Clearing & Grounding Bracelet

One of these lets things in. One keeps things out. The third holds you still while they do it.

Clear quartz is the one that opens. In Chinese practice 白水晶 is the stone kept for clearing: a clear head, a clean start, the slate wiped. It is what people put on at the beginning of something rather than in the middle of it. A new job. The first week of a new month. The morning after an argument that went nowhere. The point where you want to stop carrying last week into this one. What it is for is the reset.

The black beads are obsidian, and obsidian is the one that closes. 黑曜石 is worn to stop carrying what was never yours to begin with. Not your argument. Not a colleague's bad mood. Not the thing somebody said in the afternoon that you are still answering in your head at eleven at night. The tradition treats it as the stone that takes a thing and does not hand it back, which makes it the stone for the end of a day rather than the start of one.

For anyone who brings other people's problems home. Nurses, teachers, anyone in care or support work, anyone managing a team, anyone who spends the evening still arguing with someone from the afternoon. It is also the straightforward one to give a man, because the only colours on it are clear, black and brushed silver and there is no guessing at taste involved. If you are buying it for the start of something, a new job or a new year, that is the traditional moment for the clear half of it. Four wrist sizes are listed with the measurements on them, so put a tape round the wrist before you order rather than guessing, because elastic stretched to fit is elastic that fails early.