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Join Adam Barralet, Kyle Perez , Ashley Leavy and Nicholas Pearson in Episode #22 of the Crystal Confab Podcast as they do a deep dive into Turquoise meaning, including:

• Allowing rather than pushing with Turquoise
• Turquoise & the air element
• Integration of spiritual information with Turquoise
• History, folklore and geology of Turquoise

Tune in now for a deeper look at Turquoise meaning!

Podcast Transcript:

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

Ashley Leavy: Hello, and welcome to the crystal confab podcast where we confab about some of our favorite crystals. I am here with three of my crystal besties, Adam Barralet, Kyle Perez, and Nicholas Pearson, and we are so excited to talk to you today about Turquoise. This is such a phenomenal stone and one of the things that I personally love about this is just the huge variety that we see it come in, which, you know, I think we don’t always think about when we are exploring turquoise. It kind of always looks really similar at first glance until you really start to get to know it. So, Kyle, I would love to have you sort of kick us off and tell us a little bit about your experience here with turquoise.

Kyle Perez: Oh, for me, I collected turquoise because it’s a stone that you should have because it’s turquoise. Right? Like, that was how I started. Like, it’s turquoise. And so these kinds of little pieces came into my collection, not too expensive.

They just kind of hung out for ages. Literally ages. And then the longer I was doing my spiritual work, the longer I was connecting to crystals, that’s when I started to sort of work with them a little bit more. I sort of needed to wait my turn a little bit before it started to reveal itself to me. I don’t know about everyone else.

Has anyone else had an experience like that with turquoise?

Adam: Yeah. A little bit. Yeah. Definitely.

Kyle: Well, I was really diving in on the instruction of the universe because I was given some. So this really beautiful piece, I don’t know if it’s gonna show up properly, is Persian turquoise. It has pyrite inclusions in it. Little beautiful tiny cubes of pyrite. And this lady just said, I need to give this to you.

This is yours. Take it. I like it, but I don’t want to. And I was just like, you’re mad, but thank you. Like, I’m not gonna say no because, like, it’s a big beautiful rough raw, like, jagged, interesting piece of turquoise totally in my bag.

And I was basically wearing it every day and I’ve been sort of doing my work and things, I would say, six, seven years or so worth of spiritual work and study and that sort of stuff. And it was starting to sort of replay back stuff from the beginning. It started to show me not things again, but the themes and allowing me to dive into them with new knowledge and a new perspective. For me, it’s been about the integration of spiritual knowledge and information. It has allowed me to not just learn it and not just study it, but to live it and experience it and to understand my purpose through these lessons.

Does that make sense? It’s this kind of yes. You’ve done the book learning. Now let’s actually experience what it’s here to show you. Let’s actually create some magic with it.

Let’s actually open your heart to the truth of the situation and what it means to you. The other thing I think with all crystals and minerals is that we learn about them from books. We learn about them from others. We learn about them from podcasts and whatever, but it’s the lived experience of how it shows you your journey and how to work with it. That’s the truth of it.

Does that make sense? Like it’s that this is why I’m here for you. This is like how we are going to work together. And so I would wear it on and off, on and off, and it was always, like, times of stagnation, maybe, times where things moved a bit slower, times when things were not as much of a rush as necessary, and so it allowed that integration to happen. It allowed that information to settle and to work itself into the nitty gritty of the body and the mind and the spirit, and it allowed me to understand how to work with it.

The pyrite, I think, that inclusion of that more active energy really allowed the doing side of things. Whereas it was the last four, five years that I think we all have had a lot of learning happening on a larger scale, and some larger pieces have come in. Now this is Mexican turquoise. I fell in love with this as soon as I saw it. Like, it just hits differently as they say.

And this one has been really helping me to learn everything that I’ve learned in my life. It has shown me everything that has been happening in my life before now and all of the things that I’ve lived and it’s gone. This is how you’re now going to use all of these lessons. This is now how you’re going to work with what you’ve learned. This is now how you’re going to live your life in your way because it’s for you and not for anyone else. And by being your true self, you can then be your best self.

I feel like it really brings out your best self.

Ashley: Do you think, Kyle, that that is, like, you reflecting back on those experiences and being able to draw the lesson from each one, or do you think it’s more of like an integration and a culmination? Like, you’ve hit this point where all of that is coming together and suddenly you’re, like, pulling on the threads and making sense of it as a whole?

