Nicholas Pearson: The Witching Stones

**NB if you're using the transcript for the contest clue, you'll have to listen to get it! BUT if you are hearing impaired, please email hello@impactwitch.com and I'll hook you up!***

Megan Hamilton (00:02.106)
I'm Megan Hamilton and this is the Embracing Enchantment Podcast. Today's guest blends science and spirituality with a special focus on crystals. He is a Reiki Shihan, a French horn player and the author of several books including the freshly published Witching Stones. I am so excited to welcome Nicholas Pearson. Hi Nicholas.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (00:27.857)
Hello, thanks for having me on the show.

Megan Hamilton (00:29.934)
I'm really excited that you're here. I've been watching you be a guest on some of the other podcasts that I listen to and friends. So I've been really excited to talk to you today. Did I say Shihan correctly?

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (00:43.339)
You get a gold star, that was perfect.

Megan Hamilton (00:45.764)
I must admit I did look it up ahead of time because I'm used to saying Reiki master, but I really like when we use the original words. So today's this is kind of an exciting episode. Today's episode airs on Samhain and is the official episode kicking off season two of embracing enchantment, which means we are celebrating one year and I I don't even you know, I mean time is we kind of know that time doesn't really exist anyways.

However, a year is shocking to me. So for my listeners, I've been teasing a contest to celebrate this milestone, and you're going to want to pay attention to hear the clue that you'll need to enter and win a tarot reading from me. I will make sure to be obvious what the clue is. And once you know, you can find the link to enter in the show notes. The contest is open to anyone and closes November 5th with the winner being announced November 6th. Good luck to everyone.

And so back to you, Nicholas. Thanks for suffering through that little bit of extra information. I like to start every episode by pulling a tarot card for the collective. And while I'm shuffling, I wonder if you can tell us your origin story. So how did you come to love stones and crystals so much?

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (02:05.774)
You know, I was a stereotype. I picked up rocks everywhere as a child. I probably spent more days than not at the local beaches in Southeast Florida where I grew up, especially during the summertime with my grandparents. But, you know, I bring home seashells and pebbles and other treasures from there, but I also loved rifling through my grandmother's collection of...

antique sterling silver and turquoise jewelry. And it just amazed me that though they were all the same mineral, they were all so different. Each had its own character. And I guess if you put this like rock collecting and gemstone loving habit together, my grandfather gave me a piece of quartz at the age of eight and that in no uncertain terms that changed my life. I was so amazed that mother nature could grow things like this. It was like something right out of a fairy tale or a storybook.

and I wanted more and the rest is history.

Megan Hamilton (03:05.807)
Wow, that is so cool. And I love that you bring that up, especially because this episode is airing on sewing and we know that there's a special connection to our ancestors on this day and around this time in general. And you know what? Before I pull a card, I'm actually going to show you something. I was going to bring this up later. But speaking of ancestral jewelry, I'm wearing two of my grandmother's.

rings and one has actually I can't remember what stone this is this is blue you'll know what it is

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (03:43.176)
could be a sapphire colored colored stones from a image on the screen are not a great way to identify but I had all my stuff

Megan Hamilton (03:45.723)
It's a-

Really? Okay, this is a sapphire. Thank you for reminding me. just sometimes if I put on the spot, I don't remember things well. And then this one is rubies and diamonds. And they're very meaningful to me. But here and you might find this interesting. I'm hoping that you do is a brooch that I inherited. Have you ever seen one of these?

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (04:11.594)
looks like it could be Scottish in origin is that Cairngorm?

Megan Hamilton (04:14.801)
It is called a pebble brooch. So yes, it's like 1860s, 1870s. I believe the center stone is citrine.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (04:26.67)
So more than likely this is citrine from the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland, I would imagine, from the look of the design and everything. And I mean, this material is really sought after today. It's almost impossible to find. Yeah. Yeah, the region has been designated. It's an SSSI, which is a site of special scientific interest. And so collecting there is extremely limited, if available at all. And it's like one of the...

Megan Hamilton (04:38.885)
Really? Well,

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (04:55.158)
One of my niches is I collect British minerals. So, these of course from Cairngorm is high on my list. I have Cairngorm granite. I've got other stuff from nearby, but that's something that one day I'll add to the collection.

Megan Hamilton (04:59.249)
Really?

Megan Hamilton (05:11.001)
If I ever see you in person, I will bring my brooch so you can take a look at it. How's that? That's so cool. I'm so glad that I asked you about that because I didn't know, you you're like, maybe doesn't want somebody to to talk about that. But it is one of my favorite things that I that I have. So thank you for sharing that with me. OK, so I am going to pull a card for the collective.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (05:16.27)
Perfect.

Megan Hamilton (05:39.739)
just to set a tone, just to see what wants to come through. And what do we need to know today?

