Hi everyone and welcome! Today I am excited to be conversing yet again with the amazing Nicholas Pearson, who has been immersed in all aspects of the mineral kingdom for more than 20 years.   Disclosure: Some of the links here are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Yay! You may not know this but Nicholas actually began teaching crystal workshops while he was in high school. He later began studying mineral science, and then went on to teach crystal and Reiki classes throughout the United States. Nicholas is the author of The Seven Archetypal Stones, Crystals for Karmic Healing, Crystal Healing for the Heart and Foundations of Reiki Ryoho. Disclosure: Some of the links here are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Yay! You might be familiar with some or even all of those titles. He is one of my very favorite authors who writes on crystals. Excitingly, he is also releasing Stones of the Goddess which will be coming out in February of 2019. It is already available for pre-order on Amazon and will be sold everywhere books are sold. So Nicholas, thank you so much for being here today! Nicholas: Thank you so much for having me on. We always have the most fun when we chat, so I'm really looking forward to today. Ashley: We do. I am really excited about this particular conversation because it seems like more and more this idea of connecting with goddess energy with the divine feminine has been coming up. I am wondering, could you tell people a little bit more about yourself and why the topic of goddess energy is something that you are passionate about right now? Nicholas: I started my spiritual path pretty young and I didn't grow up in a particularly religious or spiritual household. My father was a recovering Catholic, so, that meant I wasn't really raised with anything in particular, and that gave me a lot of freedom. One week my dad and I might go to the library on the weekend and I would pick up a ton of books on science -- whether it was the obvious geology or something maybe a little bit more left-field for me. Then other weeks it would be things like mythology and fairy tales and folklore. That was my first look at nonstandard religion. Although it might not have been what is being practiced today, it gave me a window into the idea that there was more to spirituality and religion than what I had vaguely seen on the horizon among my peers. By the time I was in high school, I really started to explore spiritual paths like paganism and witchcraft and the whole metaphysical area. Although crystals have been my primary way of getting into a lot of different topics of discussion, I really loved the idea that there were so many religious traditions and spiritual paths that honored the divine as both masculine and feminine, sometimes both at the same time, sometimes neither. I really found that strangely comforting. I grew up in a single parent household so it was just me and my dad and I was raised by this tribe of women: my grandmother, my aunts -- all of these strong female figures. Also my stepmother after my father got remarried. This idea of the goddess felt really reassuring to me in a way that God the Father didn't resonate. The idea for this book just started as a cursory glance at stones that were related to different goddesses around the world. When we talk about our planet, we personify it as Mother Earth. This is maybe the most primal and universal experience of the divine feminine. You can go to virtually any ancient culture and you see Mother Earth and a Mother Earth figure and Earth Goddess somewhere in there. It's like when we hold crystals, we are holding part and parcel of the body of the Goddess. It really started as a little aside and kept poking away at the back of my mind until finally, I had to sit down and write it.