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Join Adam Barralet, Ashley Leavy, Kyle Perez, and Nicholas Pearson in the very first episode of the Crystal Confab Podcast as they discuss all-things Black Onyx, including:

• Black Onyx & the New Moon in Libra
• Black Onyx for Shadow Work
• The science behind the energy of Black Onyx
• The origins and etymology of ‘Onyx’ and how the meaning has shifted over time

Tune in now and dive into the magical world of Black Onyx!

Podcast Episode Transcript:

Crystal Confab Podcast Introduction: Are you just starting with crystals? Or maybe you have a whole collection but aren’t sure how to use them? Join 4 crystal nerds, healers, workers, and lovers for crystal confab, a casual chat about all things crystals.

Adam Barralet: Hello, and welcome to the first ever episode of crystal confab. My name is Adam Barralet, and I am joined by 3 individuals who I believe to be 3 of the best crystal experts in the world. We’re gonna introduce ourselves in just a moment, but this is going to be a podcast which explores the crystal world, and we’re gonna take a deep dive into one of your favorite crystals each and every week. So joining me on the podcast is Kyle, Ashley, and Nicholas. How are we all today?

Kyle Perez: Really good.

Ashley Leavy: Great. Thanks for having us.

Adam: A pleasure. A pleasure. Now we’re gonna be we’re gonna be joining you every single week. Yeah. You might be wondering who on earth we are.

So I might get each of the hosts to introduce themselves. We might start with Ashley. Ashley, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Ashley: My name is Ashley Leavy. I’m the founder and educational director at the Love and Light School of Crystal Therapy. I am also the author of several crystal healing books, including Cosmic Crystals and the Beginner’s Guide to Crystal Healing. I’ve been doing this work professionally since about 2007, and I am so excited for our inaugural episode and can’t wait to talk with all of you.

Adam: And, Ashley, your voice sounds a little bit different to mine. I’m guessing you’re not Australian.

Ashley: I am not. Thank you. I’m in the states. I live in Madison, Wisconsin, where I enjoy gardening, my chickens, time with my dogs, spending lots of time working with my crystals, and, overall, just having kind of a, you know, pretty quiet peaceful existence.

Adam: Amazing. Amazing. And, of course, also joining us from the States, we’ve got Nicholas. How are you, Nicholas?

Nicholas Pearson: Great. So, thanks so much for, you know, getting us all to collaborate, getting us in one space. I’m really excited for this. So for those who may not know my work already, my name is Nicholas Pearson. I am currently writing my 10th and 11th books simultaneously.

The majority of which have been about crystals. You may already know some of the more popular ones like Crystal Basics or Stones of the Goddess or Crystal Healing for the Heart. And I have been a mineral collector for more than 30 years now. Initially, I went to university and actually majored in earth and environmental science and worked in the earth science field for a bit before leaving to do other things. And, I have been writing for about 10 years now, and, I’m really excited for some of those projects that are coming up on the horizon.

I’m joining from, Orlando, Florida, so I’m I’m here in the the central part of the Sunshine State, although it is nighttime and not very sunny. And, I’m just so excited to get together with some like-minded folks.

Adam: And, of course, I needed some southern hemisphere backup, so I called on a good friend, Kyle. Kyle, thanks for joining us and being part of the team.

Kyle: It is absolutely my pleasure. I am so excited to be a part of this and to just chat crystals with people that love them and have been a part of it for a long time. So I’ll go into myself. I’m Kyle Perez. I go by the crystalline mage.

I’ve been working in the industry for over a decade. I’m a qualified gemologist, psychic, and crystal intuitive. I do a lot of reading work, and I’m lucky to work in wholesale as well. So I get to work in kind of the B2B between, where they get sourced and then where they get sold to. So I deal with a lot of businesses.

I have worked in crystal shops and wholesale for a long time as well, and I am a big nerd when it comes to crystal stuff. I love to blend the science and the spirituality and bring that understanding to whoever I’m talking to when it comes to crystals.

Adam: Amazing. And I also am in Perth, Western Australia with Kyle. So we are in the most isolated city in the entire world, but a very beautiful world as well. So I can look out my window and see kangaroos. I’ve always lived in the bush and in nature.

So crystals were a big thing for me since I walked in and bought my first crystal, which was an amethyst about 30 years ago. And then I gave you a little sheet that told you what all the crystals did. I went back and bought another crystal and another crystal and to the point now where, you know, I would hate to try and count my crystal collection. So about 10 years ago, I was invited to write my first book, Crystal Connections. I also created a series of meditations, guided meditations for crystals that are now on Itunes and work with crystals as well as other nature’s gifts like essential oils, animal wisdom, and throw a bit of tarot and astrology in there as well.

So, Kyle, I’ve got a bit of a question you start up with. We were kind of toying up when we were meeting before we got together and went, what do we call this? And you came up with the title of crystal confab. And I must admit, I don’t know about the others, but I haven’t heard of a confab before, so you’re gonna have to explain it to me and anyone else is wondering what on earth it is.