Megan Hamilton (05:52.39)
Well, we don't hate this one too much. We have the 10 of cups. I will say that one time in my life I was driving home and ran under a rainbow that I know was the rainbow that was probably coming to mind when Pamela Coleman Smith created this card and it was so

It's even it's really hard to explain because I'd never experienced I've seen lots of rainbows. I've been under rainbows before but this was like It felt it felt very very different than than other rainbows I had encountered before and the feeling I got from being underneath that while I was driving through I now associate with this card the ton of cups And I love that that's actually the card that came up today. And what we know about this card is it's a completion, it's an ending, it's a culmination of a bunch of stuff that's come before it, maybe the end of a journey, but it's a time to celebrate, it's a time to enjoy all of the work that you have been doing up until now.

And also it's what sometimes can be thought of as a stage card, which means that there's these two lines happening that make it look like the characters in this card might be on a stage and what we're seeing might be a backdrop. So I invite you to think about what that might mean. Is our vision of perfect happiness true or is it an illusion? And then if that's the case, what might?

happiness, joy, celebration look like for you? Okay, so I have so many questions for you, Nicholas, and

Megan Hamilton (08:02.789)
Let's start here. In the popular podcast, The Telepathy Tapes, have you listened to that podcast? Okay.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (08:07.895)
I've not.

Megan Hamilton (08:12.001)
They share in that podcast that the folks who are able to access telepathy might also have sensitivity to the vibrations from crystals. So these are folks who don't speak using words, but are highly intuitive and sensitive. And in one episode, one of the people knows that there's stones that have entered the house. And they're asking

to be able to see them. And I'm wondering, thinking about, you know, energetics and crystals, can you speak a bit to what we mean when we say vibrations and why we might be interested in them specifically with crystals?

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (08:57.634)
Yeah, so you know, it's one of those things where we use a lot of scientistic language, so words that have meanings in science, but we use them outside of those parameters when we're in the kind of healy-feely and mystical realms. And part of that is because it's very hard to find agreement for subjective experiences, for personal gnosis, for the numinous, the ineffable, which, you know, evades...

good definition in terms. But if we want to use science as a model or as a metaphor for what we're experiencing, I'm all for that just as long as we know what words mean. So, you know, when we talk about a vibration, we're talking about some kind of energy or something that we interpret like an energy. So energy is defined as the capacity to do work. Heat is energy, light is energy, movement is energy. There's...

Megan Hamilton (09:43.832)
huh.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (09:50.691)
potential energy that is stored, there's kinetic energy that's in motion. There's lots of different ways we can kind of map out energy. But if we were to graph what we mean by something in the kind of light and electricity and magnetism spectrum, what we call electromagnetism, which is not just visible light, it's a really, really, really big spectrum. We can graph how energy moves in a little S-shaped curve called a sine wave. And it has

peaks and valleys and its cycles. And those cycles are the vibration, the oscillation of the little photons, little packets of energy that can behave as waves or as particles that move, that have mass. So, you know, vibration is pretty vague. What we might interpret that to be, if we're going to kind of map it out onto the

more scientific meaning, we might be talking about the frequency, which is the number of little squiggles, the number of oscillations we get in a given unit of measurement. We might say it's hertz, which is cycles per second. however many of those little squiggles it makes per second is its frequency, its vibration. And frequency, to use by way of analogy, is kind of like the station on a radio. And in fact, in the old school era, if we go back to that ancient and mystical time,

when radios actually had dials and knobs instead of everything being attached. As you're tuning the dial, what you're literally doing is choosing the station by its oscillation rate, by its vibration or its frequency. That's the number of megahertz, the number of cycles being measured. But there's another knob we got to pay attention to, and it's really important when we talk about subtle energies, and that's the volume knob.

So if we draw an imaginary line through those peaks and valleys of that S-shaped curve and we measure the distance away from the center, that is what we call

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (11:53.604)
I think you're gonna have to edit. I've just lost it, sorry. I've been in the witchy head space for so long. Frequency and amplitude, there we go.

Megan Hamilton (11:56.753)
That's okay.

Megan Hamilton (12:01.605)
There we go. That happens to me all the time.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (12:05.806)
So if you draw this imaginary line and measure the distance away from the center, that is what we call amplitude. And amplitude is the loudness, if you will, of that signal. So those two things together kind of equate to what a lot of people describe as a vibration. But we often focus so much on the frequency part, we forget about the volume part. And the thing about crystals is because of their makeup, a crystal is usually a solid substance.

that has a very specific chemical composition, so it's always the same ingredients, and a symmetrical repeating structure called a crystal lattice. In other words, they are highly organized. They're structured, they're ordered, they are coherent structurally, and that means they're also going to be coherent energetically. They have very precise frequencies, but they also have very strong amplitudes, which kind of cuts through the white noise and makes them very perceptible.

humans on the other hand, you might have noticed we are very incoherent beings. I'm only talking about in terms of electromagnetism, but you know, maybe it carries over to other aspects of our lives. So when this coherent model meets the incoherent model, there's a kind of conversation, a dialogue that takes place on an energetic level where one can entrain or harmonize the other. And it's always the one that is

more organized with the higher amplitude that's going to train the other. So we kind of adapt, we're align ourselves in the fashion of crystals, energetically speaking. And this isn't just rare and precious gems. This is also the humble rocks of the earth that are made out of tiny little crystals that have kind of been smushed together.

sometimes less than tiny crystals that have been smushed together to make every rock, every mineral, everything that we encounter in the geosphere.

