Benefits & Uses of Rose Quartz

Rose quartz is a stone known as the ultimate self-love crystal…making it one of our favorites over here and of course, a great stone for February!

But rose quartz isn’t just about self-love. It has a whole slew of benefits and uses, which I’ll be sharing in this post. Keep scrolling for some of the major benefits of this stone!

Unconditional Love

Rose quartz is associated with the heart chakra, helping you open your center of giving and receiving unconditional love.

Energy Muse states, “According to [ancient] myth, Cupid, the Roman god of desire, or Eros, the Greek god of love, bestowed the gift of love to humans in the form of a rose quartz.”

Rose quartz can be used to cultivate unconditional love of all kinds: self-love, romantic love, friendship love, love for the earth, love for family, and more.

Compassion

Along with unconditional love, rose quartz helps cultivate compassion. By opening the flow of love throughout your body and energy field, it helps you connect to the interconnectedness of all beings, creating more love and compassion for the people around you and even those you can’t see and will never meet. I’d love to get rose quartz into the hands of every person in the world and watch how the world changes!

Restores Trust

In the heart chakra, we store fear, anxiety, and broken trust. Rose quartz can be used to help us accept past hurts, forgive ourselves and others, and ultimately restore trust.

Softening & opening

Sometimes our hearts get hardened. This often happens when, as I mentioned above, our trust has been broken, our hearts have been broken, or we’re holding and carrying past pains and hurts with us.

Rose quartz is your ally to help you gently soften and open this center of love. It’s here to help you soothe and break down the walls, opening yourself back up to connection, love, and vulnerability.

Gratitude

Gratitude comes from the heart chakra. When our heart chakras are closed, it can be difficult to experience gratitude and really feel the depth of all that we are grateful for. Rose quartz can help you release blockages here and open up to a flow of gratitude, helping you love your life for all that it is.

Cleansing

This stone is associated with the element of water and is thought to be very fluid, helping wash out stuck emotions, toxic energies, and negativity to return you back to your pure, divine essence: love.

It works slowly and gently — think more of a softly flowing river than a crashing ocean wave!

Venus energy

Rose quartz carries with it the energy of Venus. Venus is the ruling planet of the signs Libra and Taurus, and connects to the Empress card in the tarot.

We can think of Venusian energy as the energy of lushness, self-care, receiving, beauty, and flow. If you’re wanting to up your self-care game, open yourself up to receiving, and release stress — work with rose quartz!

Uses of Rose Quartz

Now that you know some of the benefits and meanings of rose quartz, how can you actually incorporate it into your life? Here are some suggestions but as always, use your intuition! You can also meditate with rose quartz and ask it how it wants to work with you.

• Add rose quartz to your altar to call in Venus energy.

• Use in self-love rituals and spells. Find a rose quartz ritual in The Ritual Deck.

• Create a gratitude or love crystal grid featuring rose quartz. Find grid and crystals for a love crystal grid in The Goddess Discovery Book.

• Meditate with rose quartz on your heart to help you open your heart chakra and let forgiveness flow through you.

• Wear rose quartz as jewelry to carry its vibration with you wherever you go.

• Create a self-love spell bag with rose quartz in it.

• Incorporate a rose quartz facial roller into your daily routine.

• Place rose quartz in the corners of your home to open the flow of love throughout your space.

How to Open Your Sacral Chakra & Know When it's Blocked

The sacral chakra, Svadhisthana, is one of the chakras I personally feel most connected to. I think in the spiritual community, we can sometimes forget how important the lower chakras are, but remember: you are a spiritual being in a physical body! So the chakras we tend to associate with our physical bodies more, like the root, sacral, and solar plexus chakras, are just as important as the higher chakras like your crown and third eye.

The sacral chakra is your center of creativity, sexuality, and feeling. It’s ruled by the element of water, and it’s located at the center of your low belly about three inches from your navel.

