Stone me!

Crystal healer Amanda Mavin thinks so. Sarah Foster finds out more.

WITH fluffy blonde hair and a gentle voice, Amanda Mavin is just the sort you would imagine to be a healer.

She’s strikingly dressed – her bright green coat conceals a sunshine yellow top – and yet beneath this bold exterior lies the temperament of a lamb.

As she admits, she’s not too good at self-publicity. “I’m not very good at promoting myself,” says Amanda.

“I wore this (she points at her bracelet) to help me with this afternoon because I was meeting you. It’s to give me energy.”

It may seem far-fetched, but crystals have been used in a healing capacity since ancient times. Apparently, the Romans wore rubies in their breastplates, believing them to have certain powers, and the idea of crystals as amplifiers of spiritual energies can be traced back to ancient Egyptian, Indian Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine traditions.

The theory is that they can work with the chakras – specific points in the body’s energy flow – to create positive effects. For this reason, people often place crystals around the home to lift their mood or induce a feeling of well-being. Amanda works with individual clients, most often where she lives in Bedlington, Northumberland, to treat a variety of ailments.

“I put specific crystals on the person, depending on what they require or what I sense they require,” she says. “I can actually sense a person’s energy levels going through the chakras and then place the stones on them in appropriate places. Crystal healing lasts about 45 minutes and there’s a client consultation beforehand.

They need to fill in a form covering their history and then, basically, I tell them what I’ll be doing to them or around them.”

The list of conditions Amanda aims to help is extensive, encompassing the physical, such as a sore throat or a bad back, the psychological and the emotional. She always asks for a doctor’s approval before beginning with a client and while she doesn’t promise a cure she claims there will be an improvement.

“I never say I can cure anybody but even with a terminal illness, crystal healing helps people relax,” says Amanda. “What I do is to try to alleviate the symptoms and help them get to the right place. I believe that illness is an imbalance caused by something inside you. I think the mind is a very powerful thing and can cause you a lot of disease.”

It was treating a friend with a lifethreatening condition that prompted Amanda to start her business, called Soul Therapy. She’d done a course with the Crystal Healing Spiritual Venturers Association (CHSVA) and so was qualified to practise but lacked the confidence to put her two years’ training to the test. Her friend felt better for the treatment, which gave Amanda the boost she needed.

“The doctors had basically given up on the disease and said she only had six months, but she had another two-and-a-half years,” she says.

“Let’s say she had a better quality of life than she would have done. She said ‘you should be doing this fulltime’, so I started to heal friends and family and then I started to branch out a bit.”

It’s been two years since Amanda went professional – although she still retains her “day job” as an IT trainer. Now 53, she’s long been interested in complementary treatments, first experiencing them herself in the 1970s. She felt in tune with the philosophy that pills aren’t always the solution and found likeminded individuals in little pockets around the country. Even then she knew that healing was her calling. “I always felt that I could help people on a soul level,” says Amanda. “That sounds a bit airy fairy but it isn’t actually. I’m not against doctors, but I think complementary medicine has its place running alongside them. I think there’s definitely a place for energy healing.”

As well as crystal healing, Amanda does reiki, which similarly works with the body’s chakras to promote good health, but it is crystals which most inspire her. Now, in addition to performing treatments, she makes “prescription jewellery” for her clients. By wearing a necklace or a bracelet tailor-made to help their ailment, the idea is that they can benefit by simply putting it on.

“It’s not just to help with illness or disease – it actually helps with dayto- day existence. It can help you be more creative or make decisions. I do quite a lot of lapis – this is lapis lazuli (again she points to her bracelet) – which is very good if you’re a public speaker. It was a surgeon’s stone in ancient times because of its healing properties. It’s a very strong, powerful stone so you have to wear it with caution. I’ve often made jewellery with it for people like lecturers and management consultants.”

Amanda produces a box containing some of her pieces. There’s chunky onyx – ideal for making you more productive – delicate pearls to help you go with the flow of life, and pretty blue lace agate for easing sore throats. If anyone is testament to the fact that crystals do exert a power, Amanda says it’s surely us in the North-East. “Everybody from coal mining areas is down-to-earth and that’s because the coal is actually a grounding mineral. You know how people feel grounded in the Lake District? It’s possibly because of the rock formations beneath them. A vast area of the Lakes is hematite, likewise Nenthead, near Alston.”

So can crystals exert a negative, as well as a positive influence? Amanda laughs. “A friend of mine has a similar surname to the crystal called ryolite, and he said ‘will you make me a necklace of ryolite?’” I said ‘it’s from igneous rock so it’s not for somebody who has a fiery temper’, which he has, but he wanted it anyway. He came back and said ‘you can have that back. I can’t wear it’. It was actually making him worse.”

Right now the business is still quite small, but Amanda would like to expand. She’d love a place in which to practise – and knows exactly what she wants. “I would love to have a glass building – I can see it,” she says. “People could listen to relaxing music, read books and have therapies and it would just be a lovely, healing space – very calming. It’s not there at the moment, but that’s my dream.”

■ Amanda offers crystal workshops where she explains the properties of her jewellery.amandamavin.co.uk