Megan Hamilton (14:09.017)
All right, so the crystals presumably would have a louder amplitude and potentially a higher frequency. And that is what energetically, would you say then that humans are adaptable to the different frequencies that come to us? Whereas something like a crystal would be finite.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (14:35.458)
Yeah, so by nature of being biological, we are all over the place. Your liver has a different makeup and a different rhythm than your kidneys and your eyeballs and your hair. And that's on purpose. Like it has to be that way. But also think about how much our subtle energies, colored by our mood and our perception, shifts from place to place, time to time, moment to moment, person to person that you're interacting with. We are constantly responding to what is happening around us.

Now, as far as the type of amplitude and frequency that crystals have, from a physics perspective, frequency is purely a function of mass. And let's demonstrate this musically. You mentioned my musical background, so I use a lot of metaphors here. Go to a harp or a piano and hit the highest key or pluck the highest string. And it's a very, very high frequency, literally.

lots of oscillations per second. And the thing that you'll note about that if you compare it to the lowest note, which has the least number of cycles per second, is that it's a lot shorter, or it might also be thinner. And so it has less mass. So a very teeny tiny crystal has a higher frequency than a larger one. Frequency is nothing more than the station on the radio. It is not a designation of less than or greater than because of being higher or lower. And in fact,

When we measure one of the, we'll say, sets of frequencies that are really well mapped out in human beings, these would be our brain waves. As we have experiences that we might describe as our consciousness expanding or ascending, the frequency is actually decreasing. The alpha state has a lower frequency than the beta state. The theta and delta have lower frequencies than that.

It is this kind of knowing the science is helpful, but also frustrating because I know what people say when they say, I know what they mean when they say high vibration or high frequency, but that is the opposite of what our brains are doing. And we are actually experiencing low frequency brainwaves to achieve these higher states of consciousness. So I find that an interesting model to communicate to people. So think of it mostly just as the station on the radio that you're tuning to, you know,

Megan Hamilton (16:40.411)
Huh.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (16:59.918)
107.1 is not empirically better than 99.8, even though one is a higher frequency than the other, they're just broadcasting different things. So think of those crystals not as high frequency or low frequency, but just broadcasting a specific template energetically, and we will align to it or not depending on what our goals might be.

Megan Hamilton (17:21.185)
I actually find that incredibly validating. Thank you so much for explaining that.

from a scientific background, also just, you know, communicating it through the way that we talk about energetics and the way that we think about vibration. And so, you know, with that, I was noting that a lot of the things that you're into involves vibration, right? So minerals and crystals and stones, as well as reiki, as well as playing your French horn.

there's a degree of vibration, there's a degree of connection to that. Can you speak to that a little bit? mean, or is it just the case of everything has vibration?

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (18:15.214)
I think ultimately it's the latter. Everything is vibration. Anything that appears solid is really mostly empty space. And what little bits of stuff are in that empty space, if we sub-divide small enough, they cease to be solid. They cease to be still. They sometimes cease to be matter altogether. You know, look at electrons, which we like to conceptualize as discrete particles that have mass and contribute to the total makeup of any given atom.

in the universe, but really they exist as clouds of probability rather than discrete bits of matter orbiting some other bits of matter. And that fascinates me.

When I went to school, originally it was to pursue music, other things happened in my life. I went other routes and then didn't complete any degree. But, you know, as I was making that kind of transition into music and I'd already started teaching crystal healing workshops and had already been involved in healing arts for a while at that stage in my life. Everyone was like, oh, it makes so much sense. You're going to apply so much of music to everything else you do because it's all vibration. And I think the only thing it's given me

is really good metaphors. Because really they are such, we'll say metaphorically there are similarities in that we learn about resonance, learn how to sync up, but training my ear to listen if I am sharp or flat or slightly out of sync with time isn't really the same skill set as tuning into a crystal. I think being open and observant is a universal skill, but

But I could learn that in microbiology just as much as I could pursuing musical performance.

Megan Hamilton (19:56.112)
Okay, so how do you tune into a crystal?

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (20:01.006)
Mostly it's learning how to get out of the way. I think that is the secret. It's the same, know, Reiki practice is a practice of surrender. There's not a lot of active doing during a treatment. If you're involved in a lot of active doing, maybe your tradition of Reiki looks a little different to mine. Maybe it looks a little bit different to it in history. That isn't good or bad. It's just the way it is. But I think the most capable and effective practitioners are the ones who just kind of...

check their ego and expectations at the door and let Reiki take over. And it's very similar if we want to tune into the energy of a crystal. Can we be very active and loud mentally? Sure, we can. But if we're doing that, how can we separate perception from our own projections? What is my baggage? My expectation look like here? And is that coloring the experience? And the only way to get good at that is to be really bad at it for a while and to sit there in awkward silence and go,

Well, once I stop projecting my stuff, I don't feel anything. But the truth is there is so much going on in the brain, in the mind, in the body, in the spirit, which are not all synonymous, right? Your brain is not your mind. It is a vehicle for it, but it's not the only vehicle for it. That it's really hard to learn to change what station on the radio we're paying attention to. Of like the...

megabytes or gigabytes worth of information that our brain is processing in any given moment where we're aware consciously of about five to seven bits of information at a time. So all that other stuff is happening in the background, we just don't realize it. And so I think when it comes to tuning into Crystal Energy, it's there, whether or not you perceive it. And it's just about learning to relax and find where that sort of bandwidth is in the whole spectrum.

of what's going on within you and around you simultaneously.

