Gemstones and Healing: Rhodonite

Copyright 2010 Eileen Nauman
All Rights Reserved

CATALOGING THE GEMS

I evaluate a gemstone in a number of ways. First, it falls into one of these categories: Heart Stone, Grounding Stone, Guard Dog Stone, High Energy Stone, Trauma Stone, Mental Stone, Stress Tone, Luck Stone, Psychic Stone, Money Stone, Arthritis Stone and Master Healer Stone. I created this system over the years because each stone has unique skills. Some, like the Master Stones, are diverse, multi-skilled and affect more than one chakra in our aura. With this blog, we’re going to look at Rhodonite. It is a “Stress” stone, “Heart” stone and a “Trauma” stone.

STRESS STONE

There are some gemstones that can work with us to ABSORB, TRANSMUTE or REFLECT what is going on in our environment that we recognize as ‘stress.’ Stress is determined by the individual. What is stressful for one may not be seen as stress by another person. These gemstones work to STOP the stress from reaching us. They might be small, but they are mighty. And while it would be prudent to remove yourself from the stressful situation, if you have to remain in it, wearing such a gemstone can be helpful. Rhodonite absorbs the energy. Over time, as it accumulates more and more, it will change color and become muted or dull looking. If this happens, put it in a salt water bath.

TRAUMA STONE

Every person encounters trauma in their life. It’s just a question of when and what shape it takes form to shake us up. Trauma is especially harmful to our Adrenal glands. When a sudden accident, an assault, a near loss of life, a war torn situation, or any other major tragedy, our cortisol levels shoot sky high. The only problem is if the trauma is ongoing (as in rape and incest, as examples), cortisol levels get “stuck” and there is a cascade of events that take place after that. No gemstone I know can lower a cortisol level. What you need to do if you have been in a life-changing trauma, is seek out a Functional Medicine physician. Their website is: http://www.functionalmedicine.org/findfmphysician/index.asp. Get you cortisol levels checked. There are ways to lower it back to normal. Trauma may include PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. You can have a ‘war’ in your dysfunctional family that you had to survive for eighteen years of your life, or you went to another type of ‘war’ in Afghanistan or Iraq, as another example.

Trauma stones can help assist us in dealing with everyday living while living with the ‘hell’ inside ourselves caused by high cortisol levels. The gemstone can equalize the playing field from the standpoint that it aids us in knowing what’s going on inside of us and that we don’t want to harm others outside of us with whatever feelings of anxiety, anger or fear that we’re wrestling with. It can help us make the right choice and not over react with others. And that’s an important step in harnessing this awful ‘storm’ that occurs because of PTSD inside us. Rhodonite works with PAST trauma, not present trauma. It digs up the old, suppressed or repressed woundings.

HEART STONES

This these gems that can help support you with problems of a heart and emotional nature. These gems are utilized in situations such as: Grief, breaking up a relationship, a divorce, loss of a loved one, loss of a pet, moving and leaving your friends or family, getting fired from a job, losing your house to a flood/earthquake, are but a few examples. People who, on a more spiritual level who are wanting to work in their heart chakra should consider a “heart stone” helper. These gemstones can open up an emotionally closed down person (repression/suppression). A heart stone can help them be more sensitive to themselves and to others. It moves narcissistic people toward concern and compassion for others, rather than just focused on their own needs. These heart gemstones help us “emote.” For those who have suppressed or repressed wounds that surround love, being loved, or not loved, also fall under this category. Anything to do with our heart; whether it is learning to love ourselves, love others, loving our enemies, learning the difference between pity, sympathy and compassion, these stone helpers can support you. Rhodonite focuses on heart wound issues surrounding lack of nurturing and lack of love via the parents toward the child.

THE HISTORY OF RHODONITE

The Greeks called it “rhodon,” or rosy. There is also “rhod” which is a Celtic word that means wheel. I would go with the Greeks because they lived a lot earlier than the Celts. Either way, rose or wheel, both fit this beautiful pink stone that has spider-web like black lines through it.

Rhodonite is considered a semiprecious stone. Consisting of manganese metasilicate gives it the pink color is often contrasted with black dendrites inclusions of manganese oxide. The best color is a deep rose to pink. In grades B, C and D, etc., you can find pink-brown, pink-gray, pink-gray-yellow coloration. In some instances it can be orange or completely black. It’s usual color is a deep, pink color with or without the black dendrites lines through it. Rhodonite is triclinic and if broken, breaks unevenly. On the Mohs scale of hardness it is a moderately strong stone at 5.5 to 6.5. Often, you see Rhodonite used in sculptures because of its tough cohesiveness mineral wise.

