we can't see the bottom of the card. And that's the beauty of tarot, that we can't always make a conclusion that these people are immediately going to die. In fact, quite honestly, I don't think so at all at a tower moment, but it is a scary card. And when we talk Tarot Bad Boys, there's always people that put together lists of the scary cards, or when I do tarot readings in person for clients, if the death card comes up or the tower card comes up, people want to run and hide a lot of times, and they're scared of that. And I'm saying here you do not need to be scared of a tower moment. We friends are living a tower moment in the world with the pandemic, people are getting sick, people are dying. Our lives are upside down and uprooted. We can't open our businesses. We can barely go to the store. We must wear masks outside. And for those of us in the United States, that's something really new for us, something we've never had to do we've been spoiled a bit, I'd say. And life is changing as we sit here and talk about this. So let's usher in major arcana 17, the star. And so again, this is 17, and tower was 16. So we're in a bit of a chronology here in the fool's journey of Major Arcana cards. And I will talk about that after I talk about the star, Major Arcana, 17, the star. My favorite tarot card of any of all cards is the star, because I've had so many moments in my life where I've had a tower moment and I've emerged stronger, happier, more fulfilled, a better person, a more authentic person. And so let's talk about her. When you look at the imagery of the star, you see a woman who is completely naked, and she's holding two earthen vessels full overflowing with water. She's pulling one and pouring one into a pond of water, and one behind her into various streams. One of those streams feeds that pond of water. We don't know where the others go, but we have to assume that it's nourishing the earth and going to another body of water. What does that mean? Why is she naked? Why is she pouring water? Why are the stars all around her? One thing we can say for sure is that water in a tarot deck is representative of emotions, and I like to look at the imagery of the star, especially in the pond of water. Let's talk about that. There are five ripples in that water, representing her five senses. I like to think that she is returning her old self to the earth so that she can take the lessons that she's learned in her tower moment and emerge as a new person, and why would she want to return it to the earth, we might ask? And it's simply because there's value into who she was, there's value about her life prior to the tower moment. But as she goes on down the line, she's gained wisdom, and she's not the same person that my friends is what is happening right now with us, and why I wanted to choose these two cards. We are going through our tower moment right now in the world, and when we come out the other side of it, life is going to be different. We're going to be vulnerable. That's why she has no clothing on. There's still going to be challenges, but we're going to be better equipped to deal with them. That's why you see a mountain in the star card in the background, seemingly a far way away, if you will. But you also see up close a tree with a bird and flowers and plants emerging. Life goes on. Life will go on, albeit it will be different, and we will be stronger, and we will be more authentic, more intentional people, and that is the message today of the tower and the star. I wanted to talk a little bit before we move on to our spring renewal ritual about the chronology here. And I pointed out that 16 and 17 on the fool's journey are chronology, chronological numbers and so real quick, the structure of a tarot deck, you have 21 Major Arcana cards, and then you have four suits of minor arcanas and court cards. But I just want to talk real quick about those 21 Major Arcana cards. Those are the very important cards, and it. Tarot deck. Not that every card is not important, because they are. But these are the major life moments, if you will. And if you were to do a meditation exercise, and you were to lay out in chronological order, Major Arcana zero, the fool, all the way up to Major Arcana 21 the world. And you were to really take an hour or so and just meditate and look at that imagery, you will quickly be able to see that it is very symbolic of a lifetime and not one lifetime. And this is the way I like to teach this. I call it a lifetime within a lifetime. And what I mean by that is that we all have this fool's journey where we start out carefree, excited, packing light, ready to tackle the world. And we go through a litany of trials and tribulations, highs and lows, whatever it is you're working on in your life at the time, until you reach completion, and then we can start over. That's a lifetime within a lifetime. I know I've had many iterations of the fool's journey in my life, and I like to journal them. It's really fun, but that's how I come to understand and teach others about the Fool's Journey. Major Arcana zero through 21 is a lifetime within a lifetime. And currently, when we're going through this pandemic that we're talking about today, we're having our tower moment and our star moment. And I want to say one thing before we move on, the star is such a beautiful and hopeful card. It gives us a renewed sense of purpose, a renewed sense of life. And again, we don't know what life's going to look like on the other side of this, but we know it's going to go on, and we're going to be a change to society. And we will have gained wisdom, and we will know how to deal with these type of things as they come about, and we