Megan Hamilton (21:59.666)
And would you say that once you find it like a knowing that you've connected, do you use the same?

pathway every time you're exploring a different crystal.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (22:18.966)
I think, you know, our mileage is going to vary. There are some tried and true methods that I come back to repeatedly. I love them. I teach them. But also there are spontaneous moments where, you know, you're taking a hike through the woods and you find a great big boulder and you plop down on top of it. And you're just overwhelmed by that. And other times you're at a really busy trade show and there's, there's too much happening. You know, people.

Megan Hamilton (22:37.755)
Mm-hmm.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (22:44.606)
inches away from your haggling over price and you're just trying to find, you know, a good spot of light under the lamp and you can't really tune everything out all the time and you just have to trust an instinct or buy something because it's pretty and trust that the rest is going to sync up later. I think it's good to have more than one avenue toward that experience of connection and to cycle through them as often as possible.

Megan Hamilton (23:12.303)
Yeah, yeah, I love I love that you talk about the idea of surrender and about sort of, you know, allowing and trying not to project and I've, you know, I think about this a lot. And I wonder if you do as well. I think about this in terms of psychic mediums or people who, you know, channel information. So much of that is

the idea of being able to let go and surrender, which is really hard for people, especially considering, you know, neurodivergence and all kinds of other things. But I also wonder if so I think about this in terms of when we go to somebody for a reading or some kind of even even reiki work, I guess you're still going to have the experience of a human.

being the filament, right? The part. And so sometimes why you might connect with a certain healer and maybe not with another healer is because they're, you know, the sum of their parts of experience of training and all of the different things end up necessarily, I think, and I'm curious about what you think, mingling with their...

know, then interpretation or flow, the way that they express whatever the art is. Would you think that that's true or do you have another opinion about that?

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (24:52.75)
If we are human beings in body, we have a bias. We have a filter, we have an expectation, and try as we might to minimize it, it will never go away. I talk very openly about how when I write, I write from my own bias perspective. Now I do my best to seek contrary evidence, to find what other people are saying. The only way really around it is to have a big enough sample set that we can plot enough points out there and draw a graph that isn't

just our experience. It is important that we have our own experience, however. You, that it's how you relate, it's how you navigate, it's how you orient yourself. It doesn't really matter what the crystal book says. If your lived experience is so different to that of the author, to that of their intended audience, some of that might work for you, but a lot of it might not. So we do need to embrace where the bias is and where it comes from. Behind me are

Megan Hamilton (25:24.198)
You

Megan Hamilton (25:28.146)
You

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (25:51.471)
500 plus, I stopped counting a long time ago, just about crystals, rocks, minerals, earth science, spirituality, just the things related to crystals. The camera goes on and on and on. I can't actually move it far enough to show you however many other books there are, but it is like the most important, the vital, the heartbeat part of my library is right here. And I have not read them all cover to cover, of course, but.

every one of these offers a different kind of perspective. I think some go deeper than others, some definitely are a little bit more transparent in the kind of bias based on someone's lived experience. Others maybe regurgitate a lot of other information, but they're also really good at summarizing other information. And for example, when I want to get to know a new stone, my goal is first and foremost to just sit and experience it. What does it feel like to me?

But that's what does it feel like to me on this particular day when I'm in this mood in this place? If I do this again tomorrow, an hour earlier, four hours later in a different kind of scenery, my experience will be different. So I try to aggregate as much of that data. And then I'm keen to compare to what, you know, all of the people who've gone before me and written these lovely books have to say. And oftentimes I find things I wildly disagree with. And I think that's important. It's really good.

seek contrary evidence. And so what I like to do when faced with this is to take a step back from all of it and go, okay, well, what could be the mechanism that is driving two seemingly different superficial end results? What is the similar process applied to two different people's lives, two different people's psyches, two different people's stories and sets of baggage that, that appears to be different at the end of the process. and that's what we forget.

And I think this kind of comes back to your point, the same mechanism applied to two different systems will look different at the end. But if we understand that mechanism, if we can engage with the process meaningfully and with maybe as little ego-driven manipulation as possible on it, then we can begin to anticipate what that outcome looks like despite our inherent bias, despite

Megan Hamilton (28:07.43)
Right.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (28:16.002)
the differences in our lived experience. And that also means hopefully finding someone who's keen on achieving the same goals and outcomes if we're looking for a reader or a practitioner or anything along those lines. And it's not because we're looking for confirmation bias. I don't want to go to a reader who's going to tell me everything is great and I'm perfect and all this. I want someone who's going to challenge me, but I also need someone who understands me so they can challenge me.

