Spiritual Meaning Of Shungite
Shungite is linked to our Root Chakra, known as the Muladhara Chakra in Sanskrit. This is the energy we associate with entrenching ourselves to Mother Earth, and the core foundation of both physical and spiritual evolution.
The spiritual meaning of Shungite is that of a ‘Neutralizer’. Equally balancing the left and right sides of your body, or ying and yang.
Thus, it’s the stone for those who wish to feel more balance in their masculine and feminine energies, in case one is overcompensating for the other.
In order for one to really awaken to new levels of consciousness and ascend to the higher chakras, there comes a lot of healing work to be done in the earthly realm through our root chakra.
Upon realization that you are not your physical body, and after starting to see yourself as a formless, shapeless soul, let go from limiting beliefs and negative behaviours. Disassociate from the ego, and your journey to self-discover will unfold.
Shungite is an excellent stone to connect with as part of your spiritual practice. I would suggest you experiment first through the following meditation techniques, before wearing Shungite as a necklace as the energy of Shungite may be too heavy for some to handle. This is because of its very dense and magnetically pulling nature.
As a stone that holds a lot of intense energy, resonating at a low vibrational frequency, the best way to work with Shungite is to attune to its energy slowly, as it may be very overwhelming in the beginning.
Most crystals need to be attuned to gradually. This way, you’ll let your energies align and understand the crystal’s individual energy.
Two different but identical pieces of Shungite may yield vastly different experiences depending on their energetic make up and your individual intention.
Properties And History of Shungite
The name of Shungite is explained quickly: it got its name from where it was first discovered. In the village of Shunga, in Russia.
The term “Shungite” can refer both to solid pieces of the carbon-based stone, and to other stones that contain shards or deposits of Shungite minerals.
Shungite is a black stone made mostly of carbon. The same element that forms both graphite and diamonds.
Its high carbon content is what gives it its distinctive light-sucking black color. But unlike graphite (the form of carbon you’re probably most familiar with), it is lustrous. And some high-quality examples even have a kind of silver reflection!
In Russia, Shungite has a long history. Czar Peter the Great, who ruled Russia at the time, was rumored to prefer to drink water infused with Shungite minerals. This led to his frequent travels to the Karelia region in Russia, where Shunga is located.
Shungite’s healing properties have since become famous, and popular among laypeople as well as Czars!
Today, Shungite has also been found and mined in other parts of Russia as well. Near lake Onega and near both volcanic eruption sites, as well as old coal mines.
The high temperatures of these sites seem to contribute to the purity of the Shungite.
It has also been reported in Austria, India, and central Africa, although none of these deposits have been as fruitful as those in Russia.
When it was first discovered, Shungite was also called black ochre. But it turned out that it has no chemical relationship to yellow or red ochre substances.
It is a relatively soft stone, and geologists have found that its origins date back around two billion years.
In its pure form, it naturally contains small quantities of fullerenes. These are hollow carbon structures that contribute to some of shungite’s metaphysical lore.
Because of Shungite’s high carbon levels, some scientists hypothesize, that it may have originated from biological processes that broke down microscopic organisms in ancient oceans.
Its connection to us, as carbon-based life forms, is at the root of its use as a healing stone in both magical and scientific practices.
There is a belief that Shungite may have positive effects on health. That’s also why it is currently of much interest to the scientific community.
Since its scientific naming and categorization in 1879, it has been studied and categorized extensively.
Benefits Of Using Shungite
Shungite has metaphysical properties that make it useful for both healing and EMF protection.
Black is almost always the color of protection in western magic. It is said to cloak the subject of the spell in darkness so that bad luck cannot find them.
The extremely dark color of Shungite makes it the ideal stone for practices surrounding hiding from bad luck.
Because of its electricity-conducting properties, it is also suitable as an amplifier in magic and meditation and in boosting the power of electromagnetic fields. Strangely it has also been reported that it can help boost weak wi-fi signals, too.
If you are working on focusing your mental energy towards a specific goal, Shungite can act as a conductor of your energy. And it can drive it more strongly towards your desired outcome.
It can ground your energy and help keep it focused on your goal so that your energy doesn’t go ‘astray’.
Shungite is able to help you focus on your desires. All while making sure you remain grounded enough to follow through on your actions. It’s those, after all, that will pave the way to your success!
And this stone will also help you understand and find practical solutions to why certain desires you have had, haven’t been able to come about.
The stone is connected to life itself in many ways. And that can give you a deeper insight into your place within it, as well as where you want to go in life.