will be kind of like that star where we're pouring our old notions and beliefs back into the earth to reemerge as a changed person. And that's a wonderful feeling. That's a wonderful place to be. So again, that's our message today, friends. Is Major Arcana 16, the tower, moving into major arcana 17, the star. And I feel like we are in the transition of the star right now. Our economies are starting to open back up. Life is going to start to return. I don't want to say return to normal, because I'm not sure that it will be normal. But really friends, what does normal mean? We adapt on our paths, we figure things out, and we become better people, better societies, better human beings, a better world. And that is the deepest message. Remember early on when I said that the tarot cards never lie. I wanted to tell you really quickly that the three weeks leading up to the changes that began in late February, early March, with this pandemic, while I pull the cards for my general readings every week on Facebook with the Major Arcana card and a combination of another card. I do that every week and post them five days a week, Monday through Friday. I also pull a spread for me to guide my personal week. And for the three weeks leading up to the pandemic, I pulled the tower card, and it kind of, I don't want to say, scared me, but it did, because it never happens. And it was predicting and telling me what was about to happen. But the thing about Tarot that you got to understand is you don't always know what it's saying. So there's a tower moment getting ready to come, but I didn't know what it was. I had heard of the pandemic. I had heard of coronavirus and covid 19, but it wasn't really a factor in our world, and I watched it unfold. So that is an example of how the cards simply never lie. They tell us what we need to know. And the tarot reader is the interpreter, the person that understands them backwards and forwards and is able to tell the story and put context in them. It's such a beautiful practice. Friends, if you've never had a Tarot reading, I highly encourage you to get one. Such an ancient, accurate and beautiful practice. So excited to move on to our spring renewal ritual friends rituals such as. An important part of our craft. I know me personally, I love to build rituals, execute rituals. It's so soul nurturing for me, if you will. It's something I practice daily that could be simple and that could be complex. I designed this spring renewal ritual with each and every one of you in mind, and I hope that it is something that you will execute on and always remember, and you'll always remember it because of what we're going through right now. And I've chosen a ritual based upon starting from seed a new fennel plant and then propagating this fennel plant and giving it back to someone or the earth outside with new life, and keeping your plant until such time that it goes to seed in the fall, and then keeping those seeds and starting over and never ending the cycle of this ritual. It's a really, really powerful and beautiful ritual that I am so excited to share with you. So I want to talk about Moon water before we get started, because we're going to be planting a fennel seed, Moon water is something that is universal across most pathways in this craft, and it's sometimes misunderstood, and so I want to clear up a little bit about it so we have but the power of the internet. Were able to find out moon cycles a lot easier than those in the past. And we recently just had a super moon that was pink. And if you didn't get a chance to see it, by all means, look online. It was, it was spectacular. And so when we make Moon water, we set a vessel of water outside and let it absorb the beams of the moon overnight, and then we collect it in the morning, and we use it for the moon's power and to add power to our rituals or spells, whatever you like to call them. And when I talk to people about it, one of the things that sometimes people will say, Well, why can't I just go out to a pond after the night of a full moon and get Moon water? And the answer is, you could. But here's the difference, it's all about the power of intention. It would be goofy and nonsensical. If we thought that we could just go set a pitcher of water out on our deck and collect it in the morning and it's any different than just a pitcher of water. That's not what we're saying here, friends and so when you want to curate and make Moon water, it is best to do it on a full moon night, because that's when the Moon is at its most powerful. You can do it though any night that you can see the moon. And you might want to research a crescent moon, waxing, waning moons and what their power is. But you can certainly do it. It doesn't only have to be on a full moon night, but here's the clincher. Here's the deal. When you make your moon water, take your vessel outside and spend five minutes with that water and think about what you want out of it, draw down the moon into that water by Your power of intention and meditation, don't just set it out there and pick it up in the morning. That's kind of goofy. You might as well just use tap water instead. You know, create your own ritual around making this moon water. What do you want out of it? And if you were experiencing a super moon, look at the properties of that, you know, the pink color and stuff. Look at color correspondences and where the moon is on the astrological sign, and figure out this particular set of Moon water and what you want out of it, and use the power within you, the power of intention, to draw that moon into the water for your own good use. That's how we make Moon water. We don't just set a set water