Kyle: It’s really, really simple. It’s just an informal private discussion, and it felt like this is going to be just that, us chatting fairly informally, and we get to share that with people. And it felt, excuse me, it felt like a nice, simple, easy name to work with too.

Adam: I love it. I love it. And we decided for our first episode to dive into Black Onyx. Now, Nick, you Nicholas, sorry. You were talking to us earlier, and you were explaining a little bit about the history of onyx.

It hasn’t always been recognized as the same stone, has it?

Nicholas: No. It’s it’s kind of a a fun situation here because, our modern-day word onyx comes to us from from Greek, which meant, a fingernail. And it originally referred to usually, like, banded agates that have parallel perfectly parallel lines. Today, we call those things like spirit level agates and water level agates, and a handful of other names. But because we have these little parallel ridges in our fingernails, that’s where that term was derived from.

And it was favored especially for things like carving cameos and intaglios, which might be used as seals, but also for a category of objects known as magical gemstones, which sounds like it could be any rock used for magic, but actually there are some pretty specific cultural and anthropological parameters on that term. But over time, what we have known as onyx has changed. So, good quality banded onyx that had really stark black bands was great for carving your cameos and intaglios because it created the greatest contrast, in the colors when you cut away those different layers. But before the advent of modern geology and modern mineral science and, you know, all the offshoots, we didn’t always define things based on their chemical composition and often where they came from or what they looked like was more important than anything else. So today, we’ve seen a gradual transition away from any banded agate that has perfectly parallel bands, no wavy lines, no concentric circles, none of that, to mostly opaque stones.

And they can or cannot have bands, which kind of loses the meaning of the word onyx altogether. And it would be in, the Victorian period when the preference for all black onyx would, you know, basically rise to the 4 because of her period of mourning after the death of Prince Albert and she popularized jet jewelry. But others also found other gems that were acceptable in that era, that being one of them. But especially in the last few decades, we’ve seen a resurgence of things that we might call cultural onyxes rather than gemological ones, which are other rocks that have lots of nice parallel bands in them. And they’re usually things like travertine, and other sedimentary calcareous rocks, things that are full of calcite and dolomite, which we call things like Pakistani onyx or Mexican onyx are often, you know, given those kind of monikers of where they come from to differentiate them from our true gemological onyx, which is, of course, silica is quartz.

Ashley: Okay. I want if it’s okay. Because, Nicholas, I love hearing about this sort of evolution of the name and how it has really changed throughout the ages and what used to be known as onyx and what’s now known as onyx and what’s kind of continuing to be known as onyx. Is this and because I don’t know, and maybe, you know, maybe anyone knows. Is this, an an instance of almost like colloquialism where people are just, like, grabbing on to this term?

Because it almost reminds me of, like this is the analogy I think of a lot, like a daisy. A daisy can mean a different thing to a lot of different people depending on where you live and what’s around in your landscape. Is that kind of what we’re seeing here?

Nicholas: Yeah. It it’s definitely a case of that. You know? And I’m sure that Kyle’s gonna touch on this a little bit more when we go into, like, our modern association with onyx and its its composition instruction things. But, the word onyx is not a geological term.

It is one that has cultural value, has aesthetic value, has gemological value. But if you ask a gemologist and a geologist to to define a particular mineral or a particular material, let’s say, you’re gonna get different answers. So, like, Jasper, great example of something that has absolutely no geological value whatsoever. Only a gemological one. And even then, you’re not always talking about the same substance.

Even when they look really, really close, they’re not. So, we see a lot of these shifts because of change in fashion, change in cultural tastes, And the ideas of things that we have formed in our modern day crystal books around onyx are certainly informed by the medieval lapidary tradition and then, you know, the late antiquity period when we see folks like Pliny the Elder and, you know, our other Roman and Greek authors beginning that kind of, literary tradition of writing encyclopedias about rocks, something most of us do today, in this room at least. And, there is this kind of unbroken chain, but it’s really fun to go back with a geologist mind, with a gemologist mind, and reread those descriptions and go, wow. That’s not what we think of this rock today. And there’s so many reasons why that is.

And some of it’s because people named rocks, described rocks, wrote about rocks they’ve never seen, and only heard someone else’s description of, or they were copying from another manuscript and another manuscript and another manuscript. So, we see that today with onyx where there’s so many different materials, that carry the name even though they really aren’t onyx in the sense that we anticipate from the gemological perspective. And then you ask a geologist what onyx is and they basically don’t care. They’d rather look at the specific material and tell you what minerals are in it and how they came together. So, yeah, onyx is something that carries cultural meaning and not scientific meaning.

Adam: So, Kyle, from your background, as a gemologist, what would you define as, onyx today?