When this chakra is open, you’re able to feel deep pleasure in your life. You’re able to really feel the world around you and you’re connected to your emotions. You’re able to flow, expand, have healthy relationships with others, and use your creativity.

When this chakra is blocked, it may manifest as:

• Disconnection from your sexuality or being ruled by your sexuality

• Experiencing a lack of pleasure in your day-to-day life

• Inability to connect with your creative energy

• Feeling stuck in a certain feeling or mood

• Dependency on a person or substance that gives you pleasure

• Inability to feel your feelings or being too ruled by your emotions

If any of those sound like you, don’t worry. Our chakras are fluid, just like us, and they can change from day to day. Scroll down to get 10 ways to unblock your sacral chakra to connect with your creative and emotional flow.

The card shown in the image is from The Ritual Deck.

Get creative

This is one of my favorite ways to open this chakra! Even if you don’t feel creative in the moment, just start creating something. It might surprise you how your energy starts to flow! Try painting, writing, drawing, coloring, collaging, creating your own movement practice, or experimenting in the kitchen.

Use scents

My go-to essential oils for opening your sacral chakra are:

• Tangerine

• Orange

• Ylang ylang

• Patchouli

• Bergamot

• Sandalwood

• Rosewood

Try massaging your low belly with one or more of the oils (diluting with a carrier oil as needed), diffusing them in your space, or placing a few drops in your bath (which, bonus points, connects you with the element of water!).

Dance

I know everyone says this, but seriously, dance like no one’s watching (because no one is!). Put on your favorite music and move intuitively however feels good for you. If you’d like, incorporate some hip circles to help you get into your low belly.

Breathing into your low belly. As you’re laying down, place your hands on your low belly. With your inhale, feel your hands rise as you flood the belly with breath, sending your life force energy to this chakra. As you exhale, feel your sacral center soften, expand, and open.

Use crystals

Some crystals that help open your sacral chakra are:

• Citrine

• Carnelian

• Orange aventurine

• Orange calcite

• Goldstone

• Tiger’s eye

• Sunstone

• Peach selenite

Try sleeping with them, meditating with them on your low belly, placing them around your home, or placing a little tumbled stone in your pocket to carry with you all day.

Meditation

Bring your palms to the center of your sacral chakra in your low belly, and start to take deep belly breaths into that space. With each inhale, visualize a little orange ball of light over your sacral chakra. With each exhale, visualize it opening, softening, and expanding until your entire body is surrounded by a beautiful aura of pure orange light.

Check out my Energy Reset Meditation Bundle here.

Use affirmations

Write them down, say them every day, make them the background of your phone—the options are endless! Choose an affirmation from the list below or create your own:

• I am fully in my body.

• Creative and sexual energy runs through me.

• I am in love with life.

• I am a passionate being.

• I am deeply connected to my feelings.

• I honor my feelings.

• I honor my pleasure.

Yoga poses

Poses that stretch your hips are really helpful for opening your sacral chakra. Some of my favorites are:

• Low lunge

• Goddess pose

• Reclining cobbler’s pose

• Wide-legged standing forward fold

• Frog pose

In each pose, just remember to breathe into your low belly!

Get to the root of the blockage

One of my favorite ways to get to the root of a chakra blockage is pulling tarot cards for these two simple questions:

• Why is my sacral chakra blocked?

• Advice for moving through the blockage

Tarot cards have such a beautiful, helpful way of getting to the heart of the matter. If you’re feeling like there’s a deep, underlying shadow or issue holding you back from fully stepping into your sexual and creative power, try this.

Play with color

The color associated with Svadhisthana is orange. Try bringing more of this color into your life by lighting orange candles, eating orange foods, wearing orange clothes, or painting your nails orange.

Intention Meditation for the New Year

Each morning we rise with the promise of being able to start over, and no morning is better suited for a reset than New Year’s Day. The New Year is a time of rebirth and so, finds many of us setting our intentions for the next year. The trick is setting intentions that feel authentic to who you are and promise to bring real change to how you approach every aspect of your life.