Kyle: The answer is yes. Like, absolutely both. Right? Like, it’s all of that and everything. Right?

I think I have as you said, I’ve been doing it long enough that it’s like these things come back around. These lessons come back to you. You can actually work with them properly. You can live with them. They go from the back of the head where you, like, learned it when you read about it many years ago.

And it’s like, oh, this is actually necessary to me now. Like this, this is how I need to do it. And for me, because it’s so, like, heart driven, I think we all can feel that. It has been so much about how much I give and how much I receive and that balance in my life. And especially dealing with burnout and how to balance my energy in what I can give and what I can’t.

What I can do and what I can’t do because if I do more in one day, I can do less or I have to do less for more days. And it has been so serious, but, like, nurturing. Like, it has that kind of parental grand parental loving, nurturing support that I really, really enjoy.

Adam Barralet: So, Carl, it’s quite interesting because I’ve been listening to these lectures that before we recorded today by Mary Ann Williamson. And she’s talking about the difference between believing in something, you know, you might believe in a certain environmental, you know, thing or political or that. There’s a difference between believing in it and actually, you know, actively getting out there and living it and making a difference in that. Would you say that turquoise is one that kind of takes us and everyone believes in so many things, and we’re all keyboard warriors, sharing our beliefs, but there’s a lot of people not doing things. Do you think turquoise is one that kind of shoves us out the door and get us actually making a difference in the world?

Kyle: I a % agree with that statement. I think it is so empowering in the way it helps us to stand up for what is right, what is correct, what is the truth. Right? And from the heart, like, it’s coming from this place of earnest, I think, would be the right word. It’s like it wants to do the best.

It wants to be involved. It wants that best out of everyone, and I think it’s never going to oh, what’s that saying? I don’t have to shout to get my point across. Like, I don’t have to speak louder. I just say my truth, and it gets across in that way.

And I think that’s what Turquoise allows us. It helps us to not shout, just to speak it, and everyone will hear it. I just if you haven’t if you’ve avoided it, just please get involved.

Ashley: So a few things that you said, Kyle, made me really think about what Adam wanted to talk about because I think it kind of touches on that. Like you said, like, there was this thing about turquoise that you weren’t drawn to until you were ready, so there was no kind of forcing it. Adam, how have you seen that energy of turquoise kind of come through?

Adam: Yeah. I guess because it’s a copper based mineral and copper, you know, we know is the conduit, so it gets things moving. I’ve you know, one term I love when it comes to turquoise is it kind of forms a bridge between us and the heavens. So it can be associated and, you know, we’ll jump in and get Nicholas to expand on this in a little while. But around the world, it’s been associated with health, with wealth, with good luck, and all these different types of things.

And I find whenever working with the crystal with corporate it, remember, that it helps things to flow. Now why this becomes really relevant at the moment as well is because, last week, I spoke about Venus going retrograde on March 2, but also we have two major asteroids also going into retrograde on that day. So you’ve got Medusa going in, and we all know the story of Medusa. It’s a very long mythology, but her asteroid basically governs mistakes that we’ve made in the past. And when she goes into retrograde, these mistakes come back up to haunt us.

And the lesson is we can either, oh, God, they’ve come up again, and I’ve got to try and bury them and hide them again, or you face them head on and you actually make amends with them. So with Turquoise, it’s about allowing things that bubble up and come. We’ve also got money or money that goes to an asteroid that’s spelled m o n y, which basically governs money. That will go into retrograde, so we’re gonna have issues with finances as well. So we’ve got this whole kind of energy shift that’s gonna be happening around the March 2 just after just before this podcast comes out and will still be evident for the ongoing week after that of, you know, relationships.

You know, we may be questioning some of our relationship to Venus retrograde going, is this the right relationship for me? And this isn’t just romantic. It can be friends. It can be family. It can be colleagues.

Is this you know, what are these mistakes that are coming up? Should I face them or should I try and, and, you know, bury them? What’s happening with money? And I think Turquoise is a beautiful companion at this time to just let things flow. There are so many people that are trying to swim up the river of life when life is trying to point you in other things.

And a lot of the time because we believe something or it’s always been this way. I think turquoise is a really great one for allowing us to surrender, to allow us to go with the flow and to listen a bit more with the flow because when we go down the river, it’s a lot easier and there’s brand new scenery for us to see. Because if we do what we’ve always done, we’re gonna get what we’ve always got. So I think it’s a beautiful one just for bringing more blessings into our life, if that makes sense.

