CRYSTAL HEALING AND GOING TO THE GYM

Reading the title of this post you may well think that you’re entitled to raise an eyebrow. Oh yeah, how could crystal healing have any connection with going to the gym, unless of course you’re the kind of person who might say, well aren’t they’re both the kind of thing… that only arse-holes and idiots are into!

Well I’m discounting the fact that you might be someone like that. Given over to rudery however true it may be! However, much as the initial question might rankle, accept my assurance that there’s a real and genuine connection between these two seemingly disparate activities. If there wasn’t I wouldn’t be sitting here at a table in the Bath Reference Library drinking hot Heinz tomato soup out of a plastic cup and sharing my thoughts.

Having said this let me immediately qualify what you are about to read by pointing out that there’s a real difference between creative writing and telling plain porkies. The first is what banking executives do, the second falls more into the province of politicians. The connection between crystal healing and going to the gym is neither. It’s more if you will a matter of considered opinion!

First though a word about gyms. Going to the gym, like going to watch football, is a displacement activity. An excuse for not doing something far more worthwhile and certainly a whole lot less expensive. In recent years an ever increasing number of people have been taking themselves to a gym for what may best be described as a workout or training session. The question is why? Whether such places are large or small you always see the same kind of people there. For example, the muscle-bound Michelin-men off on one side pumping heavy iron and the trainers and sports coaches employed to give affable advice. The friendly disposition by the way is important for keeping customers because gyms are businesses more than anything. There to make money out of your self-deluded belief that being healthy is more important than anything else and exercising and ‘keeping fit’ is the best means to attaining that end.

Is it really? Never mind that much of what you eat is junk food and your drink sugared up to the eyeballs. And never mind too that you could afford to eat much healthier food and wouldn’t get so fat if you weren’t paying serious money to go to a gym in the first place! The gym and football that is. You needed to begin with yourself. With a bit less laziness and a bit more self-control but you didn’t and now you’ve got to pay for it both ways. All that exhaustion on the treadmill or bicycle and having to pay for the pain. Kidding yourself that you’re taking your flabby condition in hand and doing yourself good only it’s all second hand now… making up for the sugar and fat habit you slid into in the first place because you were a sucker for it.

Gyms are places for people who make up excuses. Along with the muscle-men and sports trainers their clientele includes quite a few ‘women of age’ who still feel a need to look good. Still want to look presentable. Then there are the thirties singles, (still!) and edgy with it, or forties plus divorcees, all lonely and looking for a friendly face or a sympathetic ear, men who’ll listen , joke, joke, but underneath it all just hoping to meet  ‘a really nice man’. Forget it ladies. Really nice men don’t go to gyms. Most have their own psychological agenda wrapped up one way or another with insecurity. Anyway most are already spoken for or angling for a shag on the side. Nothing else. Most don’t have the money or inclination for wining and dining and most can’t even talk about Delia let alone Dostoyevsky! WHO? Sorry I meant Debussy.

Then of course there are the main players, lads between 17-24, mostly students and from the lower middle class. The great majority work out hoping to build muscle. Fitness is a secondary thing. They’re young. Feel an inner need to look good, feel tough, like in their untutored juvenile minds they think it’s what young women want! Sorry lads, it’s only the over 70s who might give you the eye if that’s what you’re after. Most are okay but many can be trouble. After all they’re there because in some way they feel a need to prove themselves and rationalise such goals by increasingly straining their bodies and physically exhausting themselves in the process. They think that the effort and fractional increase in muscle makes them real men though it doesn’t of course and plays no part in increasing testosterone levels. That’s more a product of genetics and diet. No, for the hordes of young men who go to gyms it’s a matter of ego and the ego they bring to the task is more often fragile than not.

The chat that passes between them is unvarying. Tales of alcohol indulgence first, closely followed by bragging about personal involvement in some gratuitous street violence, all of which is closely followed by digressions on young women of their acquaintance that are invariably obscene and often staggeringly ignorant of the most basic knowledge of physiology. Need it be said that they are rarely seen to shower in changing rooms or apply soap in any way, preferring instead to make use of scented sprays. Horrifyingly enough, my wife tells me, it’s the same for young women, most by the way never changing out of the clothes they exercised in!

