How to Charge Your Crystals

A beginner’s guide to powering your stones with nature’s abundant energy

Words and photography by AZALEA LEE

“Crystals by themselves are like ingredients in your pantry: It’s not until you do something with them that the magic happens,” Azalea Lee writes in her new book, The Crystal Workshop: A Journey Into the Healing Power of Crystals (Artisan, $25), available now. Here, the expert herself shares what to do with your crystals day to day so that you see the greatest benefits.

It is only when you work with crystals with attention and gratitude that you allow your energy to collaborate with the energy given off by the stones. In this harmonic dance, your energy initiates a movement that the crystal can shape and form through its stable pattern of energy. The crystal feeds this renewed energy back to you, which you then accept, experience, and project as an evolved energy back to the crystal. Thus, in order to receive a crystal’s energetic benefits, one must engage with it in a continual interactive relationship. If a person ignores this interaction, there will be no energy for the crystal to work with. This is the reason why someone can spend their whole life around crystals yet not experience any healing benefits from them. For although they share a physical space with crystals, they are not energetically working with them.

But even if you have been consciously interacting with a stone, after some time it may seem as though the crystal has stopped working. This is because, like a stuffed-up nose, your crystal has become energetically clogged up and has no space to continue working with your energies. Leaving your crystals alone in a dark place for a long time will both cleanse and charge them. But since this process can take years, we need other ways to energetically cleanse and charge our frequently used stones.

Charging gives a crystal additional energy, allowing your crystal to work with more vibrancy and for a longer duration before it needs to be cleansed again. Charging can also increase the intensity of any intention placed into the stone. There are numerous ways to charge crystals, but the following are the core techniques to be familiar with.

Moonlight
Rather than using moonlight for cleansing, I prefer to work with moon energies as a way to charge stones and give them a soft and gentle boost of feminine energy. Moonlight energies work well for facilitating transitions, like breakups or moving from one home to another, or for situations where introspection and quiet inward understanding would be helpful. In these cases, I would use moonlight energy to charge my stones.

Each phase of the moon brings different energies to the cleansing and charging of your crystals, so if you’re going to be working with moon energies it is important to learn about the respective energies each of the different phases brings. In brief, the full moon brings waning energy, which is an energy of release as the full moon shrinks into the blackness of the new moon. The new moon (when the moon cannot be seen and is at the beginning of its journey to enlarge into a full moon) brings an energy of growth. Each phase’s energies can be then used to enhance (or charge) the intention you put into your crystal.

Sunlight
In contrast to the gentle, soft, and feminine energy of moonlight, sunlight is the masculine counterpart of celestial light energy. Sunlight energy is strong and vibrant. Its energy feeds, strengthens, and moves forward. This makes sunlight’s masculine energy ideal for charging stones. As long as your crystal is not sensitive to light and has been cleansed in advance with another method, you can put it in the sun to charge.

Direct sunlight can also be used to assist in cleansing your stones, in conjunction with the sea salt and water method described in Chapter 11. Again, as long as your crystals are not sensitive to either light or water, you can submerge the crystal in a bowl of sea salt and water and then place it in bright sunlight. The sun will further energize the cleansing water itself, and as the stone becomes cleansed, the sunlight will begin charging the stone.

How much time this takes depends on how much sunlight there is, what kind of sunlight it is, the kind of stone you have, and how much you want to charge it. This process may take a few minutes or a lot longer, depending on what your circumstances are and how much you want to charge the stone. Simply hold your crystal and intuitively feel if it has been charged enough for you.

Eclipses
Because solar and lunar eclipses resonate with the energies of dramatic shifts of change, they can be used to charge stones with this kind of energy. Thus, if you feel your life has become too stagnant and wish for it to be different, you could charge your crystals with eclipse energies to begin shaking things up in your life and go on a grand adventure of change. While any eclipse energies will initiate shifts, lunar eclipse energies catalyze internal shifts that cause radical changes to happen with yourself, while solar eclipse energies facilitate external shifts, bringing intense change to outward aspects of your life. If you choose to charge a stone with eclipse energies, be prepared for a potentially turbulent but worthwhile ride!

An ideal stone for eclipse charging is clear quartz. Choose one that can be kept close to your skin, like a pocket stone, so that the energies stay near you as you go through the process of change. Before the eclipse, go outside, light a candle, and place your cleansed crystal next to it. As you smudge the crystal with a sacred herb, set the intention of change you want to manifest. Hold this intention as the eclipse passes over the crystal. Then get ready for some (eventually) fun experiences.

Burial
Sometimes a stone becomes so energetically heavy that it needs to be returned to Mother Earth for healing and rejuvenation. You can bury a stone directly in the earth, or you can elect to bury it in a box for later retrieval. How long it needs to be buried depends on how heavy the crystal’s energy has become. It may need to be buried for a week, a month, a year, or more, depending on how much it needs to be cleansed.

For example, you may find a crystal in an antiques shop or be given a stone that feels energetically heavy or like it has been used or preprogrammed in some way. If all other methods of energetic cleansing do not erase the programming or heaviness of the crystal, you may need to bury the stone and give it back to Mother Earth to be cleansed.

Understand that this process of cleansing a stone by burial may take longer than your lifetime, so you must be prepared to let go of the stone to allow it to become fully purged and cleansed. And this may be the very reason why you have come across a previously owned stone: By attracting you to it, the crystal has gotten your attention and subsequently your assistance. If you have resonated with it, you will have an easier time connecting with the crystal and being sensitive to its needs. You can be of service to the crystal by helping it heal so that it can become energetically vibrant again. Other times, by burying it, you are helping the crystal get to the right person. Burying the crystal gives it time to be cleansed and then at some later date to be found by the person who is actually supposed to work with it. In both cases, in a small but significant way, you help to raise the collective energy of the world by raising the energy of the crystal.

If you are planning to bury a crystal, ask Mother Earth where the right place to bury it is. Allow yourself to receive either an intuitive sense or a picture of where the crystal should go. Or you can bring to mind a place you are considering and see if the impression you get is positive or not. If it isn’t, wait patiently until a place comes to mind that you have a strong feeling about. Remember that you will need permission from a property’s owner or caretaker in order to bury crystals on their land.

You may also elect to return the crystal to Mother Earth by releasing it into deep living water. This also is a way to return a crystal back to Mother Earth for healing.

Copy and photos excerpted from The Crystal Workshop: A Journey Into the Healing Power of Crystals by Azalea Lee (Artisan, $25).