Ashley: It does, Adam. This is, like, one of those things that it can feel so scary, though, right, when there are these big changes on the horizon, when those relationships feel a little rocky, when we can’t count on the financial support or abundance we’re used to receiving. Like, these are big, big, big life changes, and I think it is normal, I think, for people to want to sort of cling and to wanna swim upstream. How do we work with turquoise to kind of ease into that and let it just take us where, you know, the universe wants us to flow rather than fighting against it?

Adam: I think as spiritual people, there’s a bit of a contrast here because we often go, oh, I surrender and let spirit take over. We do that until something goes wrong. Do you mean? And then, like, we’re in a relationship and they’re like, okay. Let’s try and control this relationship.

Or, oh god, I’m running out of money. Freak, freak, freak in that type of way. I would suggest sitting with turquoise a lot. And there’s a little bit of magic that I really like to do with turquoise, and it’s kind of animal magic. So birds are considered the messengers of the, you know, of the world.

They travel around. They symbolize freedom. And I would actually sit outside and listen to the birds. This could be a really interesting exercise. When I teach shinrin yoku or forest bathing, I get people to stop and listen to the forest birds.

And a lot of the time you think it’s just one bird tweeting, but you can pick up a whole range of different ones. But as you do that, listen to the guidance and listen to feel the freedom that they teach in our lives and all birds and all winged creatures in one way are messengers of freedom. But we can also ask them to be messengers to take our desires out to the world. You know, I’d have a meditation on iTunes with turquoise, which basically helps you to tune into the birds of the world and ask them to take your messages of peace out into the world. So I think sitting, relaxing with it, wearing it, and keeping it around you is obviously gonna help.

But this idea of connecting with this sense of freedom, and I think the animal kingdom offers us so many different lessons. And I think for me, turquoise really fits well with birds because of that sense of freedom, and not being held and rigid in that type of way. Because I believe you also find that this is a really great air, kind of crystal as well, Ashley.

Ashley: Yeah. I do. So what is so interesting to me is when we look at some of the history and mythology of stones, and Nicholas is gonna go into this quite a bit more in-depth, in just a minute. But I love when we have a stone that’s found in different places on the Earth, and we can actually look and find some overlap and some commonality in the way that that stone was viewed. So if we look at how turquoise was viewed here on Turtle Island, modern present day so called North America, we can see that a lot of indigenous groups here connected turquoise with the sky, with the air.

And so if we go all the way to Asia and the Mideast, there are also some bits of mythology and lore connecting turquoise and its use there to the sky. And it makes sense. Right? I mean, there are very few things in nature that have this brilliant vibrant blue color, a few crystals, even fewer flowers, and the sky. And the sky and the ocean are probably, like, the biggest swathes of blue that we have in the world.

So I love that this is connected with the sky. And, like Kyle showed, a piece of Mexican Turquoise I have one as well, mine is rough, but I wanted to point out with these, most of the time, especially these larger pieces of Mexican Turquoise, they form in this kind of crust and they have been stabilized. Now, there are a few different types of treatments or enhancements that are done to Turquoise. There’s stabilization, which is often some sort of like lacquer or protectant that’s put on the outside surface of the crystal. This is super common.

It’s like a generally accepted method of making sure that the turquoise is a little stronger because it can be quite crumbly, it can break quite easily, it’s also a bit porous. So especially because we see this reserved for jewelry, that stabilization is really important to make sure that our turquoise will be long lasting in jewelry and will stick around for a while. But there’s also reconstitution, and I have this piece that my grandma gave me when I was little. And this is a piece of recon turquoise, which is when they take some turquoise, usually some real turquoise, not not always, but, recon should be. They take some real natural turquoise, all little manner of bits.

They kind of grind it up into a powder, and then it is blended together with some sort of, like, resin stabilizer, and then often you’ll see that tumbled into these large nuggets. But then we can on occasion find completely untreated turquoise, which usually nowadays you kind of have to find older stock or you have to literally know someone that is collecting it. So I have some turquoise with pyrite here which is beautiful. This is from the American Southwest as well. This is from Arizona.

I have this little piece which is called a Sea Foam turquoise. It’s a tiny little kind of bubbly nugget and this is from the Fox Mine in, I think, Arizona, but maybe New Mexico. And then I have some Cornish turquoise which I got on a trip when I was with Nicholas from, like, the greatest crystal shop in the world. This is from Cornwall, of course. And then I have this beautiful piece, which is from Kazakhstan.

