Like a lot of people, I started out on my journey with a lot of self study.

This was even going back to my teenage years. I would read so many books about the metaphysical properties of crystals. My very first book that I ever got was Melody’s ‘Love Is In The Earth’. I actually found it at a library sale for 25 cents or 50 cents and I couldn’t believe it. I was so excited and I bought it for myself.

Straight away I read it cover to cover which, if you’ve read Melody’s book, you’d know is no small feat. It’s pretty intense. She has so much wisdom and knowledge to share. That was a big eye-opener for me about just how deep you could go in the world of crystals. There are minerals in that book that to this day I’ve probably still never seen in person. There are minerals that I had never even heard of the first time I went through and read that book. But it was so exciting at that time because it was a whole new world for me, and that instilled this deeper curiosity. I just wanted to know more and more.

I’m one of those people whose thirst for knowledge is never really quenched.

I am always wanting to learn something new. So although that was my first deep foray into this kind of self study in the realm of crystals, I started to buy books by lots of other people – authors that I have a great deal of respect and admiration for, such as Judy Hall, Naisha Asiyan, and Katrina Rafael. I started to learn a lot about the different perspectives and viewpoints that exist in the crystal healing world and just how many possibilities there were out there for how to work with stones.

At the same time, I also felt a little confused and overwhelmed. As much as there were things that many people agreed upon, there were also things that they disagreed on. There were just so many conflicting ideas. I felt really lost in my exploration of the mineral kingdom in trying to really understand how to work with crystals for my own personal growth and well being.

Around this time, I was also finishing up college and I decided to take a part time job at a metaphysical shop in Madison, Wisconsin called Mimosa Books and Gifts.

It just felt like something that was really right for me. It fit with my interests and things I was passionate about while I was going to school for botany. Again, that was my passion for the natural world coming through… I love plants. I had gotten my associates degree in ornamental horticulture and decided to pursue my bachelors degree in botany. There were things that I liked about my studies and things that I didn’t like about it, but working at Mimosa was really supporting this part of myself that I needed to be nurtured.

At that point, I was going through big changes in my life. There was so much happening for me and I realized that the path that I was on was focusing my career trajectory in botany. I had some amazing jobs, and had essentially already started out my career in that field. I worked for the premier root biologist in the world at the Mortner Reedum out of Chicago, so I was on this very solid career path. However there were things that just didn’t feel right about it to me.

The career path that had been put in front of me started to seem fairly limited. The career options available didn’t really resonate with what I wanted to do or what I felt like I should be doing.

It was really scary because even at that time, the positions that I had in my field were very well paying. They had a certain amount of prestige associated with them. Even when I decided to take that little part time job at a metaphysical shop, I got some pressure from my family to do something that was more aligned with what I was finishing up school for… Basically, what everyone else thought I should be doing. But I thought, “You don’t know. I need to do this for me.” I needed to have this part of me be nourished by how I was spending my time and by my career, because our careers are so much of what we do. Not necessarily of who we are but of what we do on a day to day. I wanted to feel really fulfilled.

Working at Mimosa, I definitely didn’t make very much money at all. It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world or the most convenient, but it was something that I really enjoyed. I think that at the time, it really started to rekindle and fuel that passion for crystals again. I got so excited about crystals and learning about crystals and helping people at the store.

I’d help our customers choose crystals for themselves and it was something that I found really enjoyable. I got excited about it and looked forward to it everyday.

At this time, I was also dealing with a lot of personal issues. I was struggling with a lot of anxiety and this was kind of two-fold. I was dealing with debilitating panic attacks almost daily. Ultimately, I think it was from feeling so much pressure in my life. I was feeling really torn between things that I wanted to do and explore and felt passionate about and feeling honestly a little bit crushed and thwarted with my possible career options that lay ahead of me. Ultimately, I was not feeling an alignment with where my life was headed. It was a really scary time.

Even though it was something that I thought that I had wanted and that I was kind of talking myself into, deep down I knew my chosen career in botany wasn’t the right fit for me.

I think that it just all bubbled over when I felt this intense internal pressure to make everybody happy and have that societal view of success. A good paying job, big house, big family, all that kind of stuff. Inside, I knew that that wasn’t really going to bring me happiness. That wasn’t really what it was about for me. For some people that is what it’s about, and that’s totally okay. But for me, that wasn’t the thing that was going to bring me happiness ultimately.