Megan Hamilton (28:41.296)
Yeah, yeah, yes. And I love the idea as well of, know, as you're talking about this and how to approach it, especially from, you know, trying not to let our egos sort of, you know, as my friend Amy says, drive the boat. What I always think about is the idea of like a lightness and a curiosity.

It almost feels like a lightness of energy or even just sort of physicality in order to be able to access what you might call a more objective perspective, but really is just getting curious and maybe letting yourself not be wrong, but understanding that...

you know, your perspective is not the only perspective. And I think that's really hard for humans, especially as we're seeing right now where, you know, folks really want to be right. There's a lot of really back and forth right now. And I wonder, you know, what might happen if we were all able to be a little bit more curious or have more lightness of energy and converse.

instead of needing to be right all the time. Okay, so in your beautiful book, and I'm going to hold it up for folks, The Witching Stones, which is, it's really lovely, Nicholas. It's a beautiful book. You can tell how much you enjoy speaking to this work, and it's so interesting, and I love that you give.

the historic background. So for folks who are unfamiliar with this book, Nicholas speaks to, think it's 14 different stones, is that right? Is 14 the right number?

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (30:42.126)
Approximately. It's complicated. We can talk about that later. are 13 chapters, we'll say. So we'll say there are 13 themes. Some of those themes technically have more than one rock in them, but they fulfill similar roles.

Megan Hamilton (30:45.49)
Chapters, okay, yeah. Okay.

Megan Hamilton (30:56.218)
Right, like the quartz section. Okay, and there's like a history of sort of like the formation of these stones and then how they've been used and then you give different rituals and spells to use with them. it's a really, it covers all the bases, I guess, in terms of where your curiosities might lie. And.

did this book come about? Because I know that you've written other books about, you know, crystal stones, minerals, and what prompted you to write this particular book?

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (31:37.166)
There are a lot of strands woven together to bring it into being. The short answer is that

I really like rocks and I really love storytelling and I wanted a project that allowed me to really tell the deep stories behind rocks. Simultaneously, some of the chapters in here are devoted to things that were really pivotal in my personal journey and also in guiding others. So in 2023, my best friend Ashley Leavy and I put together this wonderful retreat in Southwest England.

kind of like stationed or centered at Chalice Well and Glastonbury, but we went through many sacred sites in the region and one of our goals was to get to know the stones of the landscape. Sure, we had really cool crystals and rare and exotic minerals in there as well, but we were working with things like flint and fossil ammonites and fossil urchins and certain kinds of marbles and serpentines and granites that come from that specific...

region, which is part of why I have this special niche of British rocks in my collection. And I felt like I wasn't done with their stories. I didn't know what that looked like yet, but I just had more that I wanted to tell and I wanted to open it up to more than just, you the handful of people going on this journey with us. The other part of it was I was writing another book and I was really tired of it. I mean,

Megan Hamilton (33:07.154)
Okay.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (33:09.422)
With all of the love in the world, I am so proud of this book. I am very happy that it finally came out. In 2020, I released what has been up until this point, at least my most popular book yet called Crystal Basics. And I had a really big tour planned for that. I was going up and down the East Coast. I was stopping in the Midwest. I was going to the West Coast. And obviously none of that happened in 2020. This book came out in early February. We know what happened right after that.

Megan Hamilton (33:30.086)
Hmm.

Megan Hamilton (33:38.844)
Mm-hmm.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (33:38.933)
So I had a lot of spare time on my hands and I saw that the urgency with which people were focused on things like their material and immaterial safety, security, protection, psychic hygiene, physical hygiene, was all kind of wrapped up in the zeitgeist. And I thought, well, know, more people are asking about crystals for protection than literally ever before in like just about 30 years of doing this work. So I'm going to finally write my protection crystal book, it's time. And

I can very confidently say I was wrong. It was not time. I had stuff that I had to go through to birth that book. It came out this year. This year is 2025. I once kind of famously wrote a book in 27 days. I'm not going to call it a good draft, it was beginning, middle, and an end. I'd never spent five years working on a project. And so there reached a point where it's like I had to dangle a carrot.

Megan Hamilton (34:15.442)
You

Megan Hamilton (34:26.726)
You

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (34:37.42)
at the end of the stick to get me to finish that book, which was having something else I was really excited about queued up next. So I love Crystal's For Psychic Self-Defense, which came out this year, but I just have the kind of brain where if I look at the same thing for too long, I no longer have an interest in doing it. I want to do something else. And I did, you know, kind of start and stop that project enough to publish two other books in the meantime, but once I'd finally gotten

Megan Hamilton (34:46.076)
Right.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (35:06.058)
it under contract, that's when I lost momentum and I needed a good excuse. So The Witching Stones is kind of born out of this, you know, physical journey that I took and my profound love for these kinds of humble stones that are in it, my love of storytelling with rocks. was kind of, I wanted to do something very different to what I was working on. And it was also just like right time, right place. I connected with Judica Illes, who was my editor for this project, to contribute an essay to another book that she stewarded.

called Scott Cunningham, The Path Taken. It's written by Scott's sister, Christine Cunningham Ashworth, and it is wonderful. And there are a few essays in there from people who either knew him or are affected by his legacy. So I was invited to write about his legacy in the world of crystals and crystal literature. I mean, I jumped at the chance. I just had such a fabulous time working with the team at Wiser on this project, tiny though my part of it was, it was like, I think I want to work on this project and it

Megan Hamilton (35:57.97)
Hmm.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (36:05.26)
feels like it ought to be a wiser book because they also have the witching herbs by Harold Roth, which is brilliant. they're distant cousins, but they're not the same book. And so all of these strands get woven together to birth this book.