And so we can see all these different beautiful colors and these are not treated, not stabilized, but those are really really really hard to find. So if you’re out there, you’re looking for some turquoise, you find some and it’s been stabilized, that’s kind of usually like a best case scenario. A little bit better in my book than a recon piece or reconstituted piece. Personally, that would be my preference. Stabilizing would be okay.

But if you’re lucky enough to find some old stock that is not enhanced or treated or stabilized, that’s a good way to go too. But it’s important to note that the recon, I wouldn’t necessarily call it fake. It’s a generally sort of accepted practice, but it’s always good when you’re shopping around to just ask, is this reconstituted? Is this stabilized? And especially if you’re dealing with a good rock shop, specialty turquoise dealer, they’re going to know their stuff, they’re going to be able to tell you that, which is really a big help.

But I love this and its connection to the sky. For those big ideas I mean think of the wide open sky that would be here on Turtle Island, especially in the American Southwest. Like, as far as you can see, it’s often just sky, and this leaves so much space for big ideas, for grand ideas, for helping you kind of tune into the vastness of the world around you and your role in it. So this is an excellent stone for guiding you on your sole purpose. If you’ve been feeling that lack of clarity on your next steps, if you don’t know what you’re meant to do in this world, how to show up and take action like Kyle was suggesting, work with turquoise because of that connection to the sky, that connection to the air element. It can give you that clarity on your life path.

Adam: Ashley, I love what you shared there about the different forms of turquoise, and I guess this is where we should slip in with a little segment of buyer beware because there are a lot of fake turquoises as well. You know, one of the most common ones I find is they get white halite. Now a halite only does come in white, and they inject it with blue dye. Kind of got those black lines in it, obviously, that looks a bit like turquoise. Sometimes it’s sold as turquoise.

I’ve heard it called turquoise halide or turquatine or all these different things as well. Not real turquoise. And then, guys, you may need to correct me if I’m wrong here, but is it magnesite that kinda looks like white clouds? Yes. It is.

We’ve got a thumbs up for Nicholas. And they dye that blue as well, and that’s obviously not a turquoise as well. Nick Kyle or Nicholas, have you got any tips maybe for or or, Ashley? Some tips for how do you tell you know, you walk into a crystal shop, there’s a small turquoise for 10. Is it real or is it not?

How would you tell?

Kyle: I wanna jump in with white. For me, turquoise has I know this won’t always be correct because I think magnesite is a bit heavier than halite, but it’s usually halite that’s dyed. So I think the weight difference between turquoise and halite is a little bit more obvious. I also think you’ll see, like, it looks faded. Like, highlight quite often has that it either looks really dyed or really faded and it’s like, there’s this sadness that comes with it.

And I know that’s really quite a terrible general thing, and I know Nicholas is going to cover things in a more scientific way. But I did wanna throw out one more non turquoise, and I don’t know if you’ve seen this on the market, African turquoise that has been out and about over the last few years. Upon testing, it is not turquoise. It is an amalgamation of a couple of things. It’s more like a chalcedony with copper and bits and pieces, and it’s beautiful and it’s lovely and it has its own unique energy, but it is 1,000 not turquoise and there is no turquoise in it.

Ashley: Okay. I have to jump in on this one. This is one that I actually know the story of, how it kind of started to get out there as turquoise. So there is a really large distributor here in The US, and then there’s another one in Canada. And they started stocking this stone, which before they started carrying it was more widely known and had been introduced on the market as African Turquoise Jasper.

You know, because so many things are called Jasper. It’s a turquoise color. So that was, like, the name, African turquoise jasper, like turquoise colored Jasper. And this is one of those things like the emerald fuchsite or fuchsite where they’re saying that this is the color. It’s an emerald colored piece, and then they just drop the actual mineral name.

So then when those distributors started selling it, they just called it African turquoise. They lost the, like, jasper in their catalog, on their website. So all these companies, at least here in The States and up in Canada, that were stocking this started just calling it African turquoise, and then you started seeing everybody on their Etsy shops, on their Instagram, on their websites also dropping the Jasper and just calling it African turquoise. And that took less than twelve months for that to, like, really happen where everybody was just dropping the Jasper and calling it turquoise even though it’s not.

Adam: Wow. I’ve got more questions as well, but Nicholas has been to this so patiently as the three of us have been banging on. I’m gonna hand it over to Nicholas. Nicholas, talk to us about turquoise.