Intentions Are Naturally Expansive

Intentions truly have no limit. If you decide that you would like to feel balanced and happy every day, there’s no end to that. You also can enjoy the flexibility of not having to hit a degree of happiness each day. If today you’re just a little happy, while yesterday you felt like you were flying, you’ve still achieved your intention.

Goals are wonderful to have, and it’s tradition at this point to set New Year’s Resolutions. But here’s the thing: goals can make you feel like you’ve failed at something. If you don’t meet a goal, it’s easy to feel bad about missing it.

So, if you’re a more goal-oriented person, start with setting an intention, then set your goal, and be sure to add some self-compassion to keep things positive.

Have No Regrets

It’s natural to look at things that you didn’t do, relationships that came to an end, or other events that you perceive as being negative. But I challenge you to shift your thinking about last year so that you can set yourself up for success this year.

• Ask yourself the following questions:

• How was last year's healing?

• What freedoms do I feel now that I’ve let some of the junk go?

• When did my choices honor my true self?

• What bad habits did I overcome?

• How far have I come with ____?

A Meditation Script for Setting Intentions

The following script will guide you through a healing meditation that focuses on setting intentions. Use it as a rough guide in your practice or record yourself reading it on your phone so you can play it back whenever you’d like.

Before you begin, have an intention in mind, either a new one or one that you’d like to renew.

Taking a deep breath in, I invite you to close your eyes and notice your body in this space.

Notice how the breath moves in through your nose and out again. Let’s take ten nourishing breaths here.

As you continue to breathe, notice that you can direct your attention anywhere you’d like it to go.

I invite you to draw your attention to the center of your head, imagining going deep into the center of your consciousness, about eye level. Any time your mind wanders, bring your awareness back to this spot.

Still breathing, I invite you to recall the last year. Is there anything that you wish to release?

If so, imagine that energy, memory, or even regret coming together in a ball of light floating in front of you. Allow this process to occur at a pace that’s comfortable.

What color is that energy? Do you feel the old year releasing out of different parts of your body?

What does it look like?

Still breathing, I invite you to release that ball of energy. Perhaps it floats off into the sun to be burned up in its rays. Maybe you imagine an angel coming down and carrying it safely away. Or maybe it just disappears.

As you watch this energy leave, how do you feel? Take a few moments to enjoy the expansiveness of this release.

Now, let’s fill in those spots that housed that old energy.

Consider an intention you would like to set – either a new one or one you’d like to renew.

Maybe you imagine writing the intention down in your journal. Perhaps you imagine what it would be like to hear it spoken aloud by a favorite person.

If this intention also looked like a ball of energy or light, what color would it be?

Would it be warm or cool?

I invite you to imagine a beautiful funnel over your head. This golden funnel simply floats above your head and invites only the best, most beautiful energy into your body.

At this time, imagine that funnel draws the energy of your intention into your body, filling up all the empty spaces where the old energy from last year resided.

If you feel a physical sensation, like a tingling or a twitching, that’s okay. Your body is simply responding to the shift in energy.

When it feels as if this energy has filled your body, take a moment to close off your funnel, knowing you can reopen it at any time to invite only the best energy into yourself.

Let’s take another ten nourishing breaths here and sit in this space with renewed, intentional energy.

When you are ready, you may end your meditation at your own pace.

If you enjoyed this meditation and want to learn more about meditation check out more blog posts on meditation here.

4 Ways to Honor the Winter Solstice

The winter solstice marks the longest night of the year, and so we traditionally associate it with darkness.

But it’s also the beginning of the waxing phase of the year, as the days start to get longer and nights start to get shorter. We are reminded that light always follows dark. The balance begins to shift, the wheel of the year turns back again.

