By Bill Moulton
As I tend to feel that Tourmaline is my “spirit crystal” I have managed to gather a few around me over the years.
There are many different kinds of Tourmaline, covering most of the colors of rainbow, and sometimes a few different colors in the same piece – called bi-color, watermelon, and tri-color tourmaline.
Most Tourmaline is good for transmuting negative energy, except some Tourmaline has much less Piezo and pyro electric capacity. Black Tourmaline has been studied and shown to be less electric in nature, but it still has it. Black Tourmaline, called Schorl, is fairly inexpensive and is fabulous for grounding and connecting with the magical, mysterious unknown. I find Schorl feels very good as a grounding crystal, and it seems to transmute radiation from TV’s and electronics and calm the environment.
Red Tourmaline, called Rubellite, is a joyful crystal, with a pinkish red color. It is a great crystal for connecting with feminine energy.
Other kinds of Tourmaline, such as clear, brown (Dravite), watermelon (green and red in the center), light pink Rubellite, indigo, violet, yellow, and yes the rare azure blue (Indicolite).
In my own limited experience I have found Green Tourmaline to be very healing, connecting with the heart chakra, but also it has a strong connection to the plant kingdom being green. Green is also good for dreaming I find. Black is good for journeying into the unknown, moving into the unconscious realms.
So I would try to touch and feel a number of different colors and sizes and see which feels the best for the intent. The Leonard Crystal store sometimes has some wonderful pieces of Tourmaline and I have always been pleased with how reasonably priced Tourmaline specimens have been here.
As to using the piece in the metaphysical sense, I find I really enjoy beginning and ending a meditation with squeezing a Tourmaline end-to-end with my thumb and index finger, right hand, simultaneously blowing breath out of mouth, with visualizing light flowing out of the right hand, for transmuting and moving negative resonance OUT of my aura (beginning meditation), and then at the end of meditation, squeeze it with the left hand and breathe in with light for bringing in positive resonance INTO my auric field.
The light, breathing in or out, and which hand is used to squeeze the crystal end to end, is what works for me based on own experience, so it may be different for others. I find it works quite well to clear the human energy field of negative energy or a bad mood.
I also find that wearing a Tourmaline is really a good general background negative energy ‘transmuter’. Since we are always out and about getting in and out of fields of tension and stress, the little Tourmaline is an excellent ally for general energy aura protection purposes.
On other fronts, in terms of bridging metaphysics and academic sciences, I find discussion of the well established phenomena associated with vibration and resonance, chaotic attractors, self organizing variety, holography, quantum physics and the concept of negative entropy (syntropy), the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and the history of alchemy and its connection to metaphysics – are all good going interesting things as far as this topic goes!
Crystals meet a lot of the formal definitions of ‘life’ as we have biologically defined it (anti-entropy, reproduce, maintain organized variety, and adapt to grow in new conditions, assimilate raw materials into orderly utilization, etc).
Also crystallography and geometry and thermodynamics all converge to ably describe the fundamental metaphysics of shape, form and symmetry. Connecting the Platonic solids, ideal objects, and the idea of ‘life’ reflecting higher dimensional ‘ideals’ is a very metaphysics sparking topic.
It has been an avid hobby of mine to study this crystal electronics stuff for the last 20 years. Most of the stuff I found reading several different books, like “The Tourmaline Group” by Dietrich.