So I was having a lot of anxiety about that, and at the same time I was diagnosed with a genetic heart condition. It was something that I was struggling with almost constantly. At that point in my life, I really didn’t know a lot about it. I had no idea up until my diagnosis when I was in my early 20s that I even had this issue. But I found that I felt quite ill a lot. I would have really scary times where my heart would just start racing. I have a specialized form of tachycardia that pops up at any time. So my heart will just start racing and thumping and just kind of beating out of my chest. I had no idea what was going on with me. I was only in my early 20s and I felt like I was having a heart attack.

My heart condition combined with my anxiety was a vicious circle because the episodes with my heart would trigger my anxiety and make it so much worse. This was a big push for me to take my health and wellness really seriously.

I am so grateful that I worked at Mimosa during this time. I felt so supported by the amazing people that I had met and the things I was being introduced to, such as yoga and meditation, which were really helping my wellbeing.

One of the big things that I did for myself was to continue to learn about crystals and start using crystals personally to help with my own personal health and wellbeing. I was really just trying to figure out how it all fit in. So all these big changes were happening for me.

I was again fortunate enough to work at Mimosa at that time, because there was an amazing teacher visiting from Chicago called Akiya.

Akiya was a certified founding instructor in one of Melody’s Workshops. So here was the thing that felt so synchronistic from the universe… that very first crystal book that I ever got for myself was Melody’s Love Is In The Earth, A Kaleidoscope Of Crystals. I fell in love with that book. I adored that book, it really opened up so many doors for me in terms of learning about crystals. However I was also at this point where I had read so many other things that I was feeling a little bit confused and conflicted about all of the information that was out there. I had decided at that point that what I needed was a teacher, a mentor to really help me understand a little bit more about crystals and how they could be used in my own life.

When I found out that this amazing teacher was going to bring Melody’s workshop to the little store that I worked at, I signed up for it right away.

I was so excited to do that training. It was something I just wanted to do for myself, for personal development. It was really expensive at that time in my life. I was a student. I was only working part time. My husband and I lived together, but we weren’t married yet. He didn’t have the best paying job either. We were young, we were kind of struggling to make ends meet. It was really scary to decide that I was going to spend quite a large sum of money on something that felt like a luxury.

Really, it wasn’t something that we had in the budget. It wasn’t something that we really could afford. In fact, I had to put the course on my credit card, which was scary. I’m really strict and regimented when it comes to my spending and that was definitely outside of my means at that time. But there was part of me that felt like it was something that I had to do. I had to do it for myself. Even if that meant that I had to cut back in some other ways. Which wasn’t easy – there wasn’t very much to cut back on – it was something I knew I had to do.

So I had to talk with my husband. I talked about how important this was to me, how it was something I really wanted to explore for my own personal development and my health and well being. Luckily he was so amazingly supportive. He said “You know what, if you feel like this is something you really need to do, then I think you should listen to that”.

So I signed up for this workshop and I can confidently say that even now, it remains one of the most transformational things I have ever done.

It was such a powerful experience. I had the privilege of taking this workshop with some amazing people that I felt such a deep connection with and an instructor that I really respected and admired. I learned so many new things. Honestly, I finally felt like something had clicked for me about working with crystals. It just kind of started to make sense, and it was because of that first professional training that I took.

I knew at the end of that training, which was a full on weekend workshop intensive, that this is something that I wanted to share with other people. I wanted other people to have that experience that I had had in this workshop. A few months later, we took the second half of the workshop. This was when I became a certified practitioner.

I started offering crystal healing sessions at Mimosa where I worked. This was something that was really exciting for me. I was so passionate about it and loved doing it.

It was a lot to juggle. I was still going to school, although I didn’t feel super aligned with that career path. I was still kind of in that mindset that it was something I had started, so I needed to finish it. It was something I should do –  have that good job and be able to support my family. I was also still working at Mimosa and then doing these crystal healing sessions on the side for people. The sessions were something that I just wanted to do because it helped me feel really fulfilled.

About this time, the owner of the store that I worked at started looking for a business partner.

She was getting to the age where she thought she may retire within a few years. Because of this, she wanted the opportunity to work with a business partner. I thought it would be something that I would be so good at and I loved working at Mimosa – it was something I really enjoyed. But I just thought, I’m young, I’m totally broke, there is not way I can make that work. I have no idea how to run a business. I’ve never done anything like that. There is just no way that that’s for me, even though it was something I really wanted to do and thought I’d be really good at. I just didn’t see how it was possible. I didn’t have the vision.