Kyle: And so the scientific meaning that we learned and that we define onyx as is actually both the original parallel banded agate chalcedony and modern black chalcedony that doesn’t have banding. I’ll show you a couple, like this is a really simple example of pure black onyx from India. You can see by the conchoidal fracturing a little bit of quartz growth there, and this again is another sort of modern one where you get a band nice and easy. And then this is actually the original. You can see the horizontal parallel banding in this agate.

Unfortunately, it’s a bit blurry, but it’s sort of that’s where it started. And I love that scientifically, we kind of if you get to the basics of it, it’s cryptocrystalline, microcrystalline quartz, which is tiny tiny itty bitty bits of quartz intergrown together. And because they’re so small, they’re susceptible to inclusions. Those inclusions create opaqueness and translucency depending on what’s in the silica solution as they grow. And I think that kind of has a really great energetic connection to the way Onyx works as sort of a magnetic energy, as something that helps us to create, as something that helps us to do with shadow, as something that helps us to be grounded.

I find its kind of base in silica, which is everywhere in the Earth’s crust, important. And then the fact that that’s included with all sorts of stuff, that’s life. That’s how we work. Like, life is fully included. Life is microscopic, and then there’s the big picture to it.

And I think when we want to work with Onyx, that scientific base of all the little things coming together is life. When we’re trying to manifest, when we’re trying to feel grounded, when we’re trying to work in life. We want to work with all little things, all little pieces that come together. That creates a whole picture. That creates a, for me, a more complete feeling, if that makes sense.

I really like to know that it is complex in its simplicity. Does that make sense?

Adam: Yeah. Absolutely. One thing I’m sure everyone, in the group get gets messages from, and we love hearing messages from our followers and that type of thing, but I’m sure you often get pictures, blurry pictures sent to you of, like, can you tell me what this crystal is? Which, you know, can can be challenging sometimes, but I love to put that to the group. What would make each of you say, oh, that black crystal, I think that’s Onyx.

Because, obviously, black Onyx can look like obsidian, can look like tourmaline, could look like jet, especially in a picture. How do we all help people identify an Onyx in this day and age?

Kyle: Can I jump in quickly first?

Adam: Yeah.

Kyle: When we did our demo degree, you get about 2 full weeks where you’re dealing with black stones. And you’re it’s obsidian, it’s onyx, it’s chalcedony, it’s, dyed stuff, it’s jet. And the main descriptor and black tourmaline, of course, the main way that we figured out, I figured out, was the easiest way through is weight. You’ll find that jet is super light, Shungite super light, jet will be the lightest, then Shungite. Onyx will fall after Obsidian.

Obsidian will be the next lightest or heaviest because it’s, amorphous in its crystalline structure. It is slightly lighter, slightly less dense. Onyx, more dense, and then your black tourmaline will be the heaviest. If you happen to get, like, something like spinel, that’s also quite heavy. Black dioxide falls somewhere in between, but you rarely will mix them up because the sheen that you get in dioxide is, you know, quite distinguishable.

Does that make sense?

Adam: Yeah. Definitely. And I guess one thing, like, a lot of people have tumbled stones, don’t they? The difference between if you’ve got 2 heavy tumbled stones, tourmaline doesn’t tumble the best. So you don’t really get a smooth surface on a tourmaline, do you?

Kyle: You can if it’s really great quality, but you’ll often see those striations. You’ll often see that kind of cracked structure, that kind of affected internal structure.

Adam: Yeah. Nicholas with Ashley, do you get asked a bit, can you help me identify this crystal?

Nicholas: Oh, all the time. And, I always remind people what the great geologists I’ve known have said, and that is no geologist no geologist worth their salt will identify a rock from a photo. And that’s talking rock versus mineral, which is that nuance matters. So I like to give people points of reflection. I give them homework.

Alright. So if it were this, you might notice this about it. So go look for this or that. You know, if they can’t remember, I know I bought an Onyx and an Obsidian at the same time. Like, okay.

Wonderful. What we’re gonna do is find the thinnest corner of both of these and put a very bright light behind it, and your mobile device is gonna be great for this and see what transmits. Now it could be that in onyx, particularly if it’s been dyed, you’re gonna have translucent portions that that reveal themselves under bright lighting, but you’re also going to see that kind of banded microcrystalline structure, that kind

Adam: of jelly like quality that

Nicholas: we find in our that kind of jelly like quality that we find in in our chalcedony group. You’re not going to find the same, optical quality in Obsidian, but you might find some really clear, translucent period, areas when it’s backlit strongly enough. So it’s giving people the tools to know how to identify it themselves rather than to put all the weight on my shoulders as the guru because that’s not my job. I’m an educator. I want people to to know how to figure these things out for themselves.