This sabbat, also known as Yule, is a time for us to connect with our darkness and alchemize it into lessons, into medicine, for the year to come.

Below are some ways to honor this sacred holiday.

Journaling prompts

Create a quiet, safe space (candles are recommended!) and let yourself free write to the questions below with no editing. No one’s going to read your answers but you!

• Write a love letter to your darkness.

• What am I most ashamed of? How can I transmute this shame into a source of power and love?

• What part of me do I want to feed and grow?

Tarot or oracle spread

Pull out your tarot or oracle deck and set the intention for your highest self tospeak to you through the cards. Give them a shuffle, and pull a card for each of the questions below. I recommend writing down the spread and the cards you pull, as well as your interpretations of them.

• What shadow wants to work with me?

• How does it want to be worked with?

• Advice for moving through shadow

• What wants to be born from my darkness?

• Advice for birthing whatever needs to come through

• Message from my inner child at this time

Lay out the cards in two rows of three like so. The deck featured here is The Ritual Deck.

Create an altar

Creating an altar is a beautiful way to honor any sabbat. Let this be an intuitive, creative process and place anything there that feels good to you! Some ideas to spark your creativity are:

• Your Death and Temperance tarot cards

• A Yule log or branch

• Holly or mistletoe

• An evergreen wreath to symbolize the wheel of the year

• Any red, green, or white crystals that you’d like (I love carnelian for red, selenite for white, and moss agate or malachite for green)

• Ash, frankincense, and any other sun herbs you like

• Pine cones

• White and silver candles

• A representation of something in your shadow that you’d like to honor and alchemize this year

Painting

One of my favorite ways to work with my subconscious these days is intuitive painting. Get out your paints, paper, and allow whatever wants to come through you as you focus on the winter solstice and what it means to you. Try not to focus on how it looks— no one needs to see it but you!

After you finish, you could place it on your altar.

Below is an infographic with a visual representation of rituals for Yule

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A post shared by Cassie Uhl (@cassieuhl)

Want to learn more about the different sabbats on the wheel of the year? Click here to learn more about the wheel of the year and download your free wheel of the year printable.

6 Ways to Support Your Goddess Sisters

Our society has a long history of pitting women against each other. Of making us fear each other and compete with each other. Of creating division and separation between us.

But we can choose to end that cycle. It ends with us. It ends with us every time we choose to uplift, love, and hold the women-identifying humans in our lives.

Below are some ways to support the women in your life.

Hold space for them

Holding space isn’t just your regular conversation where we mostly just wait until it’s our turn to talk. There are a few important keys to holding space:

Give your full presence

Give your full presence with deep listening and eye contact. Your friends can tell when you’re not really there with them (and you can tell when your friends aren’t really there, too!). Put your phone to the side and really focus on what they’re saying.

Non-judgment

Offering non-judgment to others starts with doing your own work on not judging yourself. This may be part of your shadow work process—click here for 5 simple steps to help you get started with shadow work.

Asking questions without giving advice

Try not to give unsolicited advice. Asking helpful questions to deepen your friend’s understanding of her own situation is so much more helpful because it allows the answer to truly come from her—not you.

Facilitate their growth

Sometimes we get stuck in fear patterns. Sometimes we want to shrink out of our fullness, our magic, our bigness. When your sister is falling into her fear, wanting to shrink, help facilitate her growth. Help remind her of her magic. Don’t give her your permission to shrink.This is about being honest and constructive. This is about not always telling your friend what she wants to hear. They may not appreciate it at the moment, but they’ll likely appreciate your honesty in the long run.

Support their connection with their intuition

You give your community a beautiful gift when you support their connection with their intuition. Our society loves to make decisions based on logic alone, and looks down on things seen as “impractical.” But by validating your sister’s desire to listen to and make decisions based on intuition, you help shakti rise.

The Goddess Discovery Books are a great tool to use for improving your intuition and are even more fun to work through with a group of Goddesses!