Megan Hamilton (36:21.936)
So this was like your treat book.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (36:24.81)
Absolutely. I did write it very quickly once I sat down and got to do it despite like the really intensive research involved. It was

Megan Hamilton (36:32.518)
Yeah, I was looking at the, I was looking at the everything that you cite in here and it's pretty extensive. Yeah.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (36:41.548)
That's typical of a lot of my works, but this one, the nuance and what I'm citing and why and how is definitely, I will say, a little bit more rigorous than some of my other works. There's a lot more academic papers and edited volumes and journals and things than I have in most of my other works. I think I've just kind of entered a threshold in how I approach research anyway. I also work in higher education now, so maybe that's...

affecting that who knows but I love learning and I got to learn a whole lot for this book and that was really exciting.

Megan Hamilton (37:22.524)
Yeah, yeah. And it's such a holistic look at each of the different stone sections, at each of the different chapters, and really helps to connect the dots of.

why we might be so interested in an arrowhead or something or, you know, why all of the different whys that we might come up with. it's, it's, and it helps connects the dot, connect the dots. It puts things into historical perspective. And then it also adds, you know, the quote unquote fun stuff of rituals and spells and how to work with, to work with these stones. So,

With that, what's your favorite witching stone to work with?

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (38:08.718)
You know, I think there are two different kinds of answers I could give you, but I'm going to go for the one that speaks most directly to my heart, and it is chapter 13 of the book, Emerald. And I have a really, when I say larger than life, I mean, it's actually larger than life for this varietal of barrel, Emerald in my collection that

pretty much sat on my desk for the entire writing of this project. I rarely write a book. In fact, I don't think I've ever accomplished a book, start to finish in chronological order, you know, start with the introduction and with the conclusion and do all of the numbers, the chapters in numerical order, that never happens. I definitely saved Emerald for the last part of this because it was this kind of torchbearer through the whole process. And so...

Megan Hamilton (39:00.498)
Hmm... Mm-hmm.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (39:03.586)
got this Ethiopian emerald the size of my fist practically which is atypical of emerald. It's not gem quality, it's certainly not going to win any beauty contests but it is unusual to get one this size because of the way they form and I...

I knew from the moment this book began as like a little seed in the back of my mind that it was going to start with Flint and it was going to end with Emerald. I didn't know what other stones were going to be in it, but I knew that was happening. And Emerald became in some ways kind of the higher octave of Flint, but it was definitely my personal ally for so much of making this book come into reality.

Megan Hamilton (39:52.306)
You really know how to incentivize yourself,

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (39:56.803)
Sometimes, yeah. Late gratification. We're gonna owe that up to like this huge Capricorn stellium in my chart.

Megan Hamilton (39:57.649)
I love that.

Megan Hamilton (40:06.384)
Okay, there we go. That helps figure it out. Okay, so then, what's your favorite way to work with your emerald, if you're okay to share that?

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (40:20.206)
Absolutely. So most of my personal practice with crystals is pretty subtle at this point. mean, they're everywhere. My day job is doing earth science with like a world-class mineral collection that I get to curate and catalog. And so I'm like, I'm always around minerals. If I stopped and had a ritual around every time I connected with one, if I had to like stop and cast a circle or something along those lines,

have time to eat or sleep or answer an email or write a book. So I have like formal structured practice that comes out when it's appropriate. But I think a lot of magical folks kind of get to a point in their life where life is the magic. It's not about having to stop and cast a spell or do a ritual or formal meditation. We still do those things, but maybe not with the same frequency and urgency as kind of at the beginning of the journey.

Megan Hamilton (41:04.817)
Mm-hmm.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (41:17.58)
because internalize the magic. so with, you know, emeralds, I think is a really good example of this process because it is deeply alchemical. If we look at some folkloric emeralds, ones that probably didn't actually exist, but certainly they fulfill the archetype, the blueprint of what emerald magic can be like in our lives. We've got the emerald tablet, the tabula smartina, on which are written the instructions for performing the alchemists.