Yet, beyond just ambitions, Shungite can also help to harmonize you with your surroundings in such a way that you’re never a pushover.
Healing Properties Of Shungite
From Czar Peter onwards, Shungite has been used for health and healing. He was said to drink water infused with Shungite to improve his health. And to this day, people still use it in elixirs and potions.
It is well documented that certain forms of carbon can have beneficial effects. Activated charcoal is the perfect example, as it’s very trendy in health and beauty products right now.
Shungite, having a very similar atomic structure to charcoal (that is, mostly carbon) can have similar benefits on a psychic level to what charcoal has on a physical level. It cleans and cleanses impurities!
You can use it to remove negative people or bad luck from your life. Or on a more practical note, it can help in easing anxiety, insomnia, and even inflammation or acne!
This doesn’t mean that you should go out and buy a piece of Shungite to deal with health problems, though!
It may help with inflammation, but trust me – when you’ve got an infection, antibiotics will help a whole lot more!
Always talk to your doctor about medical concerns, and do not use any type of crystal as a substitute for medical attention.
Shungite has a very calming, steadying energy, which can be beneficial to anyone, in any walk of life.
How Shungite Can Help You
Shungite is extremely beneficial in purification, grounding, healing, and protection.
You can use it for any of these purposes, alone or in combination, depending on your precise needs.
Shungite can also amplify your psychic power in general. Meaning, you can use it in conjunction with other stones or magical objects in order to strengthen them.
Because of its black color, Shungite is said to ‘suck up’ negative energy. And by ‘cloaking’ you, it can also protect you from bad energy finding you.
This is extremely beneficial if you are dealing with negative or toxic people in your life.
For Relationships
Sometimes people just seem like they want to bring you down. Shungite will deflect their negative energy away from you, keeping you safe, and your energy positive.
It’s not necessarily a stone of increased harmony and love. But shungite has a unique ability to “cut the BS” in interpersonal relationships and get right to the sources of any problems.
Just like with Hematite, this may lead to a few initial confrontations. But in the long run, it will massively benefit your overall happiness and success in your personal interactions.
Properties such as these might not be as common as the usual love and peace vibrations you find in other stones. But that actually makes this stone’s energy one of its greatest strengths.
Sometimes you just have to say what you mean and mean what you say, and stick to your principles besides.
What’s great here is, that you won’t find that Shungite necessarily promotes confrontational or aggressive energy. Rather, you will feel more assertive and more self-assured – qualities we could all do with more of sometimes.
If you’ve had your fill of people dismissing your ideas or input as soon as you try and vocalize it, this stone could well give you the self-respect and insistence on the merit of your own plans to see you through!
People will come to admire your straightforward, ‘tell it like it is’ attitude, and recognize that you can work openly and constructively to solve problems, rather than trying to sweep them under the rug.
Because the stone is deflecting or absorbing all that negative energy, it doesn’t rub off on you. You’ll quickly find yourself becoming luckier and more successful in virtually every field of your life that you dedicate mental energy to.
Whether you worry about improving your career, financial status, romantic life, or general happiness. Shungite can help you focus your positive energy towards those goals.
Shungite is also well known for its physical healing properties.
For Healing
While you should, of course, never use it as a replacement for professional medical care, it can be beneficial in improving your general wellness.
It can “suck out” the negative energies that accompany many illnesses. And it can improve your mood and energy levels, which will set you on the road to healing.
This is one of Shungite’s best powers. And more and more people come to understand that a healthy body and a healthy mind often go hand-in-hand.
Because of the wonderful way of looking at things from a positive point of view that Shungite encourages – without it making you wishy-washy and apt to live in a dreamland – it’s very good for helping you to have the mindset your body needs to strengthen and recover from illness and injury.
Better still, working with the energies of this crystal can help you to be more immune to future illnesses – as long as you back it up with a healthy lifestyle of course!
How To Best Use Shungite
As Jewelry
The single best way to use Shungite is to wear it on your person, on a daily basis. It doesn’t matter much how you wear it.
Pendants are always a classic, but earrings, bracelets, brooches, or even rings work just as well.
But you should be very careful with your Shungite if you wear it as a ring – its relative softness makes it somewhat fragile!
The key thing with Shungite is, that it should always be near you.
Shungite jewelry has the ability to ‘clear the air’ by absorbing negative energy. But it doesn’t really work if it’s not in the vicinity of that negative energy to absorb it!
In Your Home
If you want to absorb negative energy in a specific environment, such as a home or office, then the same rule applies.