Nicholas Pearson: Sure. I I wanna preface this by saying two things. First and foremost, at the museum gig, last week, I got to see an old friend, a rock I met twenty plus years ago that was not in a place it should have been, which was great because it means I could find it quite by accident. And so far, we’ve only acknowledged the, cryptocrystalline varieties of turquoise, but there are actually well formed euhedral crystals of it out there in the world. They are few and far between, and one of the most famous sources for it is Bishop Mine in Campbell County, Virginia, which is where this piece comes from.

It is very old stock. This is not material that comes up very often. I’ve occasionally seen a piece for sale on the Internet, of small pieces priced at exorbitant amounts, and this is not the finest specimen in the world. It’s also not the worst. So, it was, like, fortuitous timing.

Just days before we got together for the confab, I got to see actual crystals of turquoise embedded in the matrix, and they sparkled. You would at first, you would go, oh, well, this obviously has to be druzy chrysocolla, but it isn’t. And that’s pretty phenomenal. The other thing I think that’s important to know about Nicholas in turquoise is that turquoise is the first gemstone I ever got to meet. My grandmother was a jewelry aficionado, but really what that meant is she was a turquoise jewelry aficionado.

And she had this great vintage collection of turquoise set in silver, mostly from the American Southwest. Whenever they would travel decades before I showed up on Earth, she would get it. If she could find a piece in a thrift store or somewhere else and someone didn’t know what they had, it was like the best day for her. So I’ve one beloved turquoise ring that I need to have, like, resized to finally fit me and have the setting repaired so the stone doesn’t slip out. And then maybe I’ll wear this piece of my grandmother’s, at one point extensive turquoise collection.

But between that and my love for rocks in the world at large, those were the two things that made my grandfather go, oh, let’s buy him a crystal. And here we are today. So turquoise is really important to my origin story, and it’s not a part I really focus on. But because of that, I’ve gotten a little bit nerdy about it. And I wanna touch on two two things that don’t seem related.

It’s its geology and its folklore. But I actually think putting this segment in the end position is great because you’re gonna see how these two things relate to everything everyone has said so far. So turquoise is a hydrated copper aluminum phosphate mineral. Like a lot of other kinds of similar chemistry, it forms in really arid environments. It does have some water in its crystal structure.

That’s important to know. We’re gonna have to come back around to this. But we tend to find it in secondary and tertiary oxidation zones that are above the original copper deposits. So we get, like, these igneous activities that produce copper ores. And then something happens to those ores that leaches them upwards, and that is what we call meteoric water.

In other words, water that comes from the sky. So only when we have this primary copper deposit and meteoric water meeting is there even a remote chance we’re gonna get turquoise to take place? But as that, turquoise is lifted up from those primary deposits, it as a you know, in solution, it gets deposited usually in thin cracks and and and other small spaces in the rocks that are younger and and and higher. So the challenge with this is that we don’t normally get very large nodules of it. So it does happen, but it’s appreciably rare.

And that’s why, like, all of our show and tell so far has been pretty flat pieces of natural turquoise because it’s just the space that it’s got left over. So, as we bear that in mind, I wanna talk a little bit about turquoise’s history. This is a gem material that has been traded and worked for at least ten thousand years. The earliest evidence that we’ve got goes back to pre Canaanite nomads who were occupying the Sinai Peninsula. We have evidence of them mining and working turquoise about four thousand years later, so, like, six thousand years ago, we get evidence of beads made in pre-dynastic Egypt, but on, you know, in Egypt proper.

Sometime in the next millennium, it was discovered and mined at large in Persia, traded along very, very distant trade routes. It’s getting into Europe and the Mediterranean and into China and other places as well. And then here in this hemisphere of the world, we have pretty good evidence of at least twenty five hundred years of turquoise use by the indigenous peoples of The Americas. First, probably, it was used in, like, Veracruz and Oaxaca and in Southeast Arizona, and then other deposits would be found in other parts of Turtle Island. We actually see the first European reference to turquoise in March when Aristotle wrote about it in his natural history works.

About fifteen hundred years ago, the intricate inlay techniques that we see were created in Mexico and then widely disseminated through the region. About a thousand years ago, there’s a deeper expansion of it by the Pueblo people. And then five, six hundred years ago, we got colonized, which created bigger demand for it. More of it is being taken back to Europe, and it also begins there the the influence of the colonists and the settlers, also introduces new techniques, new, we’ll say visual motifs as well to the lapidary work being done by indigenous folk. So there is this kind of exchange always taking place in turquoise history.