So I try to give them, like, little teeny actionable things. I love the idea of referencing the relative density of them, but if someone’s only got one, they have nothing to compare it to. And if they have 2 but they’re different sizes, they’re the masses, of course, are going to be, you know, contingent on that. So, I try to stick to the optical things that I can communicate in as few words as possible. And when all else fails, if it’s, you know, a case of jet versus, Onyx, hardness is gonna be a really easy test, streak test.

You know, those are the kinds of simple things that we can all do with what we’ve gotten, you know, the kitchen or the garage. So I like to give people science experiments.

Ashley: I think that’s really fun. I would also add, like, I think it’s sort of process of elimination. I think when it comes to any type of identification, we’re working with a lot of different pieces of the puzzle. So we’re looking at luster. We’re looking at the grain texture.

We’re looking at the weight. We’re looking at the hardness. All those things kind of come together, and it’s through process of elimination that we get down to what is most likely because we may not be ever a 100% certain. We can be really pretty sure most of the time. Kyla, I love that you touched on weight because I think especially when we’re working with something like Blackstone’s, and I love that this was kind of a whole unit of study for you where you were just given all these different black stones and had to start to see those differences.

I think that when you have a lot of experience, starting to look at them side by side and noticing those subtle differences, noticing from one stone to the next that tiny difference in weight, noticing what the surface of the stone looks like. In my Onyx, it’s very, very smooth. It’s almost a little bit waxy to the texture, just barely, you know, compared to something like obsidian that would be super glassy and smooth. It would have a really high luster. It’s all these little things coming together and then that slow process of elimination that sort of gets you to the best result.

Adam: One thing that I’ve always said to, people that ask me if I’m kind of struggling or between the 2 of us, we can’t work out exactly what it is. I’d love to know everyone else’s input on this. At the end of the day, it’s our individual relationship with the stone, and it definitely helps to know if it’s onyx or obsidian or, you know, whatever the crystal may be. But this how important do you think it is to actually make sure you definitely have a black onyx?

Ashley: I’d love to jump in on this one. I think, for me, I love to be able to name that stone. I’m, like, building relationship with my crystals. It’s not it’s not one-sided. I wanna get to know them.

I wanna get to know them really intimately. And for me, personally, naming them, just like naming anything and any type of work that you’re doing, I think, is useful. It’s a useful tool, but it’s also I wouldn’t say completely necessary because it’s about building that relationship. I definitely have a few, like, rocks in my toolkit that I still, after all these years, don’t know what they are. There are things that maybe I picked up somewhere or found somewhere.

I have good ideas of what they might be, but I can’t 100% put a name to them. But there’s still a deep relationship there. And so I think it helps provide context. It helps give you more information for that relationship building, but I also wouldn’t say that I think it’s 100% necessary. If there’s a crystal that you feel a strong connection with, that you enjoy working with, that you’re building that relationship with, at the end of the day, I don’t think you have to know exactly what it is.

Kyle: Can I compare it to cooking? Oh, sorry. To jump in

Adam: Go on.

Kyle: I’d like to compare it to cooking. Like, cooking can be really intuitive and it can be really, like, strict. Right? You can follow a recipe really anal retentively, excuse me, and need to know the weights and everything blah blah blah. And then I myself am a very intuitive cook.

There are certain things that I’m like, I just know it tastes good. I just know my nonna used it for a 1000000000 years, so I know I add it. I don’t have to know the compounds. I don’t have to know exactly why, but I’ll put bay leaf in every ragu I make because I have to and that’s how it’s done. And I don’t have to know the ins and outs of it, but I know it’s bay leaf.

But in other cultures, it’s called something else. Like, the name is going to change differently wherever you go. So our relationship to it, you know, has a context, but it doesn’t have to be, you know, so I know. It can be more intuitive, and I think having the base of where it comes from, what it can be, is a great place to learn from. And if you really want to know all about that and you have that mind, it’s awesome and it helps, and I do.

I love the scientific side of it. I love understanding all of the nuance, and I love knowing why each crystal does what it does. But I know of so many people out there don’t even have the time to think of it in that way. They don’t even have the time to connect with crystals in that way. They do a little bit, but not to the obsessive way that we all get to, I suspect.

And so just knowing enough, I think, is enough. Does that make sense?

Ashley: I think so. Do you think this comes down to, like, our human desire to want to always label things and put them in their neat little boxes, their little orderly kind of things? I mean, we don’t see that a whole lot in nature. Right? That’s like I feel like that’s a very sort of human tendency to wanna organize and

Kyle: Totally agree.

Adam: Yeah. I fully agree as well. Yeah. Nicholas, can you can you lay in bed at night having a crystal in your house that you haven’t identified yet?

Nicholas: I actually know how this is gonna go. In a theoretical world, no. I absolutely cannot. I have the scientist brain. Like, I’ve got I’ve got this desire to, like, dissect and understand things because I find I find such a deep and intimate story that emerges when I can contemplate those things.

