Show notes
Join Adam Barralet, Kyle Perez , Ashley Leavy and Nicholas Pearson in Episode #15 of the Crystal Confab Podcast as they do a deep dive into Snowflake Obsidian meaning, including:
Snowflake Obsidian for balance
Harnessing winter season energies with Snowflake Obsidian
Snowflake Obsidian for working through grief and personal lows
The interplay of stillness and movement within Snowflake Obsidian
Tune in now for a deeper look at Snowflake Obsidian meaning!
From energetic protection to past life healing, Obsidian is the crystal of transformation. When used with the right intentions, Obsidian acts as a guardian, truth-seeker and mirror to the soul, offering its ancient wisdom to guide you toward deep inner healing. This is why I've created my Unlocking Obsidians Course - to help you uncover and harness the raw, untamed power of Obsidian for empowerment, clarity, and a stronger connection to your authentic self.
In this immersive course, you’ll discover:
Obsidian’s Origins & Formation – What makes this natural glass so unique?
The Many Types of Obsidian – Black, Rainbow, Mahogany, and beyond—each with its own distinct energy.
Practical Techniques – Learn how to use Obsidian for energy clearing, scrying, protection, and deep healing.
How to Spot Fake Obsidian – Ensure your crystals are the real deal.
Whether you're a crystal lover, healer, or spiritual seeker, this course is designed to help you embrace Obsidian’s transformative power in a way that feels supportive rather than overwhelming.
Podcast Transcript:
Crystal Confab Podcast Introduction: Are you just starting with crystals? Or maybe you have a whole collection, but aren't sure how to use them? Join 4 crystal nerds, healers, workers, and lovers for crystal confab, a casual chat about all things crystals.
Nicholas Pearson: Hello, and welcome to another edition of crystal confab. My name is Nicholas, and I'm here with some of my best friends, and we're gonna confab about a new crystal. And this week, we don't actually have a crystal to talk about. So, maybe that's a really great place to start. Our ally for the week, our topic, our subject, our friend is snowflake obsidian.
And, you know, technically, given that it's obsidian, it's not a mineral, it's not a crystal, it's in this kind of weird liminal space that I think we'll talk plenty about, but, you know, what what reason do we have for throwing a non crystal in our crystal confab?
Ashley Leavy: I would love to jump in on this one right away because this is actually a question that I get from my students a lot. Like, you know, is it okay to work with these things that in the healy-feely world, we often just lump everything together and call it crystals, but obsidian, like Nicholas said, is not actually a crystal. The reason that we work with crystals in the world of crystal healing, we can generally agree, there are lots of reasons, but in general, you know, crystals have this perfect orderly structure to them. And it's thought that by bringing that perfect stable structure into our own energy field, into our space, then the energy of our field, our space goes through the process of entrainment and starts to mimic that perfect stable structure of the crystal. But Obsidian, since it doesn't have that internal crystalline structure, why would we still work with it?
And I like to think of this as, you know, there are lots of different reasons that we can turn to crystals and point to different crystals and look at where their properties come from, where their energy comes from, because everything has energy in this world, whether it's a crystal or not. Right? So just because obsidian isn't a crystal doesn't mean it doesn't still have this amazing energetic quality to it. And with our stones of all sorts, we can point to a lot of different ways that they get their properties and associations. Like, color is a common one that people turn to, crystal system is another one, but also mythology, lore, historical reference that sort of has been passed down through the generations and is still very much a part of our conscious connection to the stones.
And so for me, that is where Obsidian has such a deep well. And I know Nicholas could probably talk about this all day because he wrote about this extensively in his 7 archetypal stones book, but it is one of those companions that have been with humans throughout history. And so there is so much depth to it. And since all things have energy, there's just different ways that we kind of tap into that energy. But, Kyle, what do you think about this?
Kyle Perez: Oh, I'm happy and excited to talk about this because this is where our fabulous friend, the volcano, comes into effect. Right? If you think about the energy of volcano, of magma, of the processes of bringing that heat, that power, that pressure from below the Earth's surface up and out and into the world, sometimes in very dramatic ways, sometimes, you know, a little bit more organically, and then the height the heating and the cooling and all of that sort of stuff, it is still silica. Right? This is the key with obsidian.
Right? Is it still silica? Silica is what? Quartz. Quartz is what? A crystal. We can still align it to crystalline sort of energy because it still has that within it. It is a natural glass, which we love. It's still a natural thing that the earth has produced and created for us, and I think anything that comes from that method and I know we're going to dive into a whole episode in the future on fossils. Fossils amber being part of that sort of group.
There's a lot of, like, non crystals that we can work with, that we connect to, that we love, and that we've appreciated over years. I love that Obsidian in different cultures around the world has been utilized for quite a few different things, but essentially in medicine and in surgery or in war and in fighting. Because of Obsidian's ability to be napped and cut and shaped into blades, it has been used all over the world. I saw a documentary where it has been proven that somewhere in the UK around the Stonehenge era or before, it was used for brain surgery to literally cut open the brain. They've used obsidian as a blade to cut open to get into pressure to relieve the pressure and then put it back open.
And because they've seen the healing, they've known that it's been successful to some degree. So to know that for 1000 of years, Obsidian has been a part of our human resource and psyche, I think, is really important. We continue that legacy, and we evolve that legacy, and we turn it into something even more amazing as we connect to it more deeply.
Ashley: And I did mention, Nicholas, that you've written extensively about Obsidian. What are your thoughts on this whole concept of working with a non