It never just stays in one spot. And we get a lot of really important themes that emerge in the myth and legend of this stone. There’s a lot related to the sky, to thunder and rain and heavenly blessings. We get this kind of ancestral or celestial or somehow divine kind of motif connected to it. A lot of connections to water, which is also related to life, fertility, and, like, the Earth itself.

We can’t separate water, sky and Earth, from turquoise or from one another. Associated with travel and safety, a lot of myths connected to goddesses and the divine feminine, and this idea of relationship. And we’re not gonna be able to explore all of these in really great depth, but I do wanna point out a couple of things. We get this idea of, like, sky and water and weather. Turquoise has been used, to protect against, to predict, or to attract rain in a variety of cultures around the world.

Some of its colloquial names in different languages translate to phrases like sky stone and stone of heaven. There was a belief that was pretty widespread in the Mediterranean and Levant that it would change color to portend changes in weather. So if it bleached dangerous weather was coming. And, of course, its formation process. Sky water literally hits the Earth to form it.

So it is this kind of intersection of heaven and Earth. And even before we had the, you know, modern science of geology, which is quite young among sciences, people instinctively made that connection. Also, its association with water. Again, this watery connection. This stone is from really arid places.

You didn’t find it in or near deposits of water. You found it very dry, but it is evidence of water having been there. Its color doesn’t just look like water. It is a footprint left by the action of water that yields life, fertility, and so much more. And this makes it a stone that in many cultures is associated with wealth and fertility and abundance.

It might be used to symbolize crops. The color of it was associated with fertility and resurrection in ancient Egypt. It’s especially the time we get the Spanish settler, and it becomes associated with themes like the squash blossom and other themes of life, fertility, abundance, resurrection. And it’s connected to serpents, which themselves embody this quality of the earth. They are connected to the earth because they’re literally touching it at all times.

And these divine serpents that we see turquoise connected to are really cross cultural. We have a group of beings called the Avano. They are horned serpents that the indigenous people of the Pueblo people saw it associated with. We have feathered serpents that are depicted in elaborate turquoise inlays in Central And South America. We have, this gem associated with the Nagini, the the the serpent spirits or serpent beings, and these are immortalized in these really elaborate headdresses that are covered with, like, drilled turquoise nuggets that resemble the end of a serpent’s tail, that are worn by the Latakia people in the Himalayas.

And, in the Mediterranean, it also became associated with Persephone whose Latin name is Proserpina. That word, Proserpina, comes from the same root as the modern word serpent because of her association with the Earth. It’s the word, to to creep, to crawl. So, even in Jyotish and Vedic astrology, it’s connected to the south node of the moon, Ketu, who is also known as the tail of the dragon or, the. So all of this serpentine imagery is there, and it’s so fascinating.

If we even just think about the color, that unique shade that is turquoise is a mixture of celestial blue and rich fertile green growing on the earth, and turquoise symbolizes this meeting place, this nexus between heaven and earth. Even in traditional motifs, the feathered serpent can traverse the land, the sky, the heavens beyond the visible sky, and the subterranean realm beneath the visible Earth. The formation process involves upward and downward movement of these forces coming together. And, ultimately, we get a mineral that moves quite a bit. It’s associated with travel and trade routes.

It leaches that primary copper upwards to travel closer to the surface, and so it’s no surprise that we also see it connected to, like, travel safety. But I think one of my favorite things symbolized in turquoise is this idea of connection, interdependence, right relationship, the kind of spider web patterns and veins that crisscross its surface or like the web of life. This is a mineral that exists because of its relationship between heaven and earth, between other minerals, between acid and base. And it is a stone that for quite a long time has been used in rituals of friendship, fidelity, and love. It is said to really strengthen our bond, our connection to life at large, and it is just this stone of standing in the web and seeing the bigger picture and being able to integrate all the different facets of it into one.

And so for me, I feel like little Nicholas got this initiation and turquoise magic before I could understand any of those things. And, it would be many years before it circles back around trying to unravel that thread. And it’s one maybe we’ll never unravel. This is a really complex tapestry woven together from so many themes and images, from the geological to the historical to the metaphysical to the medicinal. It’s such an incredible stone.