And so much of the work that I do subversively, like, I position myself as a lay science communicator to metaphysical folks. I just don’t tell them upfront that that’s what I’m doing. I, you know, we do it until their eyes glaze over and we move on to the next bullet point. I’m not here to indoctrinate or, like, force it down, but, like, the goal is to romanticize that story because we learn so much by it. So I absolutely have rocks in this house that I have never figured out the whole story of.

I might know part of it. I know something about it. I can make some educated guesses. If, you know, if I went back to the mineral science field and had, you know, equipment that I do not have in my home office, we could, you know, do some x-ray diffraction and some other things and figure out what these are. And it really isn’t that important.

But to be able to look at something in my collection and go, I know where it came from or I know the circumstances in which I found this pebble or I can tell that there’s some really well-shaped little cross sections of quartz, which we call phenocrysts in this particular kind of igneous rock, then then I know something about it. And it it compels me to understand the world from its perspective, the journey that it’s taken, what it not just what it’s made out of, but the forces involved in bringing them together and ultimately bringing them and me together. So I love solving a mystery, but over the years, I’ve gotten really comfortable with surrendering to the idea of mystery. I’m never gonna have the whole story, so I get as much as I can.

Ashley: What about you, Adam? I wanna know.

Adam: I yes. I really like to know. And I really resonate with what you were saying actually about that human need to categorize. I think it’s you know, we really like that need. But I found it interesting what Nicholas was saying that, obviously, before they weren’t looking at the structure and the waste and all that.

They were like, well, it’s that cold stone from that area that must be Onyx. That must be something else type of thing. So, obviously, what we have available to us throughout time has evolved. So I think it’s, yeah, I think we could do our best, but I don’t think we should lose sleep. And sometimes, you know, I guess it’s and we all probably dance in this.

It’s a balance between what Nicholas said, between, the science and the knowing and understanding that some things are just magical, and we don’t need necessarily have to, describe them as well. Maybe that’s the dance between our yin and our yang aspects in that way.

Ashley: You know, one thing that’s helped me thinking of is, like, I’m thinking of some of my students, some of my customers at my crystal shop who have gotten identifications wrong over the years as we all have. Right? And I can think very clearly about someone who had this this piece of lapis that turned out to be sodalite, but she said it makes so much sense now why I just felt something so different from this particular stone than I did from the rest of my lapis. And she told me, like, she was almost trying to kind of force what she knew of lapis and, like, what Nicholas was saying, the story of lapis onto this stone, and it was just not happening. And then when I said, well, my dear, that is because you have the most beautiful sodalite of the highest quality.

It is gorgeous. Like, it looks very similar to lapis. I see how you got there. And so it was just interesting that she had this kind of epiphany moment like, oh, well, that makes sense. And because that wasn’t that stone story, so I I like how you said that, Nicholas.

Adam: Well, hopefully, we’ve given everyone a bit of a they probably scramble through all their black stones, and hopefully, they’ve got their black onyx now. I’m glad we’re able to give a few extra tools and no. I, in a previous life, also worked with Kyle works in wholesale with crystals, and sometimes, I’m sure you still do it today. You get a new batch of stone. We’re not too sure what it is.

You have to choose a sacrificial, lamb, and, basically, you take to it with a hammer to see how it breaks apart.

Kyle: The amount of, shardage of crystals in the back room or on the back steps, it’s generally not that bad nowadays. I think we kind of we’re able to see things and go, wait. That’s not that. I don’t need to break it open. Let’s look at it with a few torches.

Let’s analyze it. But there has been a couple of times. The most recent one, we got a batch of, Ruby and schist, Garnet, and we had to break it open to confirm. Obviously, we did the UV test and a couple of other things, but it was breaking it open and going, yeah. I mean, come on.

This can’t be. Glad we, got to break one open because it’s fun to get a little bit of frustration out sometimes. Sorry for the sacrificial crystal, but it’s great to know, especially because in the process of bringing them out of the ground, there’s gonna be a lot of breakage, and that helps you to identify. So it is actually a really important scientific process.

Adam: I don’t know if I’d endorse this. We’re all fans of crystal therapy, but I don’t know if we should be encouraging everyone to take the hammers, you know, get the hammers out with their crystals to get rid of that anger. No.

Kyle: No. No. I would I would sacrifice, sorry for any fans, but I would sacrifice Opelite to the hammer gods.

Adam: I second that one for sure. Now one thing I’m really passionate about, I’m sure we’re all really passionate about is there’s a lot of people that go to the shops, they buy all these crystals, you know, they’ve got 10 in their handbag, 4 in their pockets, 2 in their bras, and that type of thing. And they’ve collected all these crystals, and now they’re sitting around looking pretty. So one thing we’re really passionate about is giving you tools and things you can actually do with your different crystals. Now being a black crystal, Ashley, what kind of work would you use, Black Onyx for?

