Inspired Clarity: Breath of the Gods Incense

Burn this mixture of incense on your altar to generate a positive and peaceful atmosphere to set the stage for your ritual. Rose hips and mint are for heart, enthusiasm, and keen thinking. The yellow candle, yellow rose, and the yellow citrine crystal are used to symbolize intelligence and mental clarity.

Gather together

• 1 tablespoon dried rose hips
• 1 teaspoon fresh or dried mint
• a charcoal cake for burning incense
• a fireproof clay or glass dish
• a yellow candle
• neroli essential oil
• a yellow rose bud
• 1 cup (240ml) of fresh water in a bowl
• a citrine crystal

Timing: Perform this rite during the new moon, when the moon is dark and not visible.

Using your mortar and pestle, grind together the rose hips and the mint. Once they are nicely mixed, place the herbs on a piece of charcoal in a fireproof clay or glass dish. Light a yellow candle anointed with neroli oil and place a single yellow rose in a vase to one side of the incense burner. On the other side, place the bowl of water with the citrine crystal in it. Light the incense and breathe in. The word “inspire” comes from the Greek word for “breath of the gods,” so allow this divine essence to fill you with grace.

Seven Sacred Stones Bracelet

Take any silver chain-link bracelet and add “charm” to it! Bracelets act as protection jewelry, and, well, they look simply divine on our delicate wrists, do they not? Of late, the trend has been to layer bracelets, but, with gem magic, there’s a danger that jeweled pieces worn together could cancel each other out because they have conflicting energies. So, I’m going to recommend that you wear this bracelet alone, without other magical wrist wear.

To make this piece, you’ll need seven stones on small pendent settings, a silver chain-link bracelet, seven jump rings, and pliers. Plain silver chain-link bracelets are easy to obtain at any jewelry department or store, from Target to Tiffany. Jump rings are open rings onto which you can slide a pendant and then close up with small chain- nose pliers. They are readily available at any craft or jewelry store.

Before you choose your seven stones, decide what energy enhancement you desire. If you want lots of energy and zest, choose red jasper or pink clamshell. If you want to be uplifted, try jade. To become wiser, pick sapphire. To stay safe while traveling, pick dendritic agate. To remain calm and overcome stress, choose blue lace agate. For more mental clarity, choose malachite. For a self-esteem boost, try rhodonite.

Once you have pursued all the gem and crystal descriptions, you can and should experiment with all manner of combinations. However, I highly recommend the Seven Sacred Stones Bracelet with the following very beneficial stones and energies:

• Citrine for a better ability to communicate 
  
• Lace agate for happiness with your job
  
• Lapis lazuli for mental brilliance
  
• Moonstone for self-love and self-expression
  
• Red coral for good health and physical strength
  
• Rose quartz or opal to make you appealing to others 
  
• Turquoise for calmness and protection from the earth

Friends of mine have reported wonderful results with this banishing and boosting bracelet. Where else can you find jewelry that will make you feel good about yourself, protect you from harm, and help you to look even prettier? You have to make it! You can find these pendant-set stones in any jewelry or new age store. The metaphysical stores have the best selection, however.

Stress-Reducing Stones

Alexandrite will bring lots of zest. Feeling depressed, worried, and blue? Citrine or jet can banish dark days. Stressed out? Rhyolite races to the rescue as well.

Certain green stones, such as chrysocolla and malachite, calm the mind, and green-flecked bloodstone is a stress buffer.

If you want to be uplifted, try jade. To become wiser, pick sapphire. To stay safe while traveling, pick dendritic agate.

To remain calm and overcome stress, choose blue lace agate. For more mental clarity, choose malachite. For a self-esteem boost, try rhodonite.

Herkimer diamonds are powerful and bring great vitality and exuberance into your life. They can redirect stress away from you with their absorptive abilities. Placing these rocks in your bedroom will cause the stress to melt away and help you relax and feel safe.

Dioptase is a gorgeous gemstone that nearly matches the color of green emeralds but lacks a similar hardness, which lowers its marketplace value. It can be found in Peru, Chile, Russia, Iran, and some sites in Africa. The true value of dioptase lies in its ability to help anyone experiencing mental stress. It lends balance to male and female energies and acts as a stabilizer. As an energy stone, dioptase can activate and awaken every chakra, invigorating the mind, body, and spirit. If you want to be really different, wear dioptase, and you will fascinate admirers with this beautiful stone and find peace of mind in the process.

Make Way This Day: A Simple Clarity Intonation

Unless you are already a skilled practitioner of the magical arts, you may well be unconsciously casting spells that throw obstacles in your path. To clear the way to greater wealth and happiness, during the new moon, pick one perfect white rose and sit in front of your altar with it. Light a white candle with your eyes closed. Empty your mind and breathe deeply. When you feel a buzzing at the crown of your head from inhaling and exhaling so mindfully, stare into the flame and repeat seven times:

    I am alive. I have power. It is real.

