Crystals for Karmic Healing, by Nicholas Pearson
Destiny Books, 9781620556184, 288 pp., 2017
The instant I saw the title of Crystals for Karmic Healing, I was intrigued. Crystals are one of my favourite areas of magick, and I’ve certainly been feeling like my circumstances or karma have been blocked for a while. This book offered the chance to learn more about the workings of karma and crystals, including how to use crystal grids, something I’d come across in passing, but never stopped to explore.1
I was quite impressed with the book upon receiving it. The cover design is clean and striking, but more than that, I love the interior and its layout. The quality of the paper is very nice, sturdy with an unusual glossy finish. The only downside is that sometimes the light can create an annoying glare on the pages while you’re reading, but it’s a very minor flaw in an otherwise excellent book. Overall I think the paper lends itself to a durable book, one that will easily withstand dog-eared pages, markups and notes.
The book is divided into two major sections: “Karma and How it Works” and “Karmic Stones and How to Use Them.” The first section contains three chapters: Understanding Karma, The Lords of Karma, and Working with Karma. Together, they provide a basic overview of how karma operates and explain related concepts like spiritual blueprints and the Akashic Records. It’s not a bad introduction, and the table of contents breaks the chapters down into even more specific sections for easy navigation. However, sometimes I wondered — especially in the case of chapter two, The Lords of Karma — if the book presupposes that readers are coming in with a fair amount of experience with, or understanding of karma. However, the book does offer detailed notes and a bibliography, so it’s also possible to work out from there.
Karma is a concept I’ve absorbed primarily through Western culture’s understanding of it, and through studying comparative religion. It doesn’t feature in my practice beyond the most basic sense, and I don’t know very much about the role it plays in other occult circles. So even though the book does its best to lay things out in an accessible way, sometimes I felt like I was missing some important context where karma is concerned. I don’t want to fault this book for a gap in my own knowledge, but if your prior experience with karma sounds like mine, you may want to do a bit more reading before jumping directly into the first section of Crystals for Karmic Healing.
The book’s second section, with its focus on crystals and their uses in healing karma was much more accessible for me. The bulk of it is dedicated to the directory of crystals and their properties. Each entry includes a large full colour picture of the crystal, usually about half a page in size, and a page or two of text about its origins, appearance and use in karmic healing. The writing in this book is strong overall but it’s in educating the reader about crystals, that the author’s love for them really shines through. It’s clear in these descriptions that Nicholas Pearson loves crystals and working with them, and his passion makes it that much easier to engage with the book.
One thing I want to specify, the book isn’t an exhaustive crystal dictionary, as I realized when I went looking for one of my favourite stones, rainbow moonstone. It limits its scope to crystals whose properties deal with resolving and healing karmic problems, which evidently rainbow moonstone does not. That’s not a flaw; the book is very clear about what its aim and focus will be. But if you’re looking for a more comprehensive book specifically on crystals and their magickal properties, this isn’t exactly the right one. But don’t worry! There are lots of other books you can check out for that!2
The last chapter in the book deals with your “karmic toolkit,” namely how to care for and use your crystals. It starts out basic, with cleansing crystals, charging them with intention and stones for daily wear. From there it moves into suggestions for past life work, recipes for crystal elixirs, sample meditations and crystal grids. One of my favourite inclusions is a thorough chart detailing which crystals to use if you’re looking to connect with a specific past life. The chart offers options geographically, and by occupation. For example, Pearson advises the use of fluorite for either a lifetime spent in a Mesoamerican culture, or for a lifetime as a scholar or philosopher.3 The chart also includes suggestions for resolving certain challenges that can be reflected in karma from a previous lifetime, such as infertility, familial loss, or particular vices and traumas. It’s a handy resource that will prove very useful for anyone interested in doing serious past life regression work.
The descriptions of each elixir and crystal grid are given the same attention and care as the descriptions of individual crystals. Pearson provides images of each grid, and carefully explains the function of each crystal and its placement in the grid. Where necessary, models are used to demonstrate crystal placement, or the way in which a certain stone should be held or wielded for best results. I was pleased to see that, although only three models were used, attention was given to their diversity, with a man, and two women of different ethnic backgrounds appearing in the photos. It definitely contributes to what is — in my mind — an approachable and well thought out book. Crystals for Karmic Healing should be considered essential to anyone interested in working with crystals, karma, past lives or healing. I’m happy to give it a strong recommendation.
- To learn more about crystal grids, take our Crystal Grid Fundamentals course. [↩]
- See Susan Starr’s review of The Book of Stones. [↩]
- p. 204 [↩]
