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Join Adam Barralet, Kyle Perez , Ashley Leavy and Nicholas Pearson in Episode #15 of the Crystal Confab Podcast as they do a deep dive into Snowflake Obsidian meaning, including:

• Snowflake Obsidian for balance
• Harnessing winter season energies with Snowflake Obsidian
• Snowflake Obsidian for working through grief and personal lows
• The interplay of stillness and movement within Snowflake Obsidian

Tune in now for a deeper look at Snowflake Obsidian meaning!

From energetic protection to past life healing, Obsidian is the crystal of transformation. When used with the right intentions, Obsidian acts as a guardian, truth-seeker and mirror to the soul, offering its ancient wisdom to guide you toward deep inner healing. This is why I’ve created my Unlocking Obsidians Course – to help you uncover and harness the raw, untamed power of Obsidian for empowerment, clarity, and a stronger connection to your authentic self.

In this immersive course, you’ll discover:

• Obsidian’s Origins & Formation – What makes this natural glass so unique?

• The Many Types of Obsidian – Black, Rainbow, Mahogany, and beyond—each with its own distinct energy.

• Practical Techniques – Learn how to use Obsidian for energy clearing, scrying, protection, and deep healing.

• How to Spot Fake Obsidian – Ensure your crystals are the real deal.

Whether you’re a crystal lover, healer, or spiritual seeker, this course is designed to help you embrace Obsidian’s transformative power in a way that feels supportive rather than overwhelming.

Podcast 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.

Nicholas Pearson: Hello, and welcome to another edition of crystal confab. My name is Nicholas, and I’m here with some of my best friends, and we’re gonna confab about a new crystal. And this week, we don’t actually have a crystal to talk about. So, maybe that’s a really great place to start. Our ally for the week, our topic, our subject, our friend is snowflake obsidian.

And, you know, technically, given that it’s obsidian, it’s not a mineral, it’s not a crystal, it’s in this kind of weird liminal space that I think we’ll talk plenty about, but, you know, what what reason do we have for throwing a non crystal in our crystal confab?

Ashley Leavy: I would love to jump in on this one right away because this is actually a question that I get from my students a lot. Like, you know, is it okay to work with these things that in the healy-feely world, we often just lump everything together and call it crystals, but obsidian, like Nicholas said, is not actually a crystal. The reason that we work with crystals in the world of crystal healing, we can generally agree, there are lots of reasons, but in general, you know, crystals have this perfect orderly structure to them. And it’s thought that by bringing that perfect stable structure into our own energy field, into our space, then the energy of our field, our space goes through the process of entrainment and starts to mimic that perfect stable structure of the crystal. But Obsidian, since it doesn’t have that internal crystalline structure, why would we still work with it?

And I like to think of this as, you know, there are lots of different reasons that we can turn to crystals and point to different crystals and look at where their properties come from, where their energy comes from, because everything has energy in this world, whether it’s a crystal or not. Right? So just because obsidian isn’t a crystal doesn’t mean it doesn’t still have this amazing energetic quality to it. And with our stones of all sorts, we can point to a lot of different ways that they get their properties and associations. Like, color is a common one that people turn to, crystal system is another one, but also mythology, lore, historical reference that sort of has been passed down through the generations and is still very much a part of our conscious connection to the stones.

And so for me, that is where Obsidian has such a deep well. And I know Nicholas could probably talk about this all day because he wrote about this extensively in his 7 archetypal stones book, but it is one of those companions that have been with humans throughout history. And so there is so much depth to it. And since all things have energy, there’s just different ways that we kind of tap into that energy. But, Kyle, what do you think about this?

Kyle Perez: Oh, I’m happy and excited to talk about this because this is where our fabulous friend, the volcano, comes into effect. Right? If you think about the energy of volcano, of magma, of the processes of bringing that heat, that power, that pressure from below the Earth’s surface up and out and into the world, sometimes in very dramatic ways, sometimes, you know, a little bit more organically, and then the height the heating and the cooling and all of that sort of stuff, it is still silica. Right? This is the key with obsidian.

Right? Is it still silica? Silica is what? Quartz. Quartz is what? A crystal. We can still align it to crystalline sort of energy because it still has that within it. It is a natural glass, which we love. It’s still a natural thing that the earth has produced and created for us, and I think anything that comes from that method and I know we’re going to dive into a whole episode in the future on fossils. Fossils amber being part of that sort of group.

There’s a lot of, like, non crystals that we can work with, that we connect to, that we love, and that we’ve appreciated over years. I love that Obsidian in different cultures around the world has been utilized for quite a few different things, but essentially in medicine and in surgery or in war and in fighting. Because of Obsidian’s ability to be napped and cut and shaped into blades, it has been used all over the world. I saw a documentary where it has been proven that somewhere in the UK around the Stonehenge era or before, it was used for brain surgery to literally cut open the brain. They’ve used obsidian as a blade to cut open to get into pressure to relieve the pressure and then put it back open.

And because they’ve seen the healing, they’ve known that it’s been successful to some degree. So to know that for 1000 of years, Obsidian has been a part of our human resource and psyche, I think, is really important. We continue that legacy, and we evolve that legacy, and we turn it into something even more amazing as we connect to it more deeply.

Ashley: And I did mention, Nicholas, that you’ve written extensively about Obsidian. What are your thoughts on this whole concept of working with a non crystal like Obsidian?