Serenity of the Setting Sun: A Spell for Mondays

To clear energy and prepare for a week of calm clarity, find a blossom of your favorite white flower—iris, lily, rose—one that is truly beautiful to your eye. Monday’s setting sun is the time for this spell, enacted immediately after the sun goes below the horizon. Anoint a white candle with clary sage oil and place it on your altar. Take your single white blossom and add that to your altar in a bowl of freshly drawn water. Place sage leaves on a glass dish in front of the lit candle and speak aloud:

    This fire is pure; this flower is holy, this water is clear.

    These elements purify me.

    I walk in light with nothing in my way.

    My energy is pure, my spirit is holy, my being is clear.

    White light burns bright in me and all the words I say.

    So mote it be. And so it is.

Burn the sage in the fire of the candle, then put in the glass dish where it can turn into ash, smudging your space with consecrating smoke as it burns. Stand in front of your altar and breathe in slowly and deeply six times. On the last, strongest exhalation, blow the candle out.

Presence of Peace: Citrine Spell

To begin this comforting ritual, anoint a yellow candle with calming and uplifting bergamot oil, then light it to bring mental clarity. Place a yellow rose in a vase to the left of the candle. To the right, place a bowl containing at least two citrine or quartz crystals.

Next, you will need saffron water, which is made quite easily by simmering a single teaspoon of saffron from your cupboard in two quarts of distilled water. Let the saffron water cool to room temperature and pour it into the bowl of crystals. Put your hands together in prayer and dip them in the bowl. Touch your third eye in the center of your forehead, anointing yourself with the saffron water. Now, speak aloud:

    Goddess great, fill me with your presence.

    This night, I am whole and at peace.

    Breathing in, breathing out, I feel your safe embrace.

    And so it is.

Conjuring Creativity: An Altar for the Imagination

Your personal altar is the ideal environment to incubate your ideas and can be a touchstone for daily conjuring and contemplation. By preparing your home and sparking your inner flames, you can clear away personal blocks and invite in friendly spirits who will aid you in personal pursuits, no matter what your line of work is.

On a low table or chest, place an orange or gold scarf and the following elements: yellow, orange, and gold candles for stimulating intelligence and clarity; bergamot oil for energy; and vanilla incense for mental power.

In an amber or clear glass bowl on the altar, place cloves and sage leaves. Next, add items that symbolize your personal creativity—perhaps a poem you wrote, a figure you sculpted, or a photograph you took of the altar.

Place benzoin, an herb for all-around mental strength and clarity, in your incense burner; it will bring inspiration from the psychic realm. Add any gifts from nature that inspire you—luminous shells, chunks of quartz, or feathers. Arrange your altar in a way that pleases you and stimulates your senses. Now, anoint the candle with bergamot essential oil while you meditate to clear your mind of any distractions. This is an essential step in opening the mental and spiritual space necessary to create, whether your intention is to create a ritual of your own design or an art project. Once you feel focused, light a sage leaf and wave it gently around so the cleansing smoke permeates your altar space. Light the anointed candles and the incense with a candle. Now set and speak your intention:

    By my hand,

    And by the blessing of the spirits,

    The fire of my creativity

    Burns bright,

    Burns long,

    Burns eternal.

    Blessings to me and to all who create!

Setting Your Intention

A well-defined and focused intention is the key to success in a life-enhancing ritual. Good results depend upon clarity. If your intention is not crystal clear, you are likely to fail. You must approach your ritual with a definite concentration. If a nagging worry is hovering in the back of your mind, you are not properly focused. You may even want to perfect an image of your intention and desire with creative visualization.

Part of your preparation should also include using ritual correspondences—the phase of the moon, the day of the week, the color of the candles you use, and much more. These things add to the depth and meaning of your ritual. Do you need to clear the energy and refresh your altar with some housecleaning and smudge? Do so and continue to focus on your intention as you create the foundation for a successful ceremony.

While you are clearing energy in your space, you must also clear out the clutter in your mind. If you are in a state of inner chaos, the outcome will simply not measure up to your expectations. Perhaps it will help you relax if you play CDs of instrumental music or sacred chants. Conscious breathing or stretching will also help you make yourself ready for ritual.

Constructing your inner temple is a marvelous process that can aid in your journey deep inside yourself. Sit or lie down in a position that is comfortable enough to relax you, but not so comfortable as to allow you to drift off to sleep. As you breathe slowly and rhythmically, imagine a peaceful, beautiful place specific to your desires. It could be a white marble temple in a lovely sculpture garden under a still blue sky. It could be a mirror pool by a sacred grove. It must be pleasing to you, a place you can visit frequently in visualization. It can be any size or shape but should have certain aspects:

• The Center: Your inner temple should have a single center from which you can access all areas of the temple. This center is a representation of your personal power center.
• Reflective Surface: Here is where you can take a look at yourself spiritually. The reflective surface can be a scrying mirror, a crystal ball, or even a pool of water. You can also use it to look at the past, present, and future.
• Water: Your inner temple can have any number of water sources, such as a waterfall, a well, a stream, or an ocean. Water represents our deepest levels of consciousness. Commune with your deepest self here. 
• Earth: Here is where you ground yourself, and create manifestation. Take stock of your deepest desires and goals here in a garden, forest, meadow, or wherever your imagination guides you. 