Place a piece of Shungite in the room, preferably in the place where you feel most conscious of the negative energy.
If you’re in an office, this might be near your door, where you can see all the coworkers that you’re having negative experiences with.
If your house has bad feng shui to it, then place a piece somewhere where the energy feels particularly bad. The places in your home where you just feel tired and grumpy when you stand there for no obvious reason!
Shungite stone is able to smooth out the flow of energy around your house. Because of its ancient connections to life itself, you might well find that everyone in your house tends to be a little more energized and ready to face the challenges life presents when your Shungite is positioned just right.
And of course, as mentioned before, this stone is wonderful for absorbing bad energy and creating a more harmonious place to work and play together.
If you have a wide or growing collection of crystals already on display in your home, then Shungite will fit right in.
As A Crystal Elixir
If you are interested in using Shungite to improve your health, then the best way to use it is to drop a small (thoroughly cleaned!) piece into purified water and drink it.
You can either use cold water or hot water. Just like with tea, hot water will amplify the energy, but may lose some of the nuance.
‘Cold brewed’ shugite elixir takes longer to make (place the shungite and water in the sun for several hours to get the full effect). But it preserves the multifaceted nature of shungite’s power.
A ‘hot brew’ may lead to some hotheadedness, but you will very effectively cut to the core of the issues that are causing problems.
By contrast, a ‘cold brew’ will keep you calm and composed in the face of negativity.
For Meditation
Here’s how to do a Grounding Meditation with Shungite:
- Lie down and place Shungite near your Root Chakra, just under your navel.
- Set the intention that you wish to make for your practice, and be open to receiving healing energy without any predetermined expectations.
- Visualize your intention through all your 5 senses, imagine what area in your life that you need help with and ‘ask’ your Shungite Crystal to send healing to you.
- This may not happen immediately, or during your first practice, but with patience, the crystal will channel its message through you. Be it through thought, visions or feelings.
- Tip: when you open yourself up to a new energy, it is best to allow the crystal to understand where healing needs to be offered naturally. And with an open mind, the crystal will give you what you need in the right moment.
It could be that Shungite first draws lower vibrational energies surrounding your aura, working on your physical body. This can cause you physical discomfort before healing the mental and emotional bodies.
Alternatively, it could start to connect with your emotional or mental body, releasing any mental or emotional blockages. These in turn will release physical discomfort.
Our entire physical body intertwines with our mind and emotions. And once you are able to release old wounds and stagnant energy, only then you will experience a truly pain-free body.
From here on, through progressive self-healing and self-care practice, you will be able to explore deeper realms of your mind. And you will experience the state of oneness or ‘I AM’.
Let Shungite set you free!
The Best Crystals To Use Or Combine With Shungite
The best healing crystal combination for Shungite is with stones that promote harmony.
Because of its intensely ‘clarifying’ power to help you identify and avoid negativity, it can sometimes contribute to confrontational attitudes.
Other people’s negativity will no longer affect you.
And this is a good thing in the long run. But when you first start bringing the power of shungite into your life, you may find yourself burning bridges.
In order to mitigate this, using stones that enhance harmony, calm, and interpersonal relationships will smooth over the rough patches.
Stones that enhance harmony include Pearls, Rubies, and Opals.
So with that in mind, here are the best stones and crystals to combine with shungite:
- Opal: the best stones for maintaining the lines of communication.
- Rubies: have the benefit of giving you increased assurance about your actions, while preventing you from becoming rash or hotheaded.
- Pearls: are the best for overall promoting harmony, as they will improve both your empathy and that of people around you.
If you are using Shungite for protective purposes, pair it with a red stone like Ruby or Garnet. All these stones have fiery energy that will further enhance Shungite’s power.
This combination is foolproof for making sure that no danger can touch you. And for giving you the power to deal with even the roughest situations.
Because of Shungite’s use as an enhancer of power, you can also successfully pair it with virtually any stone in order to amplify its properties.
There is basically no stone that cannot be successfully combined with Shungite. Whether you’re using stones or crystals to go after love, wealth, or success, Shungite can be used in conjunction with them to enhance their effectiveness.
Because of this, Shungite is one of the most useful stones that you can have in your collection! It’s an all-purpose stone that can be used in almost every circumstance.
Shungite can protect you when negative energies surround you. And it can also encourage you to bring forth positivity of your own.
It can help you to appreciate when to make your move and when to hold back and give everything a little more thought.
If you’re someone who finds it hard to say no or an individual who feels the emotions of others as though they were her own, this is a fantastic stone to rely upon.