If the young men are sometimes aggravational the muscle-men are invariably courteous and affable. A rude or unkind word let alone any physical show of displeasure is entirely beneath them. They look upon such things with horror. In acquiring muscle they have visibly elevated themselves into a fraternity. A recognizable club of attainers. As physical gods they are far above the commonality of ordinary mortals, the ‘skinnies’. They are the cool, calm, smiling hard men who give advice on occasion and sometimes help… who have their own small surrounding circle of youths or, as they seem to me, acolytes. The muscle-men never seem to seriously ‘work out’. One or two exercises perhaps, with heavy weights, no more, and each accompanied with considerable noise! They do not need a harsh routine like others. They’ve done it all and are merely there to be seen!

Finally a fair proportion of the clientele attending the larger often University based Gyms are athletes who use the various facilities to enhance their performance. Such Gyms inculcate a ‘team’ ethos and the athletes attached to such Gyms regard themselves as ‘team members’. They often have academically qualified personal fitness trainers employed by the University and wear ‘team’ garments bearing the University name or logo and often talk ‘team talk’. More often than not they are studying there for some kind of sports degree and are part of the established identity of the place, a University with a reputation for ‘sport’. Like the muscle-men (who by the way wouldn’t be seen dead wearing University logo garments and are rarely students themselves but more often townies) these sporting types are affable but communicate mainly with the sporty circle around them not the wider clientele.

The interests of a gym’s clientele, no matter whom, whether it’s those seeking sporting success, personal fitness, whatever that may mean, those seeking youthfulness again or better appearance, or engaging in what they regard as a worthwhile social activity with friends, even those who believe they may be healthier for the experience… whatever their reasons or rationalization for committing themselves to such often exhausting physical effort… all this, like sport itself, is delusional, a displacement activity for other things.

In ancient society the majority of those who engaged in sporting activity did so as a challenge, a human challenge of physical prowess. In the last century however, sport has become something else. Its reach is now global, instant and intensely financial. Sport is big business. It has become important to a majority of people who live on the planet and an undoubted component of their emotional lives. The rise of commercialization has seen a concomitant rise in a universal desire to feel healthy, one now translated into a desire to be ‘fit’ and keep oneself so. Physically fit! The commercial rise of the Gym has in turn fed this desire and turned it into a need. Even so this whole circular process with sport at its center is entirely delusional . Human health and well-being doesn’t need gyms. It doesn’t need people to physically challenge and exhaust themselves when such ends could be better achieved in far easier, less costly ways.

The commercial rationality for more and more gyms has little to do with health and physical well-being. It’s commercial rationality. Just that! Human well-being is far better achieved by control of diet and daily exercise such as walking. By self-discipline in consumption in general. Instead we have sport and we have the gym. The money that people, mainly men, pay to watch professional football, and the money that people, mainly young men, pay to attend a gym are part of the same self-indulgent lazy delusion. Wanting to be part of a tribe. Seeking out and performing a ritual.

But watch out. Rituals come in various guises.

While you’ve been reading this post the question I asked at the beginning nonetheless remains in your mind. Crystal healing and going to the Gym… so where’s the connection? Let me answer it this way. Have you noticed that whenever you go to a gym the place is more often than not full of tension. Tension seems to thrive in the place. It’s palpable. All that stress, all that sublimated emotion. All the challenge and physical effort. If keeping fit is supposed to promote well-being it certainly doesn’t help you relax. Gyms are just about the most un-relaxed places I know, full of the most un-relaxed people. The whole atmosphere of the place is tense. Everyone struggling to do better, to achieve some kind of goal for some barely defined purpose. Struggle and exhaustion, while questionable as a path to personal physical well-being, are certainly no pathway to personal relaxation. More likely a slippery slope to some kind of breakdown.

Personal relaxation and spiritual ease, mental and therefore physical well-being, crystal healing adepts would argue, are more a product of spiritual energy. That is healing energy and the healing energy of crystals. Forces that bind you to the earth, that promote strength and vitality, imbue confidence and help you focus your mind. Teach you to breathe when you exercise.