I’m pretty analytical in a lot of ways and if I can’t connect the dots and see how I get there, I just think it’s impossible.

So I didn’t speak up about it. I didn’t say it was something I wanted. I just kind of resigned myself to the fact that it wasn’t going to be possible for me. But lo and behold, someone else actually stepped into that position who was just as young and broke as I was. Honestly, I was really surprised that that happened.

The owner of the business, Diane, who is such an amazing and influential person in my life, decided she was going to give it a go with this person who was, like I said, just a couple of years older than I was and also super broke. We were in the same position, but she had spoken up. She had said, I want to give this a try. So, she stepped into a trial partnership role. I didn’t really know how she was going to make that work financially with a business partnership or anything like that. But there was part of me that was just bummed. I was so bummed and so disappointed in myself that I hadn’t said something.

I thought, well how can this person make this work? If this person can make this work, I probably could have done this. Why didn’t I say something? Why didn’t I speak up? It was a really hard lesson because I felt that I had missed out on this huge opportunity in my life. I was really disappointed in myself and that doesn’t happen often.

In that moment I felt a lot of regret because my intuition was telling me that this was something I should do and I didn’t listen because logically I couldn’t figure out how I was gonna get there.

So let that be a lesson. If your intuition is really pushing you to do something, always listen – even if you don’t know logically how it’s gonna happen. So, fortunately for me,  the partnership with this other person, after a few months, kind of didn’t work out. She realized it wasn’t something she really wanted. It wasn’t what she thought it would be and she decided to gracefully step out of the partnership, which left a vacancy.

Diane was still running the shop, doing amazing things, and put it out there again that she was looking for a business partner. I decided this time that it was all or nothing. I was gonna make this happen. Honestly, I didn’t know how but it was something that I wanted. So I thought, “Okay, you know what? I’m just going to go for it. I have no idea what’s going to happen. I might fail and that’s really scary but this is one of those things that when I look back later in life, if I haven’t tried then I’ll regret it.” So, this time I spoke up and I decided to have a conversation with Diane.

Even though I was so close to finishing my degree in botany, I decided I was going to leave school.

This was a big deal. My family was not happy. They were understanding, but not happy. There was a lot of pressure. It was a big step for me, but I decided that if I really wanted to give this a go, I needed to tell the universe that I was ready. For me, staying in this kind of career path was not fulfilling. It was not the way to go. 

Diane and I had a meeting and she kind of started out by saying, “Okay. Now, I’m really excited that you decided to take this meeting with me. I wanted to propose something to you and just let me know whether or not this would work.” then she said, “Here’s the thing, I would love to run this business with you but I know you’re in school, I know that’s a priority, I’m wondering if it would be possible for you to maybe step in as a manager, even if it were just part time.”

I said, “Diane, I am so grateful for that offer but that’s not going to work for me.” and her face just kind of fell and I could tell she was really disappointed and I thought, “Okay, this is it. This is my moment that I have been kind of working up toward.” 

I said, “Here’s the thing, I can’t accept a manager job because what I would really like to do is be your business partner.”

“I adore you, I love what you do here, I love Mimosa. This is something I feel that I’d be really good at. I know that I have no experience running a business or managing a business. And I have no money to buy and do a business. I’ve no idea how to make that work. But if you’re willing to give me a shot, I feel like we can figure those things out together and make it happen.”

Her face immediately lit up and she was like, “I’ve wanted to ask you the whole time! But I knew you were in school, so I didn’t want to say anything. What are you going to do about school?” and I said, “Well, I’ve actually decided just a few days ago to leave school.” And of course, she was also nervous for me. It was a big change, but she was so supportive and so amazing. I really have her to thank for so many things in my life.

So, with a whole lot of elbow grace and sweat equity, I was able to become a partner in the business.

I started working 60-70 hour weeks at Mimosa. It was a lot of hard work. Like please, don’t get me wrong here, things don’t just magically happen. The universe also always requires you to put in some effort to make your dreams come true. It was a lot to balance and juggle but I was learning so much. It was something I really enjoyed so even though, yes, it was exhausting and yes, it was a ton of work, it’s something that I would not change for the world.

I got so much experience and learned so much. My professional sessions started to pick up. I was able to schedule them more as I was at the shop more. I was there interacting with more customers and making great contacts and I started to do more and more sessions. It was something that I enjoyed so much.