This gem is found in the USA (Massachusetts and New Jersey), Brazil, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Mexico, Russia and Sweden. Historically, within Russia, Rhodonite was carved into service platters and were given as gifts during the royal czarist weddings.

HISTORY OF RHODONITE

There’s not a whole lot of information about Rhodonite. One is found in 18th century Russia. The legend goes that the people of a village discovered beautiful pink and black Rhodonite. The miners noticed that the eagles of the Ural Mountains would carry huge pieces of rhodonite to their nests. They began to put pieces of Rhodonite in the cradles of their babies. This was done so that they would grow up strong like the mountain eagles. This would also mean having sharp, clear sight, strength and hardiness.

At one time, it was the national stone of Russia. Now, it is the state gem of Massachusetts (where it is found to this day).

Referred to as the ‘singer’s stone,’ it is felt that wearing it improves one’s hearing and sound discrimination sensitivity. And along with this, wearing it will improve one’s hearing if it has deteriorated. The inner ear can also be affected by this stone’s energy as well.

THE ASTROLOGY OF RHODONITE

Saturn rules this gemstone. And like Saturn, we human beings tend to lock away our hurts and wounds for half or all of our life. Our emotions that took a beating (usually in childhood) hang around deep in the recesses of our subconscious, lost to another time and place. Saturn has rulership over anything old or ancient, be it a memory, an experience or both. And Saturn rules over our darkness of wounding. Especially by the parents. Those things that wounded us and we do not let go of, continue to generate toxic energy until it comes into the light of day of our consciousness so that we can work through it once and for all. Rhodonite is about digging up very old, sometimes forgotten hurts and dragging them out of our closet of the subconscious.

ASTROLOGY TRANSITS AND PROGRESSIONS WITH RHODONITE

Any Saturn transit to a person’s natal chart that causes hard aspects (conjunction, square, inconjunct or opposition), can wear this gem. In the realm of heart ache, heart wounds, the inability to love and like one’s self, this is the stone to wear during those times. Depression that settles in with these transits or progressions of Saturn may be pointing to early childhood negative patterns where you were not loved or nurtured enough to grow into a healthy, responsible young adult.

WEST DIRECTION

Rhodonite is a gemstone of the heart and human emotional anatomy. The West direction is the element water, dying and transforming. This is also the position of the Wounded Healer archetype; wounding and then working through the emotional trauma to come out the other side of the gauntlet to turn around and show others how to heal from similar trauma. It is about our EMOTIONS. And it is our emotions where we so often get stuck and refuse to change when we really ought to be. The West is about surrendering over to a higher power, letting go, releasing and having faith in the unknown that you will survive this and get through it. This is the position of “grace” to accept one’s Fate and yet, try to improve upon one’s attitude toward it in a positive and graceful way.

It is our emotions that get us into trouble. We are incarnated into a human form with a certain set of emotions that are shaped by our first eighteen years of life. Those who come from a dysfunctional family background or a war torn country while growing up, have taken on some very deep and serious wounding. Psychologically, this is known as Emotional Deprivation Disorder. Only by getting in touch with these wounds can we open them up and allow the toxicity to drain out of them so we can finally heal up. This direction helps us to focus on just this. It’s a direction of a great deal of emotional pain as we work through that wounding a second time around, but the good news is, this time it will discharge. And then, true healing can begin and you can move on to a higher evolution spiritually. Plus, your compassion and understanding by taking on this wound is profoundly increased. There is a silver lining to this, after all. Rhodonite is a specialist in the realm of low self-esteem, disliking one’s self and never believing in one’s abilities. These are all heart-centered wounds.

MENTAL HEALTH IMPLICATIONS OF RHODONITE

Heartache isn’t a viable medical term, but it fits here. Old grief from the loss of a loved one. Low self-esteem caused by unloving or dysfunctional parents when a child, can all play into his scenario. Depression. Grief. Lack of belief in self. Unable to make decisions for self. The person believes that no one could love them. They are devoid of feeling of love for self and possibly others. They sense they are incapable of loving others. They may question any token of affection by another or doubt their sincerity toward them. o Believe that no one could possibly love them.