Nicholas: Yeah. So, you know, I think there are a couple threads here that are gonna intersect. You know, 1st and foremost, when we look at the genesis of Obsidian, it’s made out of a lot of things we find in comparable rocks. So I think it’s helpful to, like, get a couple definitions here, like, what makes a crystal a crystal and a mineral a mineral and a rock a rock? A crystal is usually a homogeneous solid substance with this kind of unit cell that repeats as this little tiny fundamental, like, building block.

And it has a high degree of symmetry, a high degree of order. Given enough space, we get crystal faces. We don’t always get that because there’s not always enough space. I mean, look at a piece of agate. We can’t see those crystal faces, but they’re still in there on the microscopic level.

And minerals are what happens when we get naturally occurring inorganic crystals. So it’s still gotta have that regular composition, that regular structure at that kind of fundamental level. And rocks are what happen when minerals combine, but then we get to something like Obsidian. If we were to hypothetically take a thin sliver of it and look at it with a scanning electron microscope, we could zoom in at a cluster of silica or titania or alumina and and see that there is kinda sorta a unit cell here, but it doesn’t repeat, and it doesn’t attach to anything else. So when we zoom out, we notice that that short range order doesn’t extend into long range order.

It’s not like our agates and chalcedonies, which have both short and long range order. We can see that a little piece of silica attaches to a longer thread of molecules, which, you know, may not make a perfect, you know, hedral or well formed crystal face in terms of the, you know, perfect quartz crystal, but it’s still identifiably quartz. With Obsidian, it’s not quite there. It’s halfway between the solid and the not so solid. In fact, because it is a glass lacking that long range order, material scientists often will describe the makeup, the structure of glasses as being supercooled liquids.

They do not flow. That is an old wives’ tale, but they lack the other defining features of most solid substances. However, when we look at those little protocrystals, those not quite crystals that are forming, they are really mineral dense. They’re full of things that, you know, we’re gonna recognize, pretty darn easily. You’ve got silica, alumina, potassium oxides, sodium oxides, iron oxides of varying kinds depending on which state of iron it is, and you’re gonna find any number of other things.

So it’s not definitely far from being pure quartz, but the same ratios are the same things we’re gonna find in rhyolite and granite and a few other kinds of igneous rocks that are kind of birthed out of the same kind of primordial liquid. And it’s that way that it belongs to the rock cycle that I think gives us access to it with equal weight, equal merit that we would any other rock or mineral. And then, you know, it differs quite a bit. Here’s one of those other intersecting threads. Well, if we can use natural glass, what’s so different about that and artificial glass?

And they have remarkably different makeups. They’re birthed by very different kinds of processes. Transparent, glass is not pure quartz. It is really far removed from it. It’s gonna be made out of mostly things like feldspar and potash and, you know, some amount of pure silica sand will go in there as well, but probably not as high as most people expect unless we’re making stuff for very specialized kinds of technology.

But it’s that mineral denseness that we get in obsidians. It’s the way that they’re formed, and it is that semblance of short range order that gives us the kind of prelude to crystallinity.

Adam Barralet: I think we’ve also got to look with that volcanic energy as well. That’s a fiery energy, and nothing is formed, you know, maybe with the exception of the tech cards, nothing is formed in that tap that most powerful fast way. When we think about how long crystals take to actually form, these are formed very, very quickly in crystal time. So it does bring that fire in us to our lives. The other thing I love to use all the Obsidian family for, and I find that they all zone in in a different arena.

But when you think about it, it’s like it’s lying dormant deep within the earth, and then it comes up in a very explosive manner. So the obsidians are amazing for us to tune into what lies deep within us and bring that to the surface as well. In saying that, we’re looking at snowflake obsidian today, which I would probably find or describe as being the most gentle of the obsidian in that way. And it’s, you know, it’s almost got a yin yang kind of energy to it. So do you find it quite balancing, Nicholas?

Nicholas: I do. And what we get with, like, all of these different varieties of obsidian, I know we talked about spiderweb obsidian already, but, you know, it’s just kinda scratching the surface of this family of natural volcanic glasses. But every one of them has slightly different circumstances under which it forms. So we’ve hinted that, but I don’t think we’ve really described the mechanism by which Obsidian is made. We have felsic lava, so it’s rich in the things that make feldspars and silicate minerals.

It’s the same ingredients that produce rhyolite, which forms under the same conditions, but cools ever so slightly more slowly, or granite, which cools much, much more slowly. And in the case of obsidian, as that very viscous lava is flowing, it has to cool so rapidly. There’s not an opportunity for long range order to take over and turn it into a rock made of lots of identifiable crystals. But snowflake Obsidian is kinda special because, well, it got pretty close. All of those little patches that we see, those are what we call phenocrysts.

This is kind of our standard gray white phenocrysts in there. I’ve got some that have reddish ones as well. This comes from Mexico. I’ve got some stuff that comes from Utah that has, like, bands of magnetite in it, which aren’t appearing on camera. But if the angle were better, you’d see this kind of rainbow iridescence to them.

And then oh, there we go. Just just a little bit, but you don’t get much rainbow color. And then we still get those phenocrysts of things like mostly crystobolite, which is a high temperature polymorph of quartz. It’s still silicon dioxide, different crystal structure, but we get these, and then they’re in that sea, if you will, of glass, of this supercooled liquid. And so we’ve got, you know, maybe more than a toe in the foothold, the realm of crystallinity.

And the other foot is definitely in that sea of chaos. And that’s the magic here. Right? We get something that is firm and regular and reassuring and predictable in the case of those phenocrysts or crystobolite. And then we get chaotic, the void of becoming.