Ashley: Okay. I love this journey that you just took us on with turquoise, Nicholas. Thank you. And you talked a bit about the connection that turquoise has to the concept of resurrection, and it made me think of another place where we often see turquoise in an unexpected place. For those of you that don’t know, I am like an aficionado of Victorian morning jewelry, and we often see Victorian morning jewelry, which is typically made of things like jet, right, that really classic black, but we will see little hints of turquoise weave their way in in the form of forget me nots.

It would be used in lay forget me not flowers, so there is this immortalization of our beloved dead in the hope that they still live within our hearts. Right? That we as long as we don’t forget them, as long as we hold them dear, we hold them close to us, and we make space for that love for them, that there’s a piece of them that stays alive. And I had never thought of, you know, other than just the blue color, maybe that there’s a little deeper meaning there. So thank you for that.

Nicholas: Yeah. And this stone is found in a lot of grave goods. It’s a funereal offering to many of the cultures that have interfaced with it. And even if we think about those kinds of celestial and divine spirits, in many cases for tribal peoples, these are personifications of their ancestors, of their beloved dead. So there’s absolutely a thread that connects these things together.

Adam: Nicholas, I’ve seen a few different statues from all around the world, and I find that often, you know, in spiritual monuments or spiritual statues of gods, they’ll use turquoise for the eyes. Have you found that to be a bit of a trend, and is there a reasoning behind that apart from just that beautiful blue color, do you think?

Nicholas: I think probably the preciousness of the material is part of that. There are a few stones that are used in, like, ocular inlays in, in lots of different cultures. One of my favorite things that we find in two unlikely places to have ever met, is Japan and Egypt who both made Plano convex lenses. In other words, flat base, rounded top like a cabochon out of quartz to insert in their statues of divinity, because you could paint underneath it. You could put ground up pigments underneath it, and it would feel lifelike.

Maybe some of those blue pigments are turquoise derived. Maybe some of them aren’t. I don’t know. But, stones being sacred and, you know, the eyes themselves being thought of as the window to the soul, it makes sense that we’d want to put a sacred object in that place.

Adam: The other thing we’d have if we’ve got a country bingo card, I think we’ve got doing rather well because we’ve listed a lot of countries where we’ve got our turquoise from as it won’t be showing off their crystal porn today. Do you think it matters where your turquoise comes from? Not in one place is better than the other, but do you think that it changes the energy of that? Kyle, you’ve got a few different pieces from different places. Does the country of origin change the energy of the turquoise in a slight way?

Kyle: I would say as we’ve covered in previous episodes, totally. Like, there’s going to be subtle differences due to the geological differences, the energetic differences, the aridity that they come from, yes, is the same, but some places are more mountainous. Some places are older. Some places are still moving geologically, like, you know, the Himalayas, somewhere that’s still moving geologically. The turquoise is different to, say, Northern Australia, which is billions of years old, really, really old, and it’s been weathered.

So they’re gonna feel very, very different from each other, and I think that’s something that we find with most crystals that we seem to be playing with and connecting with. And I think also if you have a deeper connection to a place, I find that connection always seems to be deeper. Like, it’s something that I think I found myself first connecting especially to Persian turquoise closer to my Mediterranean roots than the, you know, stuff from the West, sorry, Turtle Island, North American hemisphere of places.

Adam: What about yourself, Ashley? Do you have a favorite place where turquoise comes from?

Ashley: Definitely the Cornish turquoise. It has to be. I’m just so deeply connected to the history and legend, lore, mythology that you find throughout Cornwall. There are so many amazing stories that influence my magical practice, that influence, the way that I interact with the land and the way that I interact with crystals. And so finding some stones from that area, especially something like turquoise, which is just, you know, a bit harder to come by compared to a lot of other things, is really special. And I gotta, like, thank Nicholas for introducing me to this one because it is definitely one of my favorites.

Adam: What is about yourself, Nicholas? Do you have a favorite place?

Nicholas: I mean, it’s not in my budget, but those beautiful euhedral crystals from Bishop Mine in Virginia, they rank really high on my list. Places of historical significance, though, also on my bucket list, but arguably a lot more achievable. I would love a piece of Egyptian turquoise. The Egyptian pantheon, Egyptian mythology was one of my, like, doorways into myth and magic as a young person. So, you know, that’s something that I think will always hold, like, a really special place in my heart.

And so I’ve got it on my list. I’m not trying very hard, but when I find the right piece of Egyptian turquoise, it’ll come home with me.