Ideally, your inner temple has four doorways or gates, one each for the four directions and elements. Once you have created your ideal inner temple, you can now use it to perform ritual, as you have created permanent sacred space inside and outside this temple through visualization. 

Pisces: Pink Yarrow

While our favorite fish are deeply empathetic to the point of being psychic, their big issue can be boundaries. When you begin to feel other people’s feelings too much, this causes emotional muddles, sadness, depression, anxiety, and ongoing overwhelm. Sensitivity and compassion are beautiful as long as you can draw and maintain clear boundaries between yourself and others. Pink Yarrow helps Pisces maintain mental clarity, good self-esteem, and healthy relationships.

Sodalite—Truth-Teller’s Stone

Sodalite is a truth-teller’s stone. When wearing it, you have no choice but to express what is in your heart and what you know to be real and right. It is a stone of sincerity. This blue crystal splendor is a relatively rare rock. There are only four known deposits of sodalite in the world: the town of Bancroft, Ontario, where it was first discovered in 1892, two other spots in Canada, and Maine. Sodalite, named for its high sodium content, is the result of volcanic activity in which nepheline rocks were flooded by sodium chlorine, giving this stone the unmatched royal blue color that makes for fine gems when cut. This may well be the reason sodalite is an environmental cleanser, reducing radioactive pollution.

Sodalite is also a balancer and aura cleanser. It is a simplifier, too, showing you how to reorganize your life and reduce stress and wasted time and energy. With this crystal, you will achieve the goals that are right for you on a spiritual level. It is a mental crystal that helps the synapses to fire smoothly and helps you retain wisdom. Sodalite impacts both hemispheres of the brain: the rational, linear half and the imaginative, intuitional side. This rare rock has the rare ability to give you great ideas as well as the impetus and planning ability to make them happen. Sodalite is good for people who are indecisive and easily confused. If you have to make an important decision, meditate with sodalite and you will arrive at exactly the right solution. Tremendous for communication, this stone is good for anyone doing public presentations. It provides the confidence and creativity to express yourself more freely and more honestly.

A popular carving stone, sodalite is coming into vogue as jewelry. Healers use it for digestive issues and to work with diabetes. It is quite good as a massage tool in wand form or as a ball or egg that can be run over the body lightly. As an elixir, it gives confidence, helps lymphoma, and reduces inflammation. If you feel you’re over-busy and that your life is just a little too complicated, wear sodalite at work. Clarity will come! 

Citrine—Cairngorm Quartz

This is the orange or yellow kind of quartz and is actually rather rare in nature. The citrines you are seeing in the marketplace are quartzes that have been heated—low-grade amethysts or smoky quartzes cooked at high temperatures to make them more valuable in the jewelry stores. You can tell if you try by looking for the more reddish orange shades these faked citrines have. On the other hand, real citrine may have started its natural life as amethyst but then got heated by Mother Nature herself in seismic or volcanic activity. Ametrine, one of my absolute favorite stones, is half amethyst and half citrine.

True citrine is found in France, Brazil, Russia, the United Kingdom, and North America. Citrine is quite often mistaken for topaz, a gem higher in monetary value. There are dealers who have taken advantage of naive collectors and sold them citrine as topaz. Citrine’s sisters in the quartz family are amethyst, the purple color; milky quartz, a cloudy white; rock crystal, the clear variety; rose quartz, a pretty pink; and smoky quartz, which ranges from gray to brown. Citrine, also called cairngorm, is a birthstone for November and helps with stomachaches. It is a crystal that helps to heighten mental clarity and creativity, increase powers of concentration, and overcome a poor memory. Citrine is an aura protector, touching the chakra system and even helping to repair holes in the aura. It opens the sacral and solar plexus chakras and kindles the crown chakra. Citrine is especially wonderful if you wear it as a jewel in rings while you are working and handling your money.

You should keep a chunk of citrine in your place of work because it will allow you to hear and accept constructive criticism. Tradesmen in India kept citrine in their shops and bazaars to attract money and abundance. An immediate feng- shui cure would be to place a cluster of citrine crystals in your wealth corner. Citrine is also terrific to have on hand in your home, as it is a cleanser of the environment as well as the etheric body. Citrine can help maintain equilibrium between the yin and yang energies—the female and male.

Citrine is quite simply an essential to have; it promotes calmness and brings out a feeling of well-being and happiness. Citrine makes anyone want to be more active and is a strong motivator. So, greater success, better health, and more money? Give me citrine anytime!