Understand and respect their boundaries

Have a clear, open conversation with your sisters about their boundaries. What is an acceptable way to handle disagreements? What do they need from you to feel safe and supported in your friendship? What do you need from them to feel safe and supported in your friendship?

Strong boundaries can keep your relationships strong. Respecting each other’s boundaries can help set the expectation for strong boundaries in other, more difficult relationships as well.

Celebrate their successes

When they rise, you rise. It’s easy to feel threatened by the expansion of someone close to you but remember: it’s not a competition.The world is an abundant, infinite place and one woman having something you may want doesn’t mean you can’t have it, too. Celebrate their expansion, their growth, their wins.

Create community

Grow together. Meditate together, do moon rituals together, cast spells together, go to talks, or do courses together. Gather together and share wisdom. Gather together and connect with your intuition. Support each other by not allowing each other to stay stagnant.

Start out by implementing one of these tools each month to get used to doing it and add on from there. Before you know it your circle of supportive women will be flourishing!

Healing with Meridian Tracing

Meridian tracing is a form of energy healing that just about anyone can do.

The meridians are energy pathways in the body that traditional Chinese medicine has studied and worked with for centuries. These pathways allow the flow of energy, called Chi in Chinese medicine, through the body.

There are 12 major meridians, and each one works to support and nourish a specific organ system. If the flow of energy in any of your meridians is too strong or too weak, the associated organ system may be disrupted. I’ll be covering eight of them today.

Meridian tracing can be a powerful self-care tool to add to your toolbox. Using it regularly helps keep your Chi flowing freely through your body, releasing blockages and revitalizing you.

Scroll down to look through eight of the 12 main meridians in the body and learn how to trace them to balance your flow of Chi.

How to trace your meridians

To trace your meridians, start by simply moving your open hand (either an inch or two above your body or directly over your body) along the course of each meridian. Visualize the energy flowing freely through the meridian. That’s it!

Take your meridian tracing a step further by tracing them with a favorite crystal. If you’re unsure, clear quartz is always a safe bet. Point crystal necklaces make the perfect wearable tool to practice this self-care technique.

Meridians

Read through the list of meridians below to find one that suits your needs. The eight meridians below are mirrored on the other side of your body. So, for example, a meridian that runs down your left leg also runs down your right leg.

Liver meridian

When this meridian’s energy is imbalanced, you may experience issues with menstruation, blurred vision, jaundice, irritability, or depression.

Heart meridian

Imbalance in the heart meridian can show up as chest pain, shortness of breath, hot flashes, heart palpitations, insomnia, irritability, anxiety, depression, and lack of joy in life.

Spleen meridian

An imbalanced spleen can manifest as diarrhea or constipation, lack of appetite, fatigue, bloating, brain fog, and absentmindedness.

Stomach meridian

When your stomach meridian is imbalanced, you might struggle with feelings of worry and nervousness.

Lung meridian

An imbalanced lung meridian can manifest as infections, upper body inflammation, excessive sweating, issues with your nose and sense of smell, and skin conditions.

Kidney meridian

This meridian rules willpower, determination, and the ability to cope with difficulty— so an imbalance here could manifest as a lack of any of those skills. Physically, an imbalance can manifest as backaches, asthma, and urinary disorders.

Bladder meridian

Emotionally, an imbalance here is associated with suppressed anger and an inability to express your true feelings. Physically, an imbalance is associated with neck and shoulder tightness, headaches, and urinary issues.

Pericardium meridian

When this meridian is imbalanced, you may experience difficulty expressing your feelings. Physically, you might have issues with your heart, chest, or stomach.

The best thing about this self-care tool is that you don’t need any tools to perform it. Meridian tracing is a simple practice that can give you an excuse to pause during a busy day to focus on your body and energy.

If you’re trying this practice with crystals, make note of how you feel after using different gemstones, as they’ll each offer you a different kind of energy.