Ashley: When I think about my work with Black Onyx, the thing that most comes to mind for me as is this amazing support for shadow work. So I wanna sort of preemptively just define in my view sort of what shadow work is because I think everyone has a little bit different idea about it. But I think it’s really this tapping into the subconscious, our interior world to better understand ourselves as a whole, to understand the things that are sort of hidden, whether, you know, we do that intentionally or not, but those things that we don’t necessarily always let the whole world see, and that we often internally sort of label as, you know, something that is a wound, something that needs healing, something that we need to work on. Like this is often how we sort of think of these parts of ourselves, but really a lot of times what these parts of ourselves need is love and support and acceptance and understanding how they fit into our patterns of behavior and that sort of thing. So I think that there’s this big push for a lot of people to want to get into the world of shadow work, to wanna start, you know, exploring this, but they feel very intimidated, or maybe they’ve even heard of things, like, going horribly wrong with shadow work.

I think that there’s a really safe and responsible way to approach this work. For me, this was done largely through journaling. That’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but that was it it’s something that, you know, I incorporate a lot into all of my healing work, so it felt to be a very natural fit for me. For other people, maybe that will be talking things out. For others, that might be meditation.

For others, it might be art therapy. Like, there are so many different avenues to explore. But in this process of sort of uncovering and working through these things and recognizing those less than glamorous traits that we may have, sometimes we need a bit of support. Sometimes we need some extra grounding. We need to feel that we’re being held, and I have always felt black onyx to be that stone for me, that stone that is kind of the unconditional support.

It’s not just grounding in the way that black tourmaline or smoky quartz can be grounding. There’s something about it that feels nurturing and supportive and almost a bit soft, giving you that soft space to process, to go through what you’re going through, to dig through the hard messy stuff in life. And I find honestly just having this stone as a physical touchstone, as a companion during this type of exploration work, it’s almost like that thing that lays the foundation for me when I know with intention, okay, I am going to go into my shadow work practice. I’m gonna dig into this issue I’m having, whatever it is, do my journaling. My black onyx is right there.

It’s there for me to hold, to breathe with, to just sit and kind of ground myself clear energy. And this is what I really, really love about this, Dawn. It’s very nurturing.

Adam: I think that’s, you know, one of the things that you explained there is that just by having the crystal with you while you’re doing that work, is is that how you would use Blackhawk? Just having it it’s kinda keeping you company?

Ashley: Yeah. I mean, I know that sounds so simple, but this is something I was talking about, on Instagram recently. Over the past few years, I feel in a lot of ways my crystal practice has really simplified. You know, it’s not that I don’t occasionally do a big layout or a big grid or something like that, but I just like you said, Adam, there are so many people who they’ve collected the crystals. They love them.

They feel drawn to them. They’re kind of sitting around, and they don’t know what to do next. I wanna just assure you that it can absolutely be as simple as letting that crystal keep you company, as holding it in your hands, as, you know, maybe sort of focusing on it while you’re in contemplation about what’s going on in your life. It doesn’t have to be overly complicated. It doesn’t have to be really complex and elaborate to be real, to be powerful, to be effective, to be meaningful and deeply transformational.

So something as simple as having that crystal there for that energetic support can literally be it, which we often don’t think of.

Adam: So in a way, just kind of having it there as a friend. That’s the friend you need when you’re doing shadow work.

Ashley: Yeah. For myself, I’m really, really tactile. That could be the ADHD, the neurodivergence. So it’s almost like, for me, like, a little fidget tool. As I’m thinking, as I’m processing, you know, I need that sort of tactile thing, and I might just turn it over and over in my hands.

I think there’s something that helps me be really present. So noticing the texture of that crystal against my skin, noticing its weight, its temperature really helps me focus on the present, really gets me in my body. And I think sometimes we need that reminder to just be present, especially if we’re trying to do that deeper work, that really transformative work. So being present, sitting in discomfort, sitting in uncertainty sometimes, whatever sort of coming up, and just knowing that that stone is helping you ground into that even if it’s a little difficult.

Adam: Love that. I love that. Nicholas, when would you rate for your black products out of your entire collection?

Nicholas: Well, I love it as an aid for focus. Kinda like how Ashley was talking about it has this, like, nourishing quality. I think about that colloidal state, this gel, this goo of silica that it was before it hardened into the gemstone that we know and love, having to collect and being, subject to gravity and accreting in those discrete bands and layers, and it’s like letting the dust settle. So, like, when my head is going a 1000000 miles an hour, because I’m also under that neurodivergent umbrella, this is a great tool for me when I need to, like, put on the laser like focus or I have to manage a lot of projects at once, and I know, like, I just can’t let assemble one of them slip. So this is one that I use to kinda tune out the rest of the noise and really find this, inner quiet and inner stamina to keep going.