Emotional Deprivation Disorder is a syndrome which results from a lack of authentic affirmation and emotional strengthening in a child’s first eighteen years of life. The child has been criticized, abused, neglected, ignored or rejected by parent(s). Because of this, lack of self-esteem, lack of confidence and lack of a certain stage or state of maturity may exist.

WHO SHOULD WEAR RHODONITE?

Anyone who comes from a dysfunctional family where not enough love and nurturing were given to you during your childhood.

SPIRITUAL CONSIDERATIONS

This is an androgynous gemstone, possessing equal skills in the feminine and masculine energy realm in order to help us. Self-hate or dislike of one’s self comes from negative messages in early childhood. It starts as a baby or young child when parents mete out orders, anger, abuse instead of love and nurturance. Very early on, the child receives the message strong and clear that she or he is not loved by the parent(s). The negative message also applies to dislike of one’s body or body shape. This involves bulimia and anorexia. Both are a result of parents negatively making comments about the child or teen’s body.

I need to take a moment here and discuss the heart chakra in relation to COMPASSION. Many people misunderstand this word and its meaning. Compassion is the ability to see where a person came from, their dysfunctional family they had to survive and then to see the resulting wound(s) due to it as to why they act/react the way they do. We don’t have to force ourselves to love this person. Instead, to simply and nonjudgmentally respect that person who has chosen this path to learn something vital and important to their soul in this lifetime. We get tested on this all the time, whether it is a person we must work with at our job, or dealing with a stranger in the grocery line, or if you’re going through a divorce, you understand the anger and even hatred that must be transcended in order to move into a heart chakra, compassionate state regarding the matter.

Compassion is about seeing/perceiving the person as a whole, forgiving them (if a spouse, ex-spouse, parent, sibling) for how they act/react, and DETACHING yourself from any emotional maelstroms’ that your connection to one another used to cause. When you can move into your heart, see this person without stirring up a lot of ugly and unhealthy emotions and simply understand their path (but not necessarily approve of it), and know they’re doing the best they can (because of their dysfunctional past), only then can you love them with this more refined position. It’s far better than being dragged kicking and screaming into sharing their hatred or rage or anger toward you, isn’t it? At least with compassion, you are detached and therefore, NOT CONTRIBUTING to an ongoing unhealthy energy dynamic between the two of you. At least one of you will receive relief from this painful process–you, who moves into your compassionate state within your heart chakra. And this is where Rhodonite excels. It is here to help heal our heart wound within ourselves so we can be more objective, less emotional and not hooked into the other person’s storm of emotional dramas.

Rhodonite is relatively unknown. It’s well known to gem collectors and rock hounds, but not to the public. This is too bad because it’s one of the great work horses of the gem world. The pink is a combination of the white/gold of our Crown Chakra where all life force energy enter our aura and trickles down to our chakras/endocrine centers to ‘feed us.’ The other is the Root chakra, the color red. When you mix white + red = pink. The color pink is often associated with being a rather passive color but in reality, from an energy standpoint, it’s just the opposite. Pink is one of the most assertive colors precisely because Cosmic energy entering our Crown chakra is what feed us spiritually and physically. The Root chakra tethers us into our body and connects us with Mother Earth. These two colors meet half way, which is in our Heart Chakra, which is why the heart is associated with the color pink. Even though the heart is actually moving green energy into our aura, pink is the other color symbolically associated with it.

Ground zero for any pink stone, then, is the heart (compassion) but also understand it directly involves the crown (our Life Force chakra) and the root (grounding fully into our body so we can make headway in a given lifetime and hopefully improve upon our spirit in some small or large way. When either of these chakra’s are impacted via the heart, when love is denied or not given fully, the person is stunted in growth on EVERY level. Why? Because the Crown, our reason for living, is involved. Further, when we get negative, tearing down communication and nonverbal messages from our parent(s), that can destroy our grounding connection with the earth. Consequently, the root is affected and the person tries to escape. When they do this, they distort their perspective of reality. This is where self-hate, self-mutilation, self-dislike, dislike of body shape, face or image, begin to occur. These are huge hurdles to overcome once the wound(s) are thrust upon the innocent child. Pink gemstones, then, have a very special part to play in this process. And each one engages with our chakras and aura a little differently. All are unique.

