This article is based on an interview I did with Ashley Leavy who is teaching Crystals for Tarot Readings for this year’s Tarot Summer School. – Ethony

I was fortunate to have a family life and a mother who really encouraged a lot of spiritual exploration and a lot of religious freedom. She encouraged me to go to a Catholic church, Jewish synagogue, Baha’i temple, and a Buddhist meditation center. I explored a lot of different spiritual paths.

My interest in crystals started when I was a really little girl. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents and my grandpa loved all things in the natural world. He was a chemical engineer but his love of science and nature blended together and he really passed that on to me.

He was an avid mineral collector and we would spend hours in his study looking at different crystals and he would tell me about them. Although he was coming from a scientific point of view there was something that I appreciated about those times we spent talking about crystals. It was something that really stayed with me.

My first introduction to crystal healing was probably when I was in the third grade. My grandpa gave me a great book about crystals and it was the Smithsonian Institute guide to crystals and minerals. It talked about the historical and legendary uses of crystals and minerals. It opened up this whole new way of thinking.

It stuck with me until my teens where I started to explore a lot of earth-based spiritual paths and crystals would come up over and over again. That was exciting for me.

I took a break during my later teenage years and early college years because I had my nose to the grindstone, doing all the things you’re supposed to do and that society tells you should be doing.

While I was going to college I was working part-time and started to need a little extra income so I made jewelry on the side. One day I took the jewelry into a metaphysical store here in Madison, Wisconsin where I thought I could maybe sell some of my jewelry. The owner bought some of my crystal jewelry and gave me a job.

Being in that environment surrounded by stones and people who were also on an alternative, spiritual path reconnected me with that part of myself and it was a very exciting time of deep exploration and became a huge turning point in my life.

I was going to college for botany at the time and I already had a degree in horticulture and I didn’t want to do what I was doing anymore. I didn’t want to go to Montesanto making GMOs, I didn’t want to lecture in a big hall about genetics and plants. It was not my soul path, it was not fulfilling.

Working at the metaphysical store rekindled this deep desire to step back onto my soul path and I was fortunate enough that within just a few short years the opportunity to become a business partner with that amazing woman who had offered me a part-time job came up. I dropped out of school and took the plunge to become a business owner in the metaphysical store and explored my passions and from there.

Even though I was working tons to grow the shop, I started teaching because it was something I loved and came naturally to me. I started doing small workshops out of our store, and then I started traveling to teach, created online classes, began to teach internationally, and here we are today.

My business partner retired back in 2015 so I’ve been the sole shop owner since then.

It was a lot of luck and the right place at the right time. I followed the little bread crumbs that spirit leaves for you when you aren’t sure why things are happening the way they are, but, if you trust your intuition and listen to your heart, you end up in the right place somehow.

It was definitely not like anything I had ever done before. I had been feeling for a while that I really wanted to become a business partner at the store. I knew it was something I’d be good at and was passionate about. Even though I was just a part-time employee, I treated that place like it was my own, I gave everything my best effort. I loved the way I felt while I was there. Even though it was a retail environment, it was much more than that – it was a hub of activity for the spiritual community.

But, I was young and poor. I didn’t have any means for making that happen in my life. I knew that my then boss was looking for a business partner but I didn’t know how I would make it happen. I thought it was something out of reach, and even though it was something I wanted so badly in my heart, I stuffed it down.

About a month after she had started looking for a business partner, in steps this other young woman who was not much older than I was and was just as broke as me. She started doing a business partnership on a trial basis, and I was kicking myself for not stepping up. Why did I not go for this? I was crushed. I thought, how did I let this happen? This is something that I wanted so bad, and everything was pointing me to it. Because I was scared and couldn’t dream big enough, I just didn’t go for it.

Fortunately for me (not so much for other people involved), that trial partnership didn’t work out. They decided after a few months to part ways. They weren’t a good fit.

Business partnerships are not easy. Mine was one of the most intense relationships in my life but I’m so grateful for it. So when the other person wasn’t working out, I felt like I had been given a second chance. It felt like the first round was the universe testing me, saying “okay how serious are you?” But also knowing I wasn’t going to take the leap without a kick in the ass. It gave me a preview of what it would be like if I didn’t go for it and how I would feel.

Luckily, I got that second chance, and was able to then speak up to Diane, the owner, and say I don’t know how I am going to make this work, I have no idea, but all I know is that I wanna do this. I was really fortunate because Diane said “I wanted to ask you so bad, so many times, you’d be so perfect for this, but I know you’re in school and I didn’t want to take away from that.”

I have to say, she is one of the most uniquely, strangely generous humans I have ever met in my life, and she let me pay for a good big chunk of that store with hard work and elbow grease. She also personally loaned me the money I would need to buy the business from her. How weird is that? I was so young and so broke and had no assets so couldn’t get a traditional business loan. She also gave me enough of a raise that I could pay a business loan payment every month. She basically bought the business from herself!

But, for her, this store had been a labor of love and a shining light in the community. She wanted to make sure that when she was ready to retire, it was going to live on. She wanted someone who would take over and love and care for it. It wasn’t just a business to her.

It was the freedom of owning my own business that allowed me to really dig into teaching the way that I wanted. I was able to incorporate those two things together. Before I knew it, the teaching part became so big and so successful, that actually I don’t work often at the store anymore.

I go there sometimes, and I have a manager who takes care of everything. We work on a lot of strategies together and enjoy coming up with things we can do for our customers. I feel so blessed that I did listen because thinking back to that time, I just had no idea what was truly possible in my life. It was just following my intuition that led me to this place where I feel so fulfilled and so happy with what I get to do. I feel very blessed.