You know, it builds up over time, and it feels like it’s gonna help me maintain the inertia I need to keep all the things moving, whether that’s just answering emails or taking care of deadlines. I remember one time we were photographing. I think it was my, 5th book. It was it was like a really labor intensive photography project for Stones of the Goddess because we wanted every image to look like a mini ritual, which didn’t entirely work out, but we it we had to do a a lot in very little time. And so I had to oversee that while handling editorial stuff and getting the nicer specimens than I had in my own collection to and from a home where we were photographing them.

So it was like that was the one I used a lot then, and it just kept me focused.

Adam: Well, I’m just thinking about photographing crystals. I had to do it for my first book, and I don’t know if we’ve all had a go at that. It’s trying to get the life and the for it to look right and all of that. That’s a whole different kettle of fish into it.

Nicholas: Thankfully, I married a photographer. My husband has a BFA in, fine art photography. So I get to outsource it, but it doesn’t go very far out. And I still get to be very hands-on, but that is not my that’s not my language in which I communicate the best. Like, my visual language is, well, actually, what I’m aiming for is to see more of the z face catching some of the light, and that doesn’t mean anything to other people.

So I have to, like, not speak in geologies. And, you know, thankfully, when I feel more grounded, I’m gonna meet people where they’re at because I have more bandwidth, and that’s one of the things that Onyx has helped me with.

Adam: For what of a better term, you and your husband probably need a rough, hard relationship to be able to communicate and get through those road issues.

Nicholas: We’ve gotten so better so much better over the years. It’s it’s pretty much a a breeze at this point, and, I’m just grateful the next project has, like, 13 pictures, whereas the last project had over 450. So

Adam: Love it. Love it. Kyle, anything you would you would also rate for Black Onyx with?

Kyle: Yes. For me, I sort of touched on it a little bit before was sort of manifesting, and both Ashley and Nicholas’s connections to sort of allowing yourself to confront things and face things and also, like, settling and allowing things to come to you is why I love it for manifestation. That idea that it takes so many little things for what we want to come into our life, that if we can stay grounded and patient and just trot forward and do the little things that we need to do each and every day, like our washing and the dishes and going to work and cleaning and like, if you can occupy yourself while still giving yourself a little bit of intention and focus to go forward, all of a sudden your manifestation is there. All of a sudden it appears before you. All of a sudden you achieve these goals and these things that you didn’t think you could because you didn’t give yourself the patience and the time, and you forgot that it doesn’t take big things to make big changes.

It takes lots of little things.

Adam: And what I what I found really interesting is, when I was, you know, kind of digging through the history and I found a myth about what why, Onyx is actually called or refers to that fingernail and comes from the Greek word. And apparently, once upon a time, as Aphrodite or Venus was sleeping on her bed at night, Eros or Cupid, her son, and the god of love, with an arrow, pricked one of her fingernails, and it fell on the ground. And so the gods didn’t want any part of this goddess to perish or dissolve, so they actually turned it into stone. And I think this kind of myth really leans into the energy for me of black onyx of I think a keyword for it is magnetism. And when we think of Aphrodite or whether we think of the spider, which I often tie in with black onyx, You know, most animals have to if they want something, including humans, we go get it.

We chase it. But what does spider do? She spins her web, which is an extension of herself, and then she allows she knows that she’s good enough and she allows what she needs to come to her. And I think in that way, just like Aphrodite didn’t go chasing lovers, they came to her. Black onyx is a really beautiful stone and crystal for allowing us to magnetize and just step back occasionally and believe that we’re good enough and even have a bit of a vibrational check-in because we always attract what we’re a vibrational match to.

So I love to just sit with it, have an intention of what I want. I even sometimes will visualize a web and met like, what I want to attract in that web and hold my onyx and let that come into, you know, come into my life and see if I am a vibrational match for it.

Ashley: Adam, I love that you shared this because you have me thinking about another way that I’ve used Onyx and worked with Onyx in the past, and it’s your anecdote about Aphrodite that kind of reminded me of this. I often associate black onyx for myself with the goddess Persephone, with this concept of the underworld journey and the re-emergence. And so this is a stone that I have placed on my ancestor altar for connecting with guidance during really difficult times and calling on that guidance from ancestors for those who are in the other world, when I need that extra kind of spiritual support. Like, you almost need that spiritual team there kind of supporting you, rallying behind you as you’re going through some of those really, you know, difficult times. So a very, very different, you know, concept because I also do see onyx as being that stone that has a lot of, magnetism about it for sure.

But in this instance, it’s almost for me like calling in that support.

Adam: I love that. I love that for sure. And this could tie in really nicely with why people might be wondering, why did you start with black onyx? Why not start with good old amethyst or rose quartz as our inaugural episode? But we just started to start with this because this week is the new moon in Libra.

Now we often hear and if you’re not too much into astrology, you might, you know, see on social media pages or different blogs, oh, it’s a new moon here and there. And what does that actually mean? So each zodiac sign obviously governs 1 12th of the population, determines when you were born, but it also governs a different aspect of life. And so what this allows us to do is when a planet or the moon is in one of those signs, it allows us to focus in that. So the example I always give, you know, this is the new moon in, in Libra.