outside and call it a day. That would be lazy and, honestly, kind of goofy. So that's Moon water. I made a couple gallons of it for this last Super Moon, and I'm so excited to be using it in this ritual. And I haven't done this ritual yet because I'm going to do it after I publish this podcast around the same time that each of you do. So we could all share that again. It's called a spring renewal ritual. We talk about fennel. It's represented by the element of fire. It's deity. Deity, meaning god or goddess. Is Dionysus, son of Zeus, a Greek Olympian God. Dionysus the god of wine and ecstasy. Symbol of Creative Forces, lifeblood of nature, patron of the arts. And these are all the metaphysical properties of fennel, protection, healing, purification. That's why I chose to use fennel. And so how we want to begin our ritual is, of course, with the moon water. If you don't have any, go ahead and create some before you get started on this. And when you have your moon water and your fennel seeds in hand, I want you to use that moon water, and I want you to soak some seeds for 24 hours just to soften them up and ensure a higher germination rate. But also that's the logical and physical reason to do that, but the metaphysical reason is that we are actually taking the power of the moon, water that we created, and infusing it into those seeds for again, a more poignant and powerful ritual. 24 hours, soak your seeds, then you want to take the seeds and sow them in a terracotta pot and some earth. We don't need to get hung up on rules. When I say Earth, it could be from your yard. It can be from a bag of Miracle Girl potting soil. It's all good. Whatever you have at your disposal and wish to use is what you can use. And I say use several seeds because of germination rates. We really want to get down to having one plant to nurture on this ritual. Now, you could plant several plants outside, if you are a fennel lover and love to use it in your cooking or whatever, that's absolutely don't waste the seeds. But for our ritual, we just want to have one plant. So when we get our sprout legs coming up, you want to thin them out to have that one plant kind of centered in the middle of your terracotta pot. And here's what I want you to do every day. I want you to make this part of your daily ritual practice for the spring renewal rituals, I want you to go to your terracotta pod. I am hoping it's inside your house, in a window where it gets enough light, but it's okay if it's outside too. I don't have, or I should say, we don't in Ohio, have the option right now, in April, as I'm looking out the window as I'm recording this, and it's snowing to set our new sprouts outside so ours will be inside. But I've written an incantation, and an incantation is just a group of words that we use in rituals and spell crafting to put power into the ritual. And I've wrote it for you guys, and I want you to say this incantation four times every day through the fall, really, because we're going to be nurturing a new life. The New Life Is this a fennel plant. I want you to say it four times. And in keeping with my theme of walking, the walk, the whys of what we do. Why? Four? Four in its most simplistic numerological keyword analysis has to do with structure and manifestation. We can tie those to in tarot, to the four of Wands, the four of pentacles, the four of swords, the four of cups and I the power of the number is to repeat this four times daily to feed back into our desire of manifestation. What are we manifesting in this spring renewal ritual, new life. As we look out, we see magnolia trees in bloom right now. We see trees budding. We see grasses growing. The earth is renewing itself, and we are going to be renewing ourselves, especially as we emerge from this pandemic. And as we talked about earlier, life is going to be different. And this whole ritual is symbolic of this time, and it's I really want you to think about that and use the power of it, because we're going to take it on for years. And I'm going to explain that here in a second after I talk about this incantation, so we know that we're doing the numerological value for keywords for structure and manifestation. And this is what I want you to say, these four lines, four times a day in your sacred spot where you are growing your new fennel plant. Sow the seed. Imagine the need. Blessings will come. This shall be done. This spring. Truth shall ring by the light of the moon, I shall receive this boon once again. Sow the seed. Imagine the need. Blessings will come. This shall be done. This spring truth shall ring by the light of the moon, I shall receive this boon. Repeat that incantation four times a day as your new life starts to come in to be. Eating, and you're going to take care of this plant and see it into its entire cycle. One of the things that I want to do in the fall, or whenever such time that your plant is at a mature state, is to propagate another plant from this plant. And I want to do that because, you know, we started from the beginning. We made our moon water, we nurtured the seed, we nurtured the plant, and now we want to take that plant. And there's various ways, I encourage you to look those up online. But one of the ways, if you get more than one bulb on your plan, is it you could take the bulb with all the beautiful fronds, cut it horizontally, and set it in a half an inch to an inch of water, until it starts to sprout new roots, new life, and then plant into the plant. And then, when you do that, and you've got that one, your new plant, your propagated fennel plant from the origin of your seed, stable, then give it away, put it back in the earth, in a garden, if that's