Here’s the thing I want tell you. That time was so formative for what I teach now in my crystal healing certification program. I wanna say, if you’re looking at taking a crystal program, I don’t care who it’s with, if it’s with me, if it’s with someone else, any crystal program that you’re looking at taking. Do your research and find out, has that person actually done sessions professionally?

You would be appalled at how many teachers are out there teaching about crystals that have never actually done professional work.

Yes, you can get so much experience doing sessions for your friends and your family and that kind of thing, but there is nothing like having to do it for a paid client. To really force you to give it your all and have it be such a powerful learning experience.

I was starting to do tons of sessions and what I found at the end of my sessions was that I would spend a good deal of time with each person, really teaching them about something that they could do for themselves.

I really like the idea of empowering my clients.

So I didn’t expect someone to come back and see me over and over again for the rest of their lives. No. My goal ultimately was to get that person to a place where they didn’t need to see me anymore. Well, except for maybe once or twice a year for a nice energetic tune up. That was my goal. I always looked at my job that way, as a responsibility to my client to really teach them how they could work with crystals for themselves and what they could do to keep their own energy field really healthy.

This was at a time, even before Facebook was a super big thing, back in 2007 and early 2008. I was doing all these sessions, starting to teach clients and online forum groups were still a thing. They were like these interest-based chat groups.

I was a member of a crystal healing internet forum chat that had a few thousand members from all over the world.

There was a man that ran the group and he was so amazing. He facilitated such amazing conversation and discussions about crystals. He had little study groups that he ran within that little chat group thing. I learned so much and I shared so much in that group. I met some amazing people. It was something that was such a big influence on my journey.

I was in there all the time chatting about, “Okay, here’s what was going on for me this week with my clients. ” And of course, keeping total confidentiality, not sharing names, not sharing personal details, but just talking and going, “Okay, I had someone to come see me for this. These are the crystals that I used. This is what I did. What do you guys think about that?” and getting tons of feedback and sharing the things that I was teaching my clients at the end of sessions. It was such an amazing support for me.

In late 2007, early 2008, I also started offering online classes.

Now, this was before online courses were what they are today. This was like before the days of video lessons or anything like that. I was offering a correspondence course which was an actual crystal healing certification program. I’m pretty sure I was the first person that ever used the letters CCH, Certified Crystal Healer, and it was something that I offered by email correspondence.

People could sign up for my program. They would get emailed their first lesson with their homework assignment, they would go through the lesson, read all the materials, do the homework, send it back to me for grading and I would send them the next lesson. This was the very first iteration of my crystal healing certification program. It started just all by emails and wasn’t super tech-savvy. I really had no what idea what I was doing online but I wanted to share things with people. At the same time, I was travelling around to teach.

I had started to really enjoy the teaching aspect, as well as the healing aspect, when it came to my crystal work.

I was getting invited to a lot of women’s groups and community groups and spirituality groups. They were asking me to share and do little lectures and workshops and presentations about crystals and what they were and how they worked. I know it seems pretty mainstream now, but back 12 years ago they were still not super big. They were one of the things that you could find in any metaphysical shop, but they weren’t the main thing. You know? They weren’t the thing that was all the rage. It was a little bit more underground. Even in the new age community.

Getting invited to go do all these speaking events and teach was really, really exciting for me. I was getting to share about crystals, about this thing that had really influenced me.

I started getting invited to places further and further away. Going from local to different communities within a few hours drive to out of state. I started having people from Oklahoma and Tennessee and Georgia and New Hampshire and Colorado say, I wish I could take this program with you. These classes you’re teaching sound amazing.

I was sharing all about this work and the experiences I was having with my students and people were like, “Ah. There’s nothing like this by me. I wish I could do this. Will you please please please bring these classes online?” And I said, “You know, I’m doing it through email correspondence and I’ve been doing that for couple years.” And they said, “Yeah, I know but I really would love to feel like I was in the classroom with you.” And so, this was at the very beginning of when the technology was even really there to start supporting that kind of experience.

To be honest, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I had built my own website from scratch all my self which I’ll tell you, it was really bad. It did not look good. But you know what? It worked, it functioned, it was far from perfect. Even my website now is not perfect. There are things that I would still love to update and change. But here’s the thing: it was something that I cared about so I made it happen. I had no idea what I was doing but I learned. I watched YouTube videos. Basically, I did everything that I could to really try and figure out how to make this happen for people.

In 2010, I started offering my Crystal Healing Certification Program, kind of as you see it now.