It’s this magic of all of those ingredients that haven’t quite crystallized could be any number of things in obsidian. They end up being obsidian because we’ve interrupted the process to stop it in place. And, I find that this particular combination of crystalline and noncrystalline that we get in this stone, in snowflake obsidian, is great for balancing processes related to movement and stillness. Sometimes we need those cycles of rest. We need stillness.

We need that crystallinity. We need things to become just a little bit harder and firmer and more rigid. And other times, we gotta remain fluid and go with the flow and let things continue to go. So, I think that’s a really powerful kind of magic that it brings. It’s a really wonderful stone for illumination as well because ordinarily, we get, you know, a plain black piece of obsidian, and you can’t, with your visible eye, see too much going on that indicates any amount of crystallinity.

There are gonna be tiny little particulates in there. If you get some, you know, gold sheen Obsidian or rainbow Obsidian, those are the results of those, like, tiny little crystals forming. But it sounds like obsidian shows it off really well. And so it’s kind of like turning the light on in the darkness as well, and it reminds us of the value of both of those things. Right?

We can’t appreciate light without darkness. We can’t appreciate busyness without rest. We can’t appreciate stillness without movement and hot without cool and wet without dry. So I find it such a wonderful stone for achieving that sense of dynamic balance. And that doesn’t mean we find a single fixed still point and stay there.

It’s recognizing that we just need to have the fulcrum in the right place so the teeter totter can go back and forth without becoming unstable. And it’s different depending on how much weight is on each end of the teeter totter. Right? You know, if you have a toddler on one side and a full grown adult on the other, that’s not gonna be balanced if you stick that fulcrum right in the middle. So what I love about the kind of interplay of entropy and order that we see in Snowflake Obsidian is that it helps us adapt to the changing tides, the moving benchmarks.

It allows us to really be present with our needs in any given moment, which means sometimes you can go 90 miles an hour full speed ahead, and other times it’s the holiday season and you’re not capable of remembering that it’s Monday or anything else, and that’s okay too.

Ashley: I would love to ask you a question about something, Nicholas, and I’m hoping maybe you’ll know the answer. So you talked about the crystalballite phenocrysts that we can see. And so you held up a few examples, and I have a couple also. Now sometimes we get them and they’re really small, and sometimes they’re really really large. And I know in general when crystals form, this isn’t like an absolute, but in general, the slower crystal forms, the larger it will be.

Is that true when we see that sort of take shape in these little snowflakes?

Nicholas: Yes. So, here’s, like, my geology 101 brain coming back to me. So when we see really fine grained in let’s back up a moment. In the case of igneous rocks, such as Obsidian, when we see really fine grained crystal structures and something like maybe basalt or rhyolite, we call those, aphanitic textures. They don’t have really big well defined crystal grains that we can see with the naked eye.

That tells us that they were formed exclusively, meaning from a volcanic eruption or something comparable, and that they had to cool relatively quickly under those circumstances because there was no insulation. When we have really large crystal grains, we call that texture phaneritic, and then the big big grains among them will be called phenocrysts. And if they’re super big, you can call them microcrysts. But in the case of snowflake obsidian, what we’re seeing is, the lava remaining molten for long enough that those phenocrysts can continue to grow, so it does have a slower cooling rate. We also have to consider that the rate of flow is part of this equation.

The faster something is flowing, the harder it is for solid bits to hold on to each other and get bigger. The presence or absence of other trace elements can also inhibit or or encourage crystal growth. So there are a few other things that go in there, but when you see those large kinds of billowy clouds that probably slowed and cooled very slowly and also flowed very slowly, whereas the opposite would be true with our really fine grained, phenocrysts and and some of the others.

Ashley: That’s really fascinating to me. So these really big, large sorts of snowflakes are, like, formed in a super chill solution. They were just kind of hanging out and enjoying the ride. And you also showed a couple times some, like, pink ones or the little snowflakes are pinkish color. I have a few of those too.

Mine are also from Mexico, and these are something I’ve only really seen on the market the past couple years. I’m wondering just off chance if anyone knows where these are getting their pink color from.

Nicholas: I mean, my theory is the higher than average trace iron that’s in there. Some of the things that we see being labeled or being sold are being called things like, red snowflake obsidian or I’ve seen it called fireworks obsidian as well. And they can occasionally have other minerals present in those phenocrysts. It might not all be crystoblate. You might have some that are feldspars, which is a chief ingredient that emerges from felsic lava that is the kind of parent material for this.

Adam: Now, Kyle, how do you like, this is such an empowering crystal, but, obviously, the black crystals can allow us to go into the shadows. And each different one, whether it be onyx, whether it be jet, or whether it be at one of the obsidians, can help us kind of safely look at those kinds of shadowy types of things. Do you find that Snowflake Obsidian can help in any of that kind of respect?

Kyle: Yeah. Absolutely. So for me personally, I’m gonna change the energy just a little bit. Working with Snowflake Obsidian has been for me about processing grief and trauma, and it has come to me and it has orbited my life. It’s one of those stones that orbited.

And weirdly, I don’t have big pieces, but I have pieces that are very intimate in how they work with me. So it’s probably not gonna work, but these are plugs, crystal ear plugs that I have worn, and I wore them for a good couple of years, 2 or 3 years, and it was during the period of my dad’s passing and after. Very convenient. I bought them online. They came to me, and I was like, these are really cool.