Adam: I love that. And one thing I wanna kinda go off on a tangent about, we’ve made several references, to a place, throughout this podcast, and I know we have people listening from all around the world. And you’ve been referring to North America as Turtle Island. And I’d love to know about the background of that. That’s one of the original names, is it?

I’m gonna lean over to the North Americans to answer this, but that’s another term I’ve actually heard before. This is the first time I’ve heard of it today.

Ashley: Okay. Yeah. I mean, I’m definitely, like, not an expert and can’t speak to the totality of the importance behind this terminology, but I know that many first nations groups here in The US prefer to refer to the original land here by the name that it was given by the original inhabitants of this land before colonization, and that name was Turtle Island.

Nicholas: I love that. Yeah. And sometimes, like, the Earth at large is referred to as Turtle Island, the imagery that it is born by the turtle. I know that the Lenape cultures, the Lenape peoples, use a lot of this kind of imagery, and describe the story of the great turtle that bears the earth.

Adam: Amazing. Now before we wrap up this confab, I believe it’s time for a bit of shameless self promotion, Ashley.

Ashley: Yes. So I am very excited because this episode is actually going to be released on the day that I open the doors for my Crystal Healing Certification Program. So this is something I only do a couple times a year. I am so excited to welcome in a new group of students. We are actually gonna be limiting enrollment this time to just 50 students.

I wanna make things really intimate. We’re kind of switching up the way that we do some of our live calls and things like that so that we can, I don’t know, get back to the roots of the school? I can create more, like, face to face time with everybody, more one on one connection. That’s what I miss the most. So if you’re interested in learning more about crystals and crystal healing, you can head over to crystalhealerschool.com to get all the details.

This is an internationally accredited program by the IPHM. So there’s a ton of goodness. I will invite you to head over to the website to check it out. Again, that’s crystalhealerschool.com.

Adam: And for those that live maybe on the other side of the globe like Australia, is this something that you need to be online for, or how does it work with time zones, Ashley?

Ashley: That’s a great question. So, actually, all of the core course curriculum videos are prerecorded, so you can go on your own schedule at your own pace. There’s no time limit for completion, which is really nice because here’s the thing, being a neurospicy person, I know that sometimes life happens and takes your focus away from things even that you’re excited about and really looking forward to. So the nice thing is you can slow it down. You can speed it up.

You can take a pause and come back to it, whatever works for you. But then there are some live calls as well. We have two live calls per month. One is on a weekday evening, either Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, and then they kind of flip flop the days of the week. And then every three months, so once a quarter, we have one on a Saturday afternoon.

So whether you are in, like, UK time or you’re in Australia, New Zealand, you should be able to come to some of the calls. If you can’t make it live, those are even recorded and put into an archive. So we have, in addition to all of the courses in the program, which is over forty hours of training, there is just this massive archive of calls that you can go watch from years and years going back to, I think, 2017 last I looked, for just tons of extra education. Plus, our CCH students get invites to our pop up calls, act or excuse me, pop up classes and extra events that we do, which are included with enrollment. So it’s a lot of fun.

Adam: Wow. And we will put the link for this on in the notes of every podcast and podcasts that we’ve put out through our different channels as well. So check that out. Now the final thing I do need to shed light on before we wrap up, obviously, you can only see the talking person on screen at the moment. And as you know, me and Kyle work very hard to make sure we are dressed appropriately every single week.

Now Nicholas tried to upstage us a few weeks ago with Larimer and his mermaid up. But, Kyle, if you just wanna introduce something you’ve been sipping out of today.

Kyle: Oh, this little thing, this little gift of a massive mug that I was given. People know I don’t drink a small cup of coffee, and this was gifted to me by a client a few years ago, and I love using it. I’ve made panna cotta in this. It is a wonderful little mug that I love to work with. Just while I’m on screen, I actually wrote a poem.

I was inspired by turquoise, and I’d love to finish with it, and it’s quite interesting reflecting back what Nicholas has spoken about especially as well as everyone else. You’ll understand why. The oceans, the lands, the sky, and the stars, a song being sung by the universe filled with love, joy, sorrow, and power. We dance, we play, we listen, we grieve, letting the music guide us like a soundtrack to our lives, scored by the conductor that is us.

Adam: I think there’s nothing left to say after that. Join us next week on crystal confab for another confab about crystals to see what outfits we’re wearing and what teacups we’re drinking out of. Until then, blessed be.

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