I started offering it online as an offering to people all over the world. It was something that was so exciting for me and something that I looked forward to doing. I was still doing it in person, travelling around to teach. I would go and teach a few classes in the program each day and it would take people in person around a year because they’d come one Saturday a month to have a workshop with me. Doing this online I think was the thing for me that made it feel like I was finally able to reach so many people. I could have that impact that I wanted to have when I got started. That was a really big deal.

As I was building an online presence, I would do this free “Ask a Crystal Healer” nights.

I would do them about once a month for about an hour. I would hop online and let people ask me questions. They would just chat and ask me a little question in our live chat. Then I’d take all those little sections from that long event and I’d break them down into short YouTube videos. Some of those you can still see on my YouTube channel.

Again, they’re so old and so embarrassing at this point because they’re not professionally produced. They are– they’re very dated, right? Some of them, I’m wearing a hilarious huge headset because it was way back in the early days of YouTube. But the information was so solid and it was something that I really enjoyed doing. I’ve left those up because I think it’s fun to see the progression. Like I said before, if I can do this, you can do this too. This is something that anyone can make happen.

So I had this online community. I had my YouTube channel, I was doing this email course and then the in person CCH program and then moving my crystal healing certification program online. It all just continued to develop over the past decade. 

Even just this year, I’ve made some huge improvements to the CCH program. I’m always listening to our community, to our students. I try to find out what they want, what they need, what would support them better in their learning.

Something that we added in just this year to the program which I’m so proud of and excited about are video demonstrations. I actually hired a professional photographer and videographer to take videos of the step by step process and techniques and skills that I teach in this program. That has been something I’ve gotten such amazing feedback from our students about. It’s been so rewarding. Even though it meant really crazy long work weeks and photo shoots with the photographer that would last sometimes like 12 hours, I am so proud to give to our students. It’s something that really makes me feel like I’m doing the thing that I’m supposed to be doing.

I’m really giving the best possible experience that I can. I’m teaching people in the best way that I can.

The really fun and exciting thing is that as technology continues to develop and grow, we’re able to do all kinds of different things. I feel like it leaves so many possibilities for the future. It’s something I’m so excited about. Just thinking back to how I got started doing those classes through email to where they’re at now, it’s pretty phenomenal. I couldn’t do that without the type of modern technology that we have, but that’s one of the things that is so cool about this.

We now have a student community that’s in a private Facebook group. I love seeing what happens in that group.

You have all kinds of people getting together, sharing their experiences, supporting one another in ways that are really truly phenomenal. We’ve even had some pretty cool things happen in that group.

We had two students who had never met, Irene and David. They met actually in our student group and they got to chatting. This chatting led to more chatting and late night chatting and having conversations about crystals and life and everything. AND they just ended up getting married last year. They lived on totally opposite sides of the Earth, they met in the group, they talked all the time, they met up in person, started to see each other once in a while and just fell in love. I think that’s so beautiful.

Also this year, in our most recent round of the program, we had two students, one who was an alumni and one who is a brand new student this time, who met in our student group. It turned out they were practically next door neighbors. They lived two houses away from each other. They had never met in person until they met in the group, found out that they lived in the same town then found out that they lived on the same street. Now they get together and do amazing crystal rituals together. 

To me, connection is the most amazing thing. This is exactly why I do this work.

Yes, it’s something that I’m passionate about, I love doing it, but I also love seeing the connections that take place. I love seeing the community come together, because when I got started, I feel so alone. That wasn’t something that I really had until a few years into it and even then, it wasn’t like how it is now. In the original chat forums, yes, you could really share and get a lot of feedback and that kind of thing but it wasn’t quite as personal. How things are today, I think it’s just more common for people to meet online and connect online and get to know one another.

This has been such an exciting and fulfilling journey and I can’t wait to see where it takes me from here. So, that’s it. That’s what I wanted to share today. With just this story of how this all happened.

The thing that I really want to leave you with is, if there’s something that you feel called to do, if there’s something that is so important to you that you know that you’ll look back later in life and feel like you missed out because you didn’t give it a try because you were afraid or because you didn’t see how it was possible, you’ve got to go for it.

There are some things in life that are just worth going for no matter how scary they seem, because the rewards can be beyond what you ever could’ve imagined. So, take it from me, that is my story and it can be your story too.

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

Summary

Article Name

How I Went from a Crystal Lover to International Crystal Teacher

Description

I get asked about it so often, so this week is the week I share the personal story of how I went from a crystal lover to an international crystal teacher...

Author

Ashley Leavy

Publisher Name

Love & Light School of Crystal Therapy

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