One such mineral that does all of this is Kakortokite, a rare white, red and black flecked opaque stone from Greenland. It helps you to recognise where you’re at. Where you are and what you need to be. In other words gives you focus and promotes concentration. It’s recognised as being useful for energy depletion physically re-energizing and re-oxygenating the body and the blood. In crystal healing terms it unites the earth, heart, base and crown chakras. Acting as a channel for what is thought to be the universal life force. In other words, this stone alone provides the precise combination of physical strength and spiritual healing that you’re not likely to find at a gym.

The Gym won’t help you with your personal problems. It will only exacerbate them! It’s a place for physical tension, for physical energy to run riot and I may ask the many of you who go to the gym, is this not the case? Surely you can feel it. However relaxing the ambience of a gym might be made, its reason for being, its purpose is physical, not spiritual. True, in Ancient Greece there were those who associated physical attainment with spirituality. In modern times the Nazis of course did the same. However the Nazis were never what you might call relaxed in any way. I mean, did you ever see Nazis laugh or smile? Only when they were murdering someone maybe. NO, ALL THIS FITNESS AS A BASIS FOR PERSONAL WELL-BEING DOES NOT MAKE PEOPLE RELAXED. IT WINDS UP THEIR TENSIONS AND MAKES THEM AGGRESSIVE.

In any case there are crystals that promote all the better things associated with tension such as a self-awareness of it and an ability to suppress its worst side and promote its better qualities. Bixbite is such a mineral. It’s bright red in colour and rare, but it’s also creative and powerful. It helps suppress the worst aspects of egotism so often found in gyms, promoting courage and passion instead. By stimulating the base and heart chakras it promotes self-healing and inculcates compassion for others. And through such humanizing spiritual strengths it promotes personal vitality and stamina.

Ask yourself, does a physically demanding and challenging session at the gym with a load of hyped up teenagers and people with axes to grind help promote your spirituality, raise your vitality and feeling of well-being or does it leave you feeling drained? Underneath it all, tense?

Personal ease is a far better basis for personal well-being. It is therefore spiritual energy and its healing character that forms a more mature, more solid basis for personal strength AND THERE LIES THE CRYSTAL CONNECTION I’M TALKING ABOUT. In this connection its healing energy is calming, soothing, embracing and loving. It is a crystal par excellence for easing personal tension and has the additional effect of reducing ambient tensions within your immediate environment. Handy when you go to the gym!

Finally, a word about Moldovite. A miracle mineral really. Deep bottle green and glassy it is now recognised as a product of a meteor impact whose pieces are referred to as tektites, small deposits of which have been found on the banks of the Vlatava River near Vlatavov a small town 20 miles north-west of Prague in the Czech Republic. It has a strong  association with the Heart, Brow and Crown Chakras and stimulated much interest in medieval times because of its association with The Holy Grail. It was therefore highly prized and  only royalty and nobility were allowed to wear it.

More recently this connection took on an altogether more serious character. Heinrich Himmler, leader of Hitler’s SS was heavily into various forms of the occult and spiritual manifestation even before the time the Nazis took over Germany and would certainly have been aware of the Grail connection, something with which he had considerable interest just as his master had many years before. Equally important would have been his knowledge of it Moldovite’s properties… that it possession eased doubt when people were troubled and promised dramatic change in their lives for the better. In the years leading up to the Second World War, Hitler was experiencing exactly such worries and doubts and was looking for encouraging signs in the views of political leaders in the countries around him which their policy of Appeasement was soon to provide! This explains why Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s Deputy in the SS, otherwise known as the Butcher of Prague and later architect of the Holocaust, spent time along the banks of the Vlatava River north of the city when he became Governor of Czechoslovakia, searching perhaps for something his boss could pass on to the Fuhrer. It’s well known that the murderous little chicken farmer would do anything to please his boss. Who knows, maybe turn a piece into a tiepin or a nice little Moldovite Swastika set in a badge.

To end this post I would finally say this. If you can get hold of some, take a bit of Kakortokite with you next time you go to the gym. If not maybe a small piece of Bixbite. If they’re both unavailable or ultra-expensive try some Purpurite. It’s seriously good for overcoming exhaustion, increasing stamina and making you feel thoroughly rejuvenated. And if you fail to get hold of any of these without remortgaging your house just try some Rose Quartz. It works every time. Helps you feel calm and loving all over. It’s the Liberal Democrats’ favourite crystal. They’ve all got a piece!