possible for you where you live, or give it to a friend and explain to them what you're giving. And when your plant comes to time to be done, to start harvesting the seeds and start this over again. Plant the seeds in your garden. Start a new house plant with you know, for herbs, if you like, fennel, but keep the cycle going for years and years. We've started with one seed, one plant, and look what we're doing. We're giving back. We have new hope. We're looking for protection from the seeds, healing, purification, renewal. And also something really interesting that we could do is if you're into wands, for your for your rituals, for your spell crafting, you could take a frond, a thick piece of fennel front, draw it out, and figure out a way to naturally attach a pine cone to the top of it that's similar in size, and then you would have A beautiful wand to take away as well from this ritual, and my friends, that is our spring renewal ritual. I'm going to start doing it this coming week. I'm so excited to do it. I think it's very healing for each and every one of us, and so poignant because of the crisis that we're all living. We will, if you can have the discipline to continue this on for years to come, you'll always have that fennel plant, and you'll always be able to remember this time and what you took out of it and you you sprouted a new life from one seed and carried it forward, gave it back to your friends, to the earth, to your family, and continue the cycle. It's very healing and very beautiful practice, and I hope each and every one of you will take part in this with me. Now I am excited to move on to our last section, talking about red calcite and how I love this gemstone. Gemstones, crystals, minerals. Who hasn't been captivated by them at some point, the beautiful formations that they make with points and geometrical patterns, the beautiful colors that occur naturally in the earth, we are drawn to these and with good reason. Each week during this podcast, I'm going to select a gemstone, crystal or mineral, and talk about it with its metaphysical properties, some personal anecdotes, if I've used it, and how I use it in my life, and how I feel about it and how it can aid you. This week, I'm talking about red calcite, perhaps my favorite of all of the stones that I use for metaphysical purposes in my life and practice. I chose it because it is represented by the element of fire, just like fennel is for our spring renewal ritual. I'm choosing fire and earth based stuff, because, again, it is spring, and I'm watching things come to life, and with that comes our creative juices start flowing. You know, winter is a time of introspection and reflection and quiet, and with spring, we are called to get back out in the world and be the best version of ourselves and honor our talents and share them with the world, whatever our craft is. And by craft in that particular statement, I mean how we earn our money, how we live our life, not practicing our craft. And so. Red calcite, again, fire, earth based has metaphysical properties regarding love, passion, courage and energy, and I love those for what we're trying to accomplish in the spring, do everything with love, honor our passions, because our passions are really how we honor the world and share with the universe. We're all called to unique offerings in this world, and we all have our talents, but in order to honor them and go full thrust at them. It requires us to have energy and courage, which the stone provides us with. Also, I like to look at color correspondences and red is a call to action. It raises energy, courage, change, confidence. So if we think about that, a call to action, you know, spring. Our call to action is to come alive and to to to begin to stir and propagate what we can offer. And the stone allows us to do that all law all the while. It is a stone that is earth based and represented by the root chakra, which is all about stability and grounding. So we take all those properties and we have really a great, great gemstone to use at our aid for whatever we may need. And if we look at just calcite, as a rule, it clears and cleans negative energy. So I want to talk about that for a second as well. What do we mean by negative energy? It's not just meaning that, you know, we're being Debbie downer, that's not it at all. Think about the crisis we're living in. We've talked about that at length here, and we all have a negative energy and emotion around it, but it's not that we're being pessimistic, per se, it's that we're scared. You know, we we are fear based human beings in a lot of ways, and we're in unchartered waters, and it takes courage and energy to get out of bed each day and start honoring our best version of ourself, and red calcite helps with that. So I want to talk about two ways to use it. Well, one way that you guys can use it, and then I want to just tell you how I use it in my practice. So think back to our spring renewal ritual, and we have this beautiful sacred space in our homes or outside, but I'm thinking a lot of it's going to be inside, where we're nurturing this new life from a seed, and we're going to we're going to do that for months and months and months, and then take new seeds from that life we nurtured and continue the cycle so it never ends. So it's a very sacred ritual and a sacred space, right? And so one way you can use this is to take a gemstone of your choice, a candle and a personal artifact, and set up a sacred space for meditation, and not only for meditation, but in what I'm about to explain to you, you can use the properties of the gemstone to infuse your sacred space. So let's think about our terra cotta pot