I feel like this kind of thing is possible for anyone. It just takes a little bit of that leap of trust. It can be scary, intimidating and overwhelming but we have to have a certain amount of trust in the exchange with the universe. You need a little logic and reason mixed in there because we can’t just blindly do everything our intuition says all the time (because sometimes it’s not our intuition).

Everyone in my life was trying to talk me out of it. I was so close to finishing up my other degree and they said why are you making this complete pivot? What is wrong with you? I had the family pressure to have the well-paying job and the big house and the white picket fence. I had the societal pressure of what we’re supposed to do and what life should be.

No one tells you as a child that when you grow up you can be a crystal healer or a tarot card reader. Your options are like a firefighter, ballerina, president, astronaut. No one says these other things and I think that more of us are opening up to the idea that other paths are possible. Those paths aren’t as well-trodden or clear and sometimes we have to make our way through the brush a little bit but ultimately the journey is so much more exciting.

But since then I’ve kind of viewed it like this – we only have so much data, and even though we want to make decisions logically and rationally, we only have so much of the facts or the picture, and our intuition is the thing that fills in all the gaps in our knowledge. If we can trust our intuition to work along with logic and reason, then ultimately we always make the best decisions for ourselves. That is probably one of the big, big, big, life lessons that came from that whole situation and just kind of never looked back.

One of the reasons why I’m so drawn to Tarot is because it’s a physical tool, a concrete thing that you can see that tells a story and helps bring what you already know in your intuitive mind to the surface. Then you can see it’s tangible and you can feel safe and secure because it’s right there in front of you.

So, I was on this big path of personal exploration. And after reading the first crystal book that I ever bought (used, from a library sale) – Melody’s “Love Is in the Earth: A Kaleidoscope of Crystals”. It is still one of the most ubiquitous crystal reference guides that exist even today. I read it cover to cover and had more questions than when I started, which was exciting for me.

Then there was an opportunity to take a really in-depth crystal healing training.  Crystals are everywhere right now and it feels like it’s always been that way, but it wasn’t. In 2007 it was a very weird, niche, subculture of metaphysical stuff.

The training caught my attention because the teacher had studied with Melody and taught Melody’s methodology of crystal healing. I had no desire to be a crystal healer, I had no desire to do any of that. I thought I’d continue on with my Botany degree and finish things up and get my career going. I just wanted to do it for my own personal experience and development.

I took the training and had such profound emotional and spiritual transformations happen that I knew that I had to be doing this. I have to share it with other people. Other people have to experience this and see what this is like.

I started just learning everything I could about crystals at that point, taking every class and workshop that was in person that was within a 4-5 hour drive from my house. I took every online class that I could. It was slim pickings in 2007 and there were some really bad ones (as well as the good ones). I learned everything I could. I was a sponge.

After I felt like I had started to learn a lot, I wanted to keep practicing and a lot of the in-person workshops that I was taking were so great because you got to do some hands-on work with someone else in the class. I was really craving more of that. So I started to open up free sessions for people in the shop, so I would do 30-60 minute sessions with people and I got pretty good at it. I felt like people were having really great experiences so I started offering paid sessions, and then I found at the end of the sessions I was spending a good deal of time sharing knowledge about crystals and teaching people what they could do on their own.

My goal wasn’t to have a practice where people would come back and see me over and over, I really wanted to empower them to work with crystals on their own and that was exciting for me.

Eventually, that got me a few invitations to come speak at women’s spirituality groups, wellness centers and events. I started teaching and that led to more invitations to start teaching. Then I got an invitation from a school that was looking for a facilitator to teach a crystal healing certification program.

I had been developing a core curriculum that I was teaching, I say online, but it was correspondence through email (this is how long ago this was). I adapted that to be a really in-depth training program and it took a year to complete. I had a great group of people in my first round and I did that three times.

Then, in 2010 I took my classes online and then started teaching that crystal healing certification program online. It really all started from those sessions and realizing doing the things that I love was empowering other people to do this work. Whether they wanted to be a crystal healer or because they were like how I was in my first workshop and just wanted to do this for themselves or their friends, families and loved ones. It was really exciting and a big turning point.

When I’m doing any sort of intuitive work, even after all these years, and I’m losing focus or answers aren’t coming, I use crystals as a point of focus. They help when I have a hard time discerning what’s intuition and what’s just mind chatter.

Crystals really help to clear excess energies, psychic debris, and extra things clouding up our field or our mind. They help get me grounded and centred and in my body so I can really focus on what I am doing without external distractions, without that mind chatter. Then I can get to a place of clarity, where the messages come through a lot easier.

If I sit down to do a reading without doing a little grounding and centering, some space clearing, I might as well just not do it. It just doesn’t work out for me. Having crystals in my sacred space also holds space, energy and creates a container to do any of this intuitive work.

Whether it’s while I’m creating things I want to share with people that is coming through as a download, or sitting down to do a reading for myself or someone else. I just like having them in my environment to hold space, they’re like these little guardians of my sacred space.

I also like to incorporate crystals into my tarot readings. A lot of people use a clarifier card at the end of a reading, I use a clarifier crystal. For me that is an extra way to cement in the energies and it gives you this tangible thing that you continue to work with even after that reading, to anchor that energy into your body, yourself and into your soul, so you can stay connected with those messages that came through.

Crystals for Tarot Readings is Now Available

Discover how to incorporate crystal energy into your work with the Tarot to gain the clarity and wisdom you need to go even deeper with your readings. Crystals are natural amplifiers of energy and can help you awaken your intuition and gain new insight into your Tarot reading practice. This blending of modalities will also help you stand out from other readers and offer something truly special and unique to friends, family, and clients who come to you for guidance.

Join Ashley Leavy, the best selling author & award-winning crystal healing instructor from Love & Light School of Crystal Therapy in her Tarot Summer School course, Crystals for Tarot Readings.