I’m gonna work with it. I’m gonna wear them. They’re the right size, and just not really thinking about the energetic side of things, and then that all happened, and I found myself taking on and off many other crystals, all my necklaces, all my bracelets. They all come off at the end of the day, and I don’t feel into them. I try to let my body do what it needs to do, but they stay in.

And these ones were not about being in my head, but allowing me to not think about things too much. The thing that I needed to do was feel and let myself feel and let myself grieve properly. Allow myself the space and the grace to do so because shocking sudden passings, trauma, things that come up, we are often guarded. We often need to be strong. I need to take care of other people. These things come up, and they certainly have come up for me in the past during situations similarly.

But this was like the universe just went, don’t you dare. Like, don’t you dare fall into those patterns as a shadow energy, which Obsidian loves to bring up. Like, you in the past have held on to your feelings too much. You have tried too hard to be strong, and if you repeat those patterns, you will like, this is the end game. The universe was literally saying, like, you will be this person.

You will do the same thing and end in the same way, and you don’t want that. Like, this was a literal wake up call in a huge, huge way. And I’ve been, like, over the past couple of years, like, fighting all of these compulsions and things that I didn’t know were buried within. And one of the main ones was, like, no. You keep going.

Like and that was something that I saw in front of me growing up was I saw all 4 of my grandparent parents pass within about a decade of each other, and my parents having to deal with that grief and trauma and having to just deal with it and just raise us children, do what they needed to do for us, and not feel everything that I know that they probably wanted to. And I got to go, I’m not doing that. I need to give myself space. Weirdly enough, about a month and a half beforehand, I’d left my part time job, so I was literally only working for myself, and I had nothing but time. And the universe was like, guess what?

You now have nothing but time. I basically did wallowing days where I just spent days in, you know, in the house not doing much. My mom, my husband, and I did a little trip where we just got away from everything and just separated ourselves from the world. And it was the middle of winter, and we went south where it was even colder and even darker. And I had these snowflake obsidians in, and the closest thing to snow that you get in WA is on the tallest peak in the far south in Bluff Knoll, and that doesn’t really happen.

It happened the weekend we were there, but at my aunt and uncle’s house where we were staying, it hailed. And the whole yard looked like it had snowed. And it was like this, it was so cold and so cool, and I was obsessed with just sitting outside because it was quiet and all I could hear was birds. And it was this, like, listen to your grief, listen to what you’re feeling, give yourself space. It was like the universe was like pull yourself away from the world and then pull yourself away from everyone and let yourself be with what you’re needing to be with.

Let yourself know that you are human and you’re allowed to feel all the feelings. You’re allowed to know that this is a traumatic thing. This is hard, and you’re allowed to feel all these things. Like, it was literally just allowing myself that space and that grace to be by myself, be with my own thoughts, not blocking them out, and just letting them come as they came. And it was on that trip that I was lucky enough, if you can see this little blue wren, which is a little beautiful unique bird that you find in the south of WA.

I’d never seen it in the flesh before, and there it was dancing in my aunt and uncle’s yard every single day. And my dad was a cop. For 30 years, he was the boy in blue, and this very bird is also on a window in this house. It has been a sign that he has shown since he’s passed, and it was like, I’m here. I’m just in a different form.

Everything evolves and changes. Volcanic things can be traumatic, but then things cool. Then they solidify. Then we find the clarity within. We find the little bits of white.

We find the illumination in the dark. And it was this permission that I’d never given myself before to process, to feel, to let myself actually have the lowest of lows and know that that’s just part of it. To know that I’ve had these amazing highs, and my relationship with my dad was incredible. We were super, super close, and that’s why it hit so hard. But it was like, guess what?

Now it’s just transforming. He is not leaving you behind. He’s still going to work with you. He’s still going to support you. He’s still going to turn up in your life and show his presence to you.

You just need to let yourself process the human side of it so that you can move into the next phase, and that’s what it’s all about. It’s not about not feeling the feeling or feeling the feeling and wallowing. It’s about letting yourself process what you need to process, to bring up what needs to be brought up, which all obsidians do with that shadow thing that they do. They need to bring it up so that they can bring it out so you can regulate. And that’s what, for me, volcanoes have always taught us is that regulation of energy.

When they’re able to bubble and do their thing, we respect them. We live around them. We utilize that really healthy, mineral rich soil that they give us. But if they lay dormant and we live on top of them and then they explode, we’re all gonna die. Like, that’s life.

Like, if we suppress things, we create illness. If we repress things, we create illness, and then it comes up badly in later life. We have these things that happen within our physical body through what we have held on to and I’m not doing that anymore. Like, it’s just not something I’m going to allow myself to do. It’s not something I give over to.

I have a full grid just to my right over here that’s all different Obsidians, and a couple of them are blades. So whenever I need to, I remind myself to cut, remove, let go as I require, and I find myself I don’t wear them anymore because my ears are now size up, so they they will fall out if I do, but I find myself when I need to just they’re a lovely little thing in the hand. Like, it doesn’t need to be a big piece. It doesn’t need to be a lot, but there’s just there’s something really nourishing about it, and I will always turn back to it when I find myself in a low point so that I know that I can just feel it because I’m human and I’m allowed to feel my things, and then we move up and we move on and we move out of that and we solidify and we crystallize and we become something more beautiful.