Megan Hamilton (41:17.863)
Okay.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (41:46.829)
Manum Opus, the great work, and it is the transubstantiation of one substance into another. And it's not literally just turning lead into gold, it's alchemizing our lives, our magic, our mind, our heart. We have the Crown of Lucifer, this legendary emerald that fell from the sky, which may have been carved into the emerald tablet, it may have been carved into the Holy Grail, it may have become other things. These myths kind of got...

say friendly with one another and the boundaries between them got more and more transparent over the years and so they've kind of subsumed one another into one greater myth about magic of emerald but you know this this crown of lucifer is is our own coronation it's our sovereignty it's our power it's our ability to step into who we are and so my magic with emerald if i'm stopping and wearing one of my favorite emerald pendants then i might spend a moment with it before i put it on in the morning

not just to ensure that Crystal is materially cleansed and energetically prepared to do the work, but to ensure that I'm in a receptive, but also reciprocal relationship with it, that I'm willing to show up for Emerald just as I expect Emerald to show up for me. And that might look like me just kind of sitting still and holding the stone, or placing around my neck and placing my hands over it if it's a pendant, or if I'm sitting with my big friend here. It's maybe just a tuning to it.

for a moment before I begin my day's work. However, there are other things that we can do with Emerald. And so, you know, we could use it for rituals of love. Hopefully we start with self-love, which I think is the real magic of Emerald. It's loving ourselves so radically, despite the narratives out there that are trying to convince us not to do that, to try to convince us that we are less than, we are not good enough, not successful, thin, wealthy, whatever it is.

that the narrative is when we decide actually I am worth that and the only qualifier I meet to be worthy of that is to be here, full stop. That's a really powerful message from Emerald. So having one by me is a conscious reminder of that. And then of course I can apply that to the ritual elements of my life. I can apply that to my practice in very opaque kinds of ways and make something.

Megan Hamilton (43:59.261)
You

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (44:09.74)
structured, but if we don't have the internal component, the external doesn't matter.

Megan Hamilton (44:14.202)
Mm hmm. Yeah. And that's a really great point about ritual. you know, we try to in the podcast, help folks who are curious about different modalities and different practices, find a way in or a way to approach it. And so the idea and this is true in my life as well is that you

you start with a ritual and it becomes, or a routine, right? The two are kind of, for me, they're very similar and you develop like a sacredness around it and whatever that means to you and you go about doing the ritual and you find your groove with it and you find how it works in your life and then at some point you maybe don't need to do all of the

You could call it pomp and circumstance. You could call it, you know, too much time, whatever the case, because you know what you're trying. For me, it's usually like a state you're trying to enter in order to achieve something. And so in this case, you know, with your emerald, it reminds you of your your fullness of worthiness. And then you can move on with that or like that's a very low level of talking about how you're working with your emerald. But

Eventually, a lot of that extra stuff can fall away, but it's imperative to use it at the beginning because it's a teaching tool to help you learn how to get to whatever place you're trying to get to. And then the getting to that place becomes easier once you've actually practiced it over time, but you can't skip it.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (46:06.807)
So this conversation is actually very near and dear to the subject of a book that I'm writing right now, because I never take a day off. I'm actually writing about the role of ritual in Reiki, both historically and in modern practice. the idea behind it is that we have these practical elements in Reiki. We think of them as practices, but they are also rituals if we allow them to be. A ritual is not a mere routine.

Megan Hamilton (46:22.482)
That's so interesting.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (46:33.966)
it's not just steps you follow, but they become markers in time and space. They give us a sense of emplacement, of putting things in their proper relationship, not just in material space, but in spiritual space and the kind of metaphysical space of myth and narrative and lineage and tradition. And they kind of situate us with the heart and soul of our practice. And...

there is this interesting through line that, you in the beginning, our rituals are rigid and simple and they get more complex over time, but we don't really require the complexity of the ritual when we internalize it. So the goal of whatever our spiritual practice looks like, when we follow a routine, sure, in the beginning, where it's like reading a recipe, I have to...

cream the butter and the sugar together, I have to sift the flour, I have to combine the wet with the dry, I have to follow everything. But after a while, if you bake enough things for enough time, you can eyeball things, or you know ratios by heart and you can sit there and measure it out. And you can also go, you know, this dough looks extra dry today and I'm going to adjust that. And you've gone off script. You're going to do one thing for something else, but it lives within you.

Megan Hamilton (47:52.124)
Mm-hmm.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (47:55.715)
You've internalized that, so now you're coming from a place of embodied ritual. It's not about following a script perfectly every time. It's about being the script. And whether that's in crystal magic or crystal healing or in Reiki practice like I'm currently writing about, the concept is the same. Ritual changes us through embodiment. Of course, we go through the uncomfortable bit of not knowing in the beginning.

Megan Hamilton (48:01.596)
Hmm.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (48:24.14)
And it is this kind of scripted recipe that we follow, but over time, the routine is alchemic in and of itself.

Megan Hamilton (48:35.844)
Well, I love that and I am so excited to read this next book. took Reiki One over the summer with Molly, who I know you are on her podcast, and I've been really enjoying, really enjoying the practice of it. Okay, so to kind of help some things up today, how are you staying?

afloat these days with everything going on? Do you have any go-to rituals in particular and anything that you could share that others who are curious might want to explore? Like what would be a great starting point to develop a ritual with a particular crystal if you if you're just coming at it from don't really know much?

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (49:28.92)
The beginning of the journey is the most exciting part. And I see that as someone who has simultaneously been doing this for more than three decades now, and someone who is a constant beginner, or at least I strive to be, I aim to be. And part of that is through my goal to seek contrary evidence, to look for things that are different to me, and then to be bad at doing it that way until I'm better at doing it that way. So...