It can encourage you to find the confidence and courage to stand apart from others and be yourself. Without taking on their energies and allowing it to influence your decisions!
You can enjoy healthier relationships, friendship and family dynamics thanks to this approach.
Of course, the stone won’t fix all your problems for you any more than any other would. But it can certainly help to open doors within yourself that can lead to greater happiness and satisfaction in all areas of life.
Cleansing Shungite
Shungite is an amazing crystal that usually does not need to be cleansed.
Cleansing it will keep it aligned with your chakras and give that powerful grounding effect on your body, mind, and spirit.
It has the amazing ability to harmonize with the energies that surround it, or the energies that it absorbs.
How To Cleanse Shungite
Here are a best methods how to cleanse a Shungite crystal:
- You can cleanse your Shungite crystal every week, or you can choose to do it once a month only.
- Wash it with water and dry it under sunlight or moonlight for at least two hours.
- Cleansing with sage:
- Smudge it with white sage. There are smudging sticks that you can purchase, or you can use loose sage leaves for this cleanse.
- Hold your Shungite crystals very close to the smoke of the sage leaves or place the lit sage stick to where you place your crystals.
- Shungite crystals can also be left to soak in water mixed with sea salt. If sea salt is not available, you can use table salt:
- Fill a glass bowl with water so that the crystals are fully submerged. Let the crystals soak for 24 hours.
- If you want a more thorough cleansing, you can soak your crystals for up to a week.
- After soaking, throw away the saltwater and don’t reuse so as not to recycle the unwanted energies.
- You can also cleanse your Shungite crystals by putting them in crystal singing bowls:
- Bigger pieces of Shungite can be placed close to the bowl. And you can just play the crystal bowl music for several minutes.
- Crystal bowl music has power and will resonate in any space. Every bowl has a different vibration which can effectively cleanse your Shungite.
- The vibrations of the sounds of the crystals will drive out all the negative energies present in the crystal.
- It will also lift the vibrations in the room so that you can be surrounded by good vibrations, too.
Why You Need To Cleanse Shungite
Shungite is an excellent healer that’s very powerful in getting rid of all kinds of negative energies. It can also protect you from the negative vibrations that people, places, and objects emit.
But because Shungite absorbs a lot of negativity, it’s important to still cleanse it, even if it’s a crystal that does not need to be cleansed. When you cleanse it, Shungite will remain a powerful cleansing, purifying, and protective crystal.
Shungite cures, restores, and stimulates. It will remove anything that harms you and your environment and restore everything that is good.
This crystal’s energy simply annihilates energetic blocks. You will only find it disconcerting when you use it after a while of enduring these energy blocks.
But anything that you have been ignoring or refusing to deal with will suddenly be right in front of you. And you will have the confidence to handle them because of this crystal!
My Final Thoughts On The Power Of Shungite
Shungite is an extremely useful and powerful stone to add to your collection.
I’ve just begun to explore Shungite. I can say, though, that its unique high-but-calming energy brought a sense of comfort and happiness from the first time I held it.
I currently keep Shungite pyramids on my desk and my art table, and find it comforting as I work and play.
Everyone can benefit from its ability to enhance the power of other stones! Before even getting into its own unique qualities, Shungite is a wonderful thing to use to heighten other stones’ and crystals’ powers.
Beyond that, Shungite is highly beneficial for its ability to absorb negative energy.
This is something that everyone can benefit from. It will help improve your relationships, as well as your general luck.
It could be that you may feel as if you’re trapped in a toxic relationship, or that people are bringing you down – but you can’t quite put your finger on to why. Then Shungite could be the stone to clear their negativity out of your life!
Once negative energy no longer bogs you down, you’ll be able to search for happiness in your own time and in your own way.
Other people’s attempts to sabotage you will no longer limit you. This is the best thing you can do for yourself!
Shungite’s healing properties are also worth exploring. Especially if you feel that illness contributes to a sense of ennui or vice versa.
Improving your mood and your health simultaneously is one of the great healing properties of Shungite.
Are you going to start incorporating Shungite into your life? Do you think its healing and protective properties will benefit you?
Please like and share this in order to get the word out about this fabulous stone!
Caroline Lucas
Caroline Lucas is an internationally-recognized crystal healer with years of expertise who shares her knowledge on crystalsandjewelry.com.
Her insights into natural healing power make her a valuable resource for those seeking to improve their health, happiness, and spiritual growth.
Caroline's dedication to helping others shines through in every article, making her a trusted voice in the world of crystal healing.