Adam: And I think, you know, as our first episode of 2025, we’re really kind of summarizing something that’s maybe a really important lesson for the year ahead. You know, Nicholas talked about the importance of the need to acknowledge that there are times for work and there are times for rest. And, you know, with that grief, Kyle, you’re talking about needing to bring it up and acknowledge that exactly that’s what the Obsidian’s do. They bring things up from deep within us. When it comes to grief, it really becomes evident to me.

We kind of think grief is when someone we love dies. But I heard a really interesting podcast around the end of the pandemic talking about how grief comes in all different shapes and sizes because there was a lot of grief that happened during the pandemic. There was grief because opportunities were lost. You didn’t get to go on that holiday. You didn’t get to go on to that wedding and all these different things.

Each year as we go by, there are things that we’re upset about. And in our society, often we’re told, you know, can’t get on with it. Just keep on going and that type of thing. And like you said, Kyle, if we don’t deal with it and face it and just give ourselves the time just to be a sad Sally for a little moment, then it will ferment. It’s like leaving a tomato in the fridge.

It will start to rot over time. And so I think this is gonna be a great crystal to work with whenever we just kind of need to feel impact. You know, we would probably say, you know, crying and grief is weakness, but at the same time, obsidian is so empowering that when we give ourselves the strength, and the permission to bring that in, that’s actually it’s not it’s not weak, it’s actually stronger to face it than to bury it as well. And one thing I’m thinking about often I’m sure actually you get this in the shop as well. People come in and they go, my best friend just lost their father.

What crystal can I get them? And as we’re talking about this, you know, I love Jet as one, but I think Snowflake Obsidian would be another great one as well. Would you agree, Ashley?

Ashley: Definitely. I think that there’s so much that we can turn to this stone for support, in regard to. And, definitely, grief and grieving is a big one. And, Kyle, I love so much that you shared this really intimate story about, you know, losing your dad, which you’ve talked about before on the show, but, like, having a stone that stayed with you for a few years during that process, because I think, you know, like, we’ve all sort of touched on, there’s there’s this push, this societal push, this external push to just work through it and get over it. And, like, people expect, well, yeah, you can grieve, but they put a time stamp on it.

And, like, if we’re being honest, that’s just not how it works. It’s just not how it works. It’s like an onion, and there are all these various layers. And, like, sometimes we think we’ve gotten to the core of it, but there’s still more. There’s still more there, especially in our relationships where people were a part of us, where people had such a deep impact on us, where they shaped the people that we are.

We carry a piece of them with us. So snowflake obsidian is definitely a stone that we can turn to for that. And one of the things that I really love about this stone is, you know, not just because of the snowflake appearance but also because of that balance of the light and dark. This is a stone that I always sort of correlate with the dark half of the year, which is up here in the northern hemisphere. We have just had the winter solstice, and we’re moving toward the days becoming a little bit longer. So we’re seeing a little bit more of that light in the darkness, but we won’t even hit the point where day and night are equal until the spring equinox.

So this is about remembering to find that light in the darkness, and this is kind of like a compass, a guide for this whole dark half of the year. So really from, like, Samhain until about Imbolc, this is a stone that I keep on my altar. It’s one that is so deeply important to me because of that concept of balance, that Nicholas spoke so eloquently about, but also remembering that we need time for rest, that we need time for reflection. So as we are just in our first episode of 2025, if we’re looking back on the past year and sort of thinking about how 2024 treated us, which many of us can agree, like, maybe not great, you know, maybe okay, but maybe not great. It was a rough year for a lot of folks.

And so having that time for reflection, especially with this Obsidian, which Obsidian was so often used for scrying and spheres, mirrors, discs, things like that. So it really lends to that process of inner reflection. But this is also for me, you know, looking at this time, at least again here in the northern hemisphere of the dark half of the year, where we kind of go down into the depths and we do our journey of descent and ascent. So right now we are sort of, you know, still descending. We aren’t quite emerging yet, but a lot of this for me is journeying to the other world, connecting with ancestors, honoring our ancestors, doing a lot of work to remember them.

So one of my favorite ways to work with this stone is for that process. I’ve talked a little bit about ancestor work before, but I like to work with a black candle again for this process of just reflection, so reflecting on our relationships with our ancestors whether they are known or unknown. And you know what? There is this amazing, amazing human that I just wanna give a shout out to. Her name is Camden Torres, and one of the things that her Instagram is the ancestral or just ancestral medium, I should say. But she taught me about this concept of calling in our healed ancestors.

And that was so powerful to me. I think, you know, especially as someone coming from a lineage as a white person where there’s colonization and oppression and things like that that we really have to contend with when it comes to, oh, am I really revering all of my ancestors? Some of which probably did some pretty awful things. So Camden taught me about this process of calling in our healed ancestors, and that’s just been a game changer for me. So I want to throw that out there and give a big shout out to Camden.

But if we want to connect with those healed ancestors and we want to, embrace the knowledge, the wisdom, the love, the support that they have to share with us. And if we also wanna really honor them and the things that they’ve shared with us in the way in which they are a part of us, then working with a black candle, some cedar oil, which maybe Adam could talk about a little bit, and some snowflake obsidian is one of my favorite ways to do this. So I like to set up my ancestor altar for winter with my snowflake obsidian. I said it kind of sits on my altar the whole dark half of the year. I anoint my black candle with some cedar oil.