Rhodonite is pink with black dendrites. In some grades of Rhodonite, there is pink and gray colors only. Or pink and yellow. In the highest quality, there are semi-translucent and a deep, intense rose pink color. Rhodonite’s sphere of skills involves wounds to the heart. The black color, in this case, highlight the inner darkness of the wounds within us. Negative patterns of love withdrawn or never given (think too of adopted children, abandoned children here) is a lifelong wound that one must cope through. Rhodonite pinpoints the inner wounding (our unique darkness we all wrestle with) and then brings the energy to start turning around the negative unloving message to the surface. Then, Rhodonite encourages on an energetic level, to actively and consciously grapple with the wound and work to heal it up. This is Rhodonite’s great gift to all of us.

IN SUMMATION….

When a person is unloved, distortion of self on every level occurs. The worst is the body distortion. The child or teen doesn’t like her lips, her breasts, her butt or whatever. This doesn’t negate the hard work ahead for each person to tackle their lack of love through daily application of breaking that pattern and through constant effort. Rhodonite helps set the bar and agenda for such a person. It’s a work horse, a helping hand, to those who are willing to explore their wounding and do something healthy and positive about it.

Rhodonite is whole-brained and profoundly engages both hemispheres and drives them like a plow horse team toward a healthy goal. If the person is too much in their ‘head’ (as many who are unloved are…), then Rhodonite will activate the right hemisphere. This engages the heart (from a compassion level) and our emotions so that a conversation can finally take place. We can’t hide and live in one hemisphere of our brain. We have two halves for a reason: we’re supposed to use BOTH sides of our brain to help us come into harmony and balance within ourselves. Too many people live in one sphere or the other. Men mainly live in their left brain. Women, who are genetically right brained but live in a patriarchal world, have learned to use both halves of their hemispheres. But when wounded, they too usually retreat into their genetic inheritance: their right hemisphere. Rhodonite doesn’t allow this to happen. It fully triggers BOTH hemispheres and this will only help the person in the long run.

Although usually an opaque gemstone, Rhodonite is quite muscular. Opaque qualities mean there’s a lot of plow horse-like stamina and endurance. The more translucent a gem is, the less power it has. It acts more like a millisecond laser. While translucent gems have a narrow focus, opaque stones are just the opposite. They have a broad ranging and very deep energy well and reserve to draw from. In the long run, it is the opaque gemstones that are the distance runners and the translucent gems are the sprinters of the world. And if someone has a serious heart wound such as self-hatred, then Rhodonite as an opaque stone is exactly what is needed in order to start tackling the wound.

Rhodonite can lift a person who has low self-esteem and slowly but surely, give them a sense of self-confidence. When the Root chakra is deeply rooted into Mom Earth, you end up with a fully confident individual. The less tethered they are, the more they question themselves and prefer to hear what others have to say instead. And when the person has shifted from low to normal self-esteemed, Rhodonite then behaves on another sphere. It is the iron fist in the velvet glove. No one pushes a true Rhodonite person around. They’re so deeply grounded that nothing short of a hurricane is going to blow them off course.

When a person is trying to love themselves instead of listening to the old patterns and yammering of dysfunctional parents, Rhodonite kicks in big time. This stone can funnel a lot of loving energy into the heart of this person who is struggling to work through their wounds from the past and heal them up. This, in itself, fuels a person with confidence. If you like yourself, you’re going to believe in yourself and trust what you know.

Above all, Rhodonite strives to bring a person out of their loveless belief in themselves and raise them to the dais of compassion. This isn’t done in a day, week or year. Instead, it takes a decade or more, but it’s worth the long term gifts.

On the opposite side, those who have healthy self-esteem but find themselves in a situation where they are going head-to-head in a confrontation (usually a divorce situation, but can be an adult child who must take care of their parent). In these dynamics, the person is being asked to rise above their anger or hatred of that person and move into their heart and treat the person with compassion, instead. Not an easy thing to do, but if you find yourself in this teachable moment, then Rhodonite can assist you in a more compassionate stance toward that individual.

HOW TO WEAR RHODONITE

Anyone who desires to move from fear, anger or hatred of an individual into a state of compassion can utilize this stone’s energy and support. Those with low self-esteem who can say that their woundedness comes from unhealthy messages from the parent(s) and their ability to love them, can gain from wearing Rhodonite. Anyone who hates themselves, their body, the way they look can utilize this gemstone. Or, anyone who is currently working on a heart wound.

IMAGES:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodonite
Humboldt County, Nevada Rhodonite rough
All other images: Eileen Nauman