You’ve probably  heard all about how working with crystals can help change your life, but  there’s so much information about how to work with them that it can be confusing when you’re just starting out—or even if you’ve been working with them for a while. Here are five important points for working with crystals.

1. Know how to work with the science of crystals

Crystals work by vibration due to their molecular structure and the way they grow—and you are also a vibrational being. What this means is that crystals aren’t like magical pills that are “for” something and will change your life in an instant — like you hear “rose quartz is for love.” Crystals will support you over time in creating and maintaining  a certain vibration, like optimism, patience, or loving-kindness—but are not like waving a magic wand over your life.

This is also why it helps to work with only a few crystals at a time. You might think that having all the crystals would just “do everything,” but this is like putting on twenty different songs at the same time; you can’t really tune into the one you need.

2. Work with crystals like they’re friends, not servants

Following up from above, you should view working with a crystal like having a friend, not a servant. Don’t get a green aventurine crystal thinking it will fetch you some wealth. Your efforts and intentions are important.

Perhaps keep the crystal in your pocket while you are at work to help you remember to put the extra effort into your projects or to imagine yourself as valuable and worthy of promotion. Touch the rose quartz you’re wearing when you hear the voice of your inner critic starting to be mean to you so you remember to tell it to shut up. You may find yourself picking up certain stones when you want a certain kind of company, the same way you’d invite one friend to a ball game and another to a rave. 

On this same topic, this means that your intention and desires are the most important factor. The crystal is there to support you, and won’t work if you’re doing nothing. You don’t need to know what you’re doing or how you’re going to do it, but you need to have an intention to develop in a certain area of your life.

3. Don’t oversimplify

You’ll often hear things like “Green stones are for wealth, pink stones are for love,” and things like that. While the color of a stone is often associated with its usage, things aren’t necessarily that simple. While you could carry around a generic “love” stone, you’ll get more mileage by drilling down and figuring out what it is you really need. Do you need to feel safe enough to allow yourself to be vulnerable? Perhaps you want a stone of protection, like black tourmaline, or a grounding stone like garnet. Does your anger always drive people away after you meet them? Work with a calming stone like lepidolite. Or maybe you’ve just been too timid to ask people out—maybe you could use a good throat chakra stone like lapis, which might also help you feel regal enough to put yourself out there. See how it works?

4. Trust yourself to know which crystals to work with

Most of the information you’ll find on the internet seems to be rehashed or copied from itself or from often uncredited original information. This can be a good start, but after a while it all starts sounding the same and can leave you totally confused. If you’re very much into crystals, it can’t hurt to get a book by a respected author, like Love is in the Earth, by Melody, or the work of Robert Simmons or Michael Geinger. Regardless of what you read, the most useful source of information is your own intuition. Don’t know what crystal you need? Go to a crystal store and see what you’re attracted to, and what wants to come home with you. Again this harkens back to the point that crystals are there to work with you, not for you, and your intuition will tell you what work you need to be doing and with whom.

5. Start out with one or two crystals

When you walk into a crystal store, it’s tempting to get one of everything to cover your bases—especially if you don’t know exactly what you want. But because crystals work via vibration, carrying around twenty crystals won’t give you 20 things — it’ll likely end up being white noise, and besides that, since your intention matters it’s easier to have a clear focus on that intention when you’re only working with one or a few stones at a time.

Also, if you’re on a budget, know that clear quartz can be “programmed” to do whatever you need it to, so all you need is a good piece of quartz. If you want to work on self-love this month, you can program it to do that. Then, if you want to work on being more intuitive the next month, you can de-program it and reprogram it with that intention. No need to have a separate crystal for everything.