Now when it’s a full moon in Libra, that’s the best time to focus on love. We shouldn’t be spending every full moon going, blah blah blah blah, please. Bring in my soulmate.

We’re living an unbalanced life. So that’s the full moon. What do we do in a new moon? Well, what I love to do is I love to think of the new moon as being like New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day.

So what are we doing on New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day? We’re we’re reflecting on the past year. We’re like, oh, thank God the year’s over. Let’s, you know, get rid of that. But you’re also celebrating things that are achieved.

And then we’re kind of planning for what are we gonna do next year. Now the difference between those that just work with the calendar year or the solar year and we who work with the lunar is we do a check-in about every 28 days. Now as you know, it’s really easy to correct course after 28 days than it is after 365 days. So what we can do is we do a minor check-in each new moon in one aspect of our lives, and then we’ve got 6 months until we’ve got the full moon. So what’s Libra all about?

It’s about relationships and partnerships. Now a lot of time, we do focus on love, but it doesn’t have to be. If you’re at this point in time, you don’t feel that you need to evolve anything in your love life, maybe, you know, that’s that’s all sorted, then you can look at other partnerships. It can be business partnerships, friendships, and that type of thing as well. Where Black Onyx comes in is, you know, we are who we hang with.

That’s why I’m hanging with these 3 amazing people to lift us all up. And so what we can do is we can get our Black Onyx, and I like full moons are the time to get in and get get all your tools out, get all magical, do all your healing. It’s high energy. But new moons, I like them to be quite reflective, and this is where I’ll get my different black and dark crystals out. So what my tip is for the new moon in Libra is go sit outside and I even say do the cup of tea meditation.

What I like about cups of tea is that I can healthy alternative to a cigarette Because you can’t you go outside, you take a too few breaths, and you can’t rush a hot cup of tea. So just sit outside and think about your relationships, all the relationships in your life. You hear different things like people say, you know, we are the culmination of the 5 people we’re closest to and all that type of thing. What would you like to change in the relationships in your life? And then maybe you might want to set an intention by holding the crystal.

You might wanna visualize the web like I referred to before and go, this is what kind of relationships I’d like to attract into my life. If we do what we’ve always done, we’re gonna get what we’ve always got, but black onyx can help to magnetize new relationships into our life, help us evolve, to meet new people, to expand in that way, and to make sure that the company we’re keeping, sometimes we just keep them because, oh, we’ve been friends for 20 years. But is that beneficial for your spiritual and and your everyday well-being as well? So that’s why I think Blackonics would be a really great crystal to hang out with for this week.

Ashley: It really was an excellent first choice. I think it’s such an underappreciated stone, so I’m so glad that we all got to show it a little bit of love.

Adam: Yeah. Now before we wrap up this episode, does anyone have anything else that we’ve missed about black onyx that we better throw in there?

Kyle: Just for, like, the new moon and just a little bit of work for people, a really simple grid crystal gridding is something that we can all work with that’s really, really simple. One piece of black onyx as a center point, and if you have clear quartz, generally, everyone has a few pieces of clear quartz, a couple of tumbled stones, or a couple of points. If you can have 4 points or 4 pieces pointing their energy towards the onyx or directing with intention the energy towards the onyx, you could sit that on your bedside table, you could have it on an altar, in a drawer, wherever, and even draw write that intention of who you’re trying to manifest, what you’re trying to manifest, the relationships, etcetera. Just simple one word, little bits under the onyx in the middle, and just let it work. Super simple, but really easy, and I love having grids because you can look at them and focus your energy on them every day and kind of receive that back.

Adam: I love that. So, hopefully, we’ve given everyone a little bit of homework or a little bit of home play. Get your black onyx out. Make sure you’ve got a black onyx if you haven’t. There’s gonna be a demand at the local crystal shops, and always support your local crystal shop as well.

Play around with your black onyx, and we’d love to know how you go. Let us know in the comment section. This is going to be available in on YouTube, on all our channels and through the popular podcast, platforms as well. If you’re interested, we’re also gonna have in the notes about a little bit about it and where you can find us also. We really encourage you whether you found us through one of us or just through a popular site.

Please follow us all because we all share a little bit about different crystals in different ways. And as I often say, none of us are right, but none of us are wrong. We’re here to act as your guides to help you further your own relationship with the crystals as well. Ashley, Nicholas, Kyle, thank you very much for joining us on our very first episode of Crystal Combat.

Kyle: Thank you.

Ashley: Thank you.

Adam: We’ll see you again next week when we dive into another crystal. Let us know what you’d like us to dive into on social media. Until then, take care.

Are you interested in becoming a Certified Crystal Healer? Find out more about the CCH and Advanced Crystal Practitioner Program HERE!