Cedar is just this amazing ancient ancestral energy to it. I mean, cedar is like one of those trees that I immediately always connect with wisdom. And, so anointing that black candle with some cedar, placing it on the ancestor altar with a little snowflake obsidian near it, lighting that candle, and just being open and asking that your healed ancestors impart any wisdom or knowledge that they’d like to share with you, anything important, in in the form of signs, symbols, messages. You know, we all kind of connect in different ways, so don’t judge how this comes through. But I think especially at this time of the new year, if you’re looking for some guidance as we move into 2025, this could be a worthwhile practice to explore.

And, Adam, if you have anything you’d like to add in about cedar oil, I know I’m kinda putting you on the spot, but, I know you work with Hanoki.

Adam: Yeah. No. I love all there are a whole range of different wood oils that I really, really love. Is there a reason why you choose to not, choose cedarwood, or is it just you were drawn to it?

Ashley: It’s something that I’ve just always associated with this idea of ancestral connection. I think because cedar trees can grow to such a great age themselves, and so they’re really these sort of pillars of that knowledge and wisdom. And since in this context, we’re seeking that sort of wisdom from our ancestors for guidance into the new year, cedar was one that sort of naturally stood out to me. But, definitely, I am a dabbler when it comes to oils. So if you have anything, you know, that you can sort of see about why that might be one that’s coming through, I’d love to hear what you have to share.

Adam: No. I love what you’ve said there. And, you know, know, when we think of any wood oils, whether it be something like cedarwood, whether it be hinoki, whether it be sandalwood, these oils, in order to get them, it takes at least decades. You know, if we need more lavender, we can whack some lavender in the ground. And within 2 to 3 years, it’s flowering and we can get that essential oil.

It comes over time that these oils must be developed. And even when we get to oils like palo santo, the oil actually doesn’t form in the tree and the heartwood until the tree dies, which is really, really interesting. But with cedarwood, on a physical level, really, really great in this context. It’s been found that when we breathe cedarwood in, it actually increases the levels of GABA that is released by the body. Now if you’re not too familiar with GABA, that is the opposite of adrenaline or cortisol.

So it actually helps us wind this down. But there’s a beautiful myth about cedarwood that says that once the creator had created the planet, he had his blueprint and he wondered where to place it. So he rolled it up and he placed it within a cedarwood tree. So there is this ancient wisdom in there, but another keyword with cedarwood is that it is about certainty. And, you know, it was a really great oil through the pandemic because what was the one thing we didn’t have?

We had no idea what was going to happen. We were very uncertain. But it brings that certainty that what actually was referring to with the ancestors of when we can connect with that lineage and that this is part of a bigger picture and a bigger plan and a bigger lineage. Cedarwood really brings in both the wisdom, but also the certainty, not only from our ancestors, but from creators as well. So I think it’s an absolutely great one for that.

Ashley: Oh, I am, like, so excited to continue to work with Cedar all through next year because I feel like if anything, there’s just big question marks right now. So thank you for sharing that, Adam. What are your thoughts on Snowflake Obsidian? How do you like to incorporate this stone, or what really stands out to you in your practice, Adam?

Adam: Yeah. There’s a really interesting astrological reason that I wanna share with us in a minute. But as we’ve been talking, we’ve been talking about all these kind of big brief moments, you know, like someone passing away or, you know, the loss of a job, the end of a relationship, and Snowflake Obsidian would be great for that. But I was just reflecting also before we hit the big red record button this morning or this evening for the 2 Americans, we were talking about how it’s the holiday period at the moment. We had all these intentions to get things done and it’s just not happening.

I think everyone can relate, not just in this period, but we get to the end of a day, and things haven’t turned out how they wanted to. You know, we got a spanner in the works. We ran out of time or life just happened. And I think snowflake obsidian would actually be a great one to work with any time of the year on any general day just when you’re feeling, damn, that wasn’t exactly how I wanted today to plan and to let that go. And I think it would be a great one.

Humans are the only species on this planet, including all animals and plants that really ignore the sun. The only thing we do when the sun goes down is we flick on a switch. So we get artificial sunlight. And I think snowflake obsidian would be a really great one with cedarwood and all the big tree oils around that kind of sunset time when we finish our working time to just kind of let that all go so that we can spend those few hours either by ourselves, with our family, just to, you know, not not bringing the stress of the day in and also not carrying that stress or beating yourself up or the grief of the day into the night or into the next day as well. So I think just sitting with it, watching the sunset, sitting outside, listening to some music, having a cup of tea, whatever that may be, just on a daily practice for 15 minutes.

Even if you just do it for the next week, I’d love to challenge everyone who’s watching or listening to try that and just see if that makes a bit of a difference to draw a line in the sand of letting the past stay in the past and feel empowered to step in the future as well. Now, astrologically, you know, I talk about moons. We talk about the big planets and Mercury and Jupiter and all their retrogrades, but I’m gonna go a little bit off kilter today. And they are continuing to discover different things, out in our solar system. And there’s always a poor debate about good old Pluto.

Is it a planet? Is it not? At the end of the day, it’s a big rock or gaseous rock kind of in the sky. It has an impact on us no matter what we call it or no matter what we categorize it as. Now it must be the week for shout outs because I’m gonna give a shout out to an amazing astrologer by the name of Alan Clay.

And he’s based in New Zealand, and he’s got a book called New Stars for a New Era. And he’s actually identified, and it’s not just him, but people are discovering more dwarf planets like Pluto beyond Pluto, and he’s actually focused on 10. And these are will we notice when these are changing and moving in our solar system as much as Mercury? No, we won’t. But the fact that people are listening to our podcast or our podcast suggest to me that you might be a little bit more sensitive to energy, we might have empaths that are tuning in.