When you don't know, it's easy to be overwhelmed. So just pick a simple thing. I have a little practice that I call a crystal contemplation that I love to teach beginners and less than beginners alike. Pick a rock, find some good lighting, get rid of as many distractions as possible and ooh and over that rock. If you put your phone on silent, you can use the light on it. So anywhere you go, because we're all kind of tethered to our devices these days.

Megan Hamilton (50:15.916)
You

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (50:26.092)
you can look at light traveling through the stone, bouncing off the surface. You can kind of rotate around like a spotlight and see what lights up as you go. If you're out in nature, sunlight is wonderful. And if you're indoors, use what you can. And there are a couple parts of this. On the first hand, I want you to be a really good observer. Don't just go, wow, this amethyst and this fluorite are the same color, because they might be, but also they're probably not.

They're not exactly the same shade and no two amethysts are going to be exactly the same shade as one another, especially if they came out of different holes in the ground. So like really look, be really curious, really inquisitive, and don't just stop at the surface level stuff and identify its color and its shape. Look at what's happening in the interior. Start to notice little fissures and planes and wisps and veils and other minerals that might be included. And even if you don't have the terminology to identify what they are, just notice them. And

Megan Hamilton (51:02.01)
Hmm

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (51:23.926)
The more we observe, the more we really connect on that level, the more we engage as many of our senses as are reasonable. You know, some stones, if you tap them, scrape them, if they're not gonna be damaged by your fingernails, they have a kind of resonant ringing quality, so use your ears. If you've got two tumbled stones of similar variety, you can clank them together. And some just kinda jostle around, and some also very resonant. You can use your tactile senses.

Some things that might be attached to matrix could have a scent to them. Don't do that if they're toxic, like please don't have your mercury-bearing minerals. Also, maybe you don't collect mercury-bearing minerals. right, and just don't lick your rocks. That's the one sense we're not going to use. I say that as someone who works in earth science, who knows that every rockhound and geologist in the field licks rocks, but like that's informed consent, they know what they're doing. You don't have that experience or degree or the credential.

Megan Hamilton (52:03.45)
No, not a good idea.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (52:23.438)
Please don't. So use your other four senses. And as we engage in this really sensory way, we're like building an image, a model, a rendering of this stone's essence within us. We can describe it visually and tactically. We can understand its heft, its weight, the way light moves through it. It's not just this is a blob of something that's pink or green or yellow. Like we're really getting to know it. And you don't have to be a geologist to really get to know it.

It's cool, it helps, but it's not the only model for doing it. And then what I invite you to do, the deeper layer of this is, as you do this, observe what changes in you. Part of it is just the power of your attention being on a singular focus. Part of it is also the relationship you're building by internalizing this stone's essence. You're bringing a part of it into you. You don't realize you are, but you are. And then you start to notice, wow, every time I pick up a piece of rose quartz, I feel something similar.

But also today, something was different than yesterday, which was different to the day before, where I noticed that every time I pick up Amethyst and Flint, there's a similar quality there, and they don't seem like they should be similar. I wonder why that is. And like follow those threads. You're gonna start to notice the things that are volatile and change every day, and you're gonna start to notice things that are similar. And here's the secret. The through line, the similar narrative every time you pick up a piece of rose quartz.

Megan Hamilton (53:22.994)
Hmm.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (53:52.771)
that's the rose quartz. The stuff that's different every time you pick up the rose quartz, that's you. That's what you're creating for the relationship because it is a conversation. It's just not happening in words. So if you get into this little crystal contemplation practice and you bring your curiosity and you bring really good observation, then you're going to make space for this kind of backdoor conversation to happen energetically in the subconscious and the super consciousness. And when you start to shift the dial away from

the material body of that selenite you're holding to, what is going on here? From a bigger perspective, you can start to predict how that's gonna happen with the next stone and the next stone and the next stone. And sometimes you'll be wrong and that's good, but it does help you build a good enough sample set that you can really surrender to the magic of the crystals.

Megan Hamilton (54:46.254)
I love that. I love that. And thank you for saying, sometimes you'll be wrong and that's good because we tend to.

believe that things are going to have fixed outcomes and they just almost never do. But the information, the magic is in the relationship and the understanding and the freshness or the new piece of knowledge and especially the relationship you're building with yourself through these other vehicles.

I feel like I could ask you 175 more questions and even more beyond that, I energetically, I am very appreciative of your time today, Nicholas, and highly recommend we're going to make sure that you can easily find where you can grab this beautiful book, The Witching Stones by Nicholas Pearson in the show notes. And thank you, Nicholas, so much for your time today and for your energy and enthusiasm and

sharing all this incredible knowledge.

Nicholas Pearson (he/him) (55:52.694)
It's my sincere pleasure, thank you so much for having me on.

Megan Hamilton (55:55.527)
Yay. All right. So folks, you can find all the information and takeaways from today's episode in the show notes or at embracing enchantment.com subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts. Please leave a review or a voice note. I'm really stumbling over my words here and don't forget to enter the contest. Find out more about Nicholas and where to follow him in the show notes or at embracing enchantment.com. Make sure you're subscribed because we have some exciting episodes coming up about spells for success.

and so much more until then, here's to building an enchanted life.