with our new seedling that is just sprouted, right? We light a candle, we set a piece of red calcite near the fennel plant, and that fennel plant is our personal artifact, and we meditate for five minutes out of our busy days. But what we're really doing is we're taking the energy and the courage from the properties of that red calcite and fusing it into our new plant to help it be successful, to help it grow into a beautiful, beautiful plant. That's one way you can use it. The other way you can use it is I use let me just back up for a second. One way I use it, and you can figure out a way to use it in your craft. I am a tarot reader, a professional tarot reader, as you all know. And so anytime a client sets down at my Tarot table and is asking me to interpret a question through the Tarot and give them guidance I hold in my hand after I've dealt the spread a piece of red calcite. Why do I do that? Well, because it raises my energy. It raises a call to action. For me, it gives me courage to take what somebody's asking, look at 15 cards and tell them this is the universal guidance that you need to hear. That is not an easy process, but it makes it a little bit easier for me, and it helps me be the best version of myself. And what I mean by that is that honoring my talents as a tarot reader, because it's. All about that fiery passion that is my fiery passion. That is what I do. And I want to tell you how much I believe in these crystals on my Tarot table. If you've ever come to have a Tarot reading with me, you would know that there's a piece of strawberry quartz in the form of a wand, there's a piece of blue Goldstone, there's a piece of Rose Quartz, and there's a piece of fluorite. And I let my querents, or my clients, if you will, choose one of them that speaks to them as I'm holding my red calcite. And that is a synergy between us, because those stones are my stones. Those are crystals that I have consecrated for my own use, and they have personal meaning to me. And you're holding that and asking me a Tarot question. I'm holding my red calcite, and so we're we're sharing that synergy and bouncing that energy off of each other, and it just all helps to make quality, successful reading. And I want to just talk one more time about walking, the walk, and the whys of what we do in the craft, and why I'm doing this again when we say walk the walk. Let's talk about that regarding crystals and gemstones. I have friends who have told me that they don't get any value out of the crystals and gemstones, and the phenomenon of holding them and putting them in your pocket, some women put them in their bra and they just don't feel anything, and I can certainly understand that notion. But here's the thing, when you come to acquire a crystal, whether it's something you find outside naturally, or you come to a metaphysical shop and something speaks to you, and you read an information card about it, and you take it home. It doesn't stop there. You really need to get to know your crystals. You need to view them as part of your toolkit, your spiritual toolkit, and how you use them. Perhaps you are buying just a crystal, just for the beauty, and you want to set it on a shelf. And there's not a thing wrong with that. But if you're really wanting to tap into the metaphysical properties of it, like I am explaining I do with red calcite, then you really get to need to get to know your stone and your crystal. That's how these metaphysical definitions have come about. And you may step into your left brain and your logic side and say, Well, who says that Amethyst just a natural tranquilizer. Who says it are people that have gone before us, years and years ago, hundreds, 1000s of years, that have that have journaled and used stones for healing, and they're the people our ancestors that have set the rules out for us that this is what I gained from carrying a piece of Amethyst. This is what I've gained from having a piece of Amethyst on my body or on my nightstand or back in the day, next to me when I sleep. And so people journaled that and researched it and documented it, and we've carried the tradition on and added to it. And I often journal in my metaphysical journal about different crystals that have different benefits and aids to me that may not be universally known. A good one for me is Malachite. I'd like to carry a piece of Malachite from time to time when I cannot get any energy, it gives me energy and helps me wake up. I don't carry Malachite all the time because it can be overwhelming. Sometimes it can actually make me feel like I drank a pot of coffee. But when I need that little extra boost for whatever reason, I'm in the middle of a big project at work or something, then I draw on Malachite. That's just an example, and I don't think that you would see that documented everywhere, that Malakut is a very energizing stone, but that's what it does for me, and I've journaled it, and so I kind of have my own little apothecary journal about about crystals as well as essential oils and magical powders and incense and stuff that works for me, and I encourage you to do the same, because it's all different for Each and every one of us. Thank you, friends. If we have reached the end of episode one of intentional, spiritual living with Brian, I thank you for listening, and I hope you've gained some valuable insight into your craft, and that you take the spring ritual and execute on it and deepen your practice. Please visit me@ravenscaldren.com or come visit me if you're local, at 110 South Sandusky Street in Delaware, Ohio. Our phone number is 740-417-8402, again. Ravenscaldren.com I look forward to episode two in the coming week. Blessed be.