And sometimes these more subtle energies will impact those that are a bit more sensitive as well. So looking at these planets and dwarf planets is really interesting. So Makemake, is a dwarf planet beyond Pluto that is named after a Polynesian or an Easter Island creator or fertility god. And what make and make, kind of governs when we get into the dwarf planets, we’re kind of getting into the global and the higher vibration focuses and it’s really focused on fair distribution of resources. And, you know, it can be energy, it can be water, it can be food, it can be all those types of things.

And you may have heard that in this world, we actually don’t have a lack of resources. We have a distribution problem, and that we could feed, you know, everyone in Africa and all the poor nations and that type of thing and how much wastage we have. And make a make is really, to do with balancing that out. And so when a make goes into retrograde as it is, it’s weak. This is the time for you may see things kind of coming to the surface where there will be, where anyone is kind of being greedy.

Sometimes there’ll be oil spills. Sometimes there’ll be, environmental catastrophes that show where someone is taking advantage of raping and pillaging the earth in that way. And that can be interesting. Look, that kind of corresponds with astrology. But on a personal level, make and make it remember is a creator and a fertility God.

But it’s also about creating and, bringing and manifesting into our lives as we go into 2025, in a fair and equitable way. Now we could all go, Oh, I wish I could have $1,000,000 tomorrow. And then your grandmother dies and you inherit it. Oh, but that’s not how I wanted it to happen. And so when we work with Snowflake Obsidian, I find it’s a really great one with this time to start thinking sometimes things manifest in ways we don’t want them to, and we need to maybe use this stone to bring in a bit more balance.

But also things when we work in harmony with the heavens and we work in harmony with what’s on mother earth, things flow a lot better. And making it allows us to have this kind of personal contemplation time. Any retrograde is a great time to contemplate is what I desire, and the way I’m going about bringing it into my life, fair for everyone concerned. Am I just being greedy and wanting more, more, more, more, more, more, more? Or am I manifesting in a way that actually serves more than just myself? And that’s what I love about these dual planets is they start to bring us out of just focusing on ourselves and you know, whether we’re in the right relationship or whether we’re having a communication breakdown into how am I as a community participant, serving that serving that community and be and being in flow with the world around me.

So when we reflect back on what we’ve been talking about about this flowing energy and this empowering energy of snowflake obsidian, just keep it near you, wearing it, meditate meditating with it. On my social media, I’ll have contemplated questions throughout the week that you can kind of read through as well. But just thinking, if things aren’t manifesting how you want them to manifest, then maybe you’re being blocked because you’re not working with the flow of the entire world or the flow of the community. And this can be a really empowering lesson that will be brought up at this time. So, sit with it.

It may not be as obvious as the Mercury retrograde, but you may notice some little things that come up. And this is why I really like snowflake obsidian at this time.

Ashley: Adam, can I ask you a question? I think sometimes when people are talking about, manifesting or thinking about it, they get really frustrated when things don’t work out. Right? And I know that there’s a lot to be said for mindset and that sort of thing. But there’s also a lot to be said from just, like, things that are happening socially, just things that are going on.

So I’m wondering if you know if someone is out there and they’re, like, hitting that roadblock and feeling like, you know, I have been really trying. I’ve been putting all my energy and attention towards something. It’s just not happening. How do you normally address that with someone? Do you have any, like, suggestions for them?

Should they rethink what it is they’re trying to call in? I mean, you know, if they’re really acknowledging, things that are existing externally, right, that are maybe outside of their control, and maybe that is what’s preventing them from sort of being able to call in that thing. What advice would you have for them? Because I’m just thinking, I feel like this is something people kind of come up against, especially this time of year as they’re setting intentions for the new year.

Adam: Yeah. I think we’ve got to work at how sometimes we manifest and try and swim up the river or against the current, and sometimes we manifest going down the river. You know, I want what my plan for 2025 might be to be king of the world. And I can do all the visualization and make the biggest crystal period in the world, but I’m betting that there’s a lot of energy that’s not gonna let me be the king of the world and butt against me in that way. So maybe thinking, what do I want?

Why do I want it? And how will it serve the greatest community and allow me to shine in that way? Maybe some kind of questions to contemplate in that way that sometimes things aren’t manifesting because there’s, you know, you’re trying to swim one way, but there’s a lot of energy swimming the other way. Things we can and people have examples, and we’ve all probably had experiences working with our crystals where the miraculous has happened. But I think miracles happen when we are in flow and working with the ways of the universe rather than the ways of nature and the ways of the heavens rather than working against them.

So I think it’s Yeah, it’s worth contemplating. Okay, why do I want this? Is this for the greater good of all concerned? I know the greater good of all concern is one of those cliched sayings that we always throw at the end of all kinds of things. But I think it’s really worth considering that.

And going a little bit deeper on why do you want that as well? If we’re wanting to, you know, manifest something to get back at an edge, just to show them that we were right or the way better, is that serving the greater good? And will that but is that going up the river or down the river? Does that make sense?

Ashley: Definitely.

Kyle: I love to add when it comes to manifesting, like, if you can break down a list of what you can do to achieve what you’re trying to manifest, and then you write the list of stuff that you can’t do, that’s out of your control, that you don’t know the answer to, and you go, this is what I’m going to do. Universe Guides, those that are working with me. This is what I need answers to and help with and illumination for because I don’t know the answer to these parts. So this is my part. I’m gonna do my part as my human self.

I’m gonna give the rest to you. And then you let that go and you focus on what you focus on each day, and you’ll be surprised at how quickly the things can actually manifest for you when you give over the control of exactly how or the things that you can’t influence or you feel frustrated by, if that makes sense.

Adam: And you’re saying that point as well. You know, you can’t just program a crystal or work with a crystal and go bring me a lover and sit on the couch as well. So you know, on the flip side of what you just said, yeah, you’ve got to do the things that you can do. And that’s where we’ve got that added bonus of working with spirit. Working with crystals sometimes miraculous things can happen on the things that are beyond our control if we’re in flow for sure. Yeah.

I’d love to ask everyone. I think it’s really important. And this is one of my passions with crystals is the ways that we can use them. And, Kyle, you talked a little bit about your earplugs and just kind of using them kind of as, I don’t know, like worry stones or fiddlestones. I know I used Jet when my father passed away as that really comforting thing as well, and grids.

Does anyone have any suggestions on other ways they would suggest to people that are watching or listening on how to use their snowflake obsidian in a practical level?

Kyle: For me, I have found the other way that I’ve worn it is just as a bracelet. When we allow ourselves to not control what’s coming into our lives, I generally wear it on my left as that receptive hand, that receptive energy, so it’s not, I’m not trying to control situations. I’m just allowing what needs to come in to come in, especially if I’m in a vibe that’s maybe, like, I’m doing stuff because I have to do it, not because I want to. I very rarely get drawn to a snowflake obsidian when I’m, like, up here. It’s like when I’m like, I have to do this.

I’ll pop it on, and I find myself more able to not trudge through, but get through what I need to get through. So I feel like if you have, as Adam said, at the end of the day, you know, things not going your way, it can be really good to let things go. I think throughout the day, if things are going a bit up and down, it can keep you more adaptable to the situations that are happening and less bothered.

Ashley: I’ll throw in. I have a way that I love to work with this tone, and it won’t work for everybody. I’m thinking of dear Nicholas who lives in Florida and probably never ever sees snow. But for me up in Wisconsin where it is like frozen tundra almost right now, I love to go scoop a bit of that fresh snow and bring it in my, my snowflake obsidian on my ancestor altar is in this little black soapstone carved bowl, and I’ll just scoop a little handful of snow and cover that snowflake obsidian, let that sort of melt into the dish so it sits in this little bit of water. Because I have a very specific reason for this. You know when and maybe you don’t know, but when you go outside and everything is covered with snow, it’s so quiet.

And it’s not just because nobody’s outside because it’s cold and it’s snowing, which is what I always thought, but it’s truly because that snow just dampens and muffles everything just a little bit. It kind of insulates. So it gets so quiet sometimes that you can hear the individual snowflakes falling and hitting the snow on the ground. And I just love that. And I mentioned, you know, how I love this as a stone for that reflection and that sort of finding that place of tranquility and pause so that you can do that reflection.

And that’s exactly what, you know, those days of that really quiet snowfall are like. So bringing that in as that act of kind of, like, you know, helps me to remember to find that peace and tranquility just like when the snow is falling and placing that snow. And, you know, here in Wisconsin, we have that almost the whole dark half of the year. So, it’s a really nice practice, and it makes me get outside even when it’s cold out.

Adam: To add on to that, I was just reminded of an experience I had. I love to pair crystals with different animal guides because, you know, in within our spiritual team, we may have angels, we may have guides, we may have ancestors, but a lot of the time different animals will appear, not particularly, you know, a dog that once was your pet, although that could be a guide, but kind of the archetype of an animal. And one that I had a really interesting experience with that I actually correlate with snowflake obsidian is bear. And, you know, often what I do is I’ll hold a crystal, I’ll see the animal come forward. And I’ll kind of say something along the lines of, you know, what is it that I need to know right now.

And I remember this big mother bear kind of, you know, 5 times the size of me. But what is it that I need to know right now? And she’s like, just lay down. Like, okay, what do I need to know right now? And she just just lay down with me.

And, when we think about what we’ve been talking about in this episode, bears are the epitome of snowflake obsidian, one of the most powerful animals on this planet. But where does that power come from? They actually take time to rest. They don’t roam around being mighty and roaring all the time. They take time to rest as well.

And I think that was the lesson and a bear often appears when I am in that go go go go go, and I’m probably needing to just rest. And often there’s not much else I’ve actually got from this bear guide that appears, quite a lot apart from just laying down. And I think for a lot of us, that can be some really divine, profound guidance as well. So leaning into bear and another essential oil, I will give it a little shout out that I love it. Patchouli.

Patchouli is really great for helping it to be present in the moment rather than worrying about the future. Really great when we’re doing yoga or Tai Chi or anything to be present, but really great with meditation. So if I can sit in as well. So we are wishing you all an amazing 2025 may like a volcano, things come to the surface unexpected and pleasant. But we will be here to guide you every single week because no matter what is happening around you, mother earth loves you and she’s given you some amazing gifts.

We’ll talk about a few of them, and we’ll have concepts about them for the next weeks coming ahead. We’ve got months planned. We’re so excited about all the different crystals. They’re kind of jumping and jockeying, like, who are we going to talk about next? And if you do have a preference or a choice, let us know in the comments as well because we love to know what you’re thinking, what you love, what’s in vogue at the moment, what you need guidance on, or maybe there’s a crystal that there’s not enough information out there about.

We can help you out with that as well. Until next week, we will see you then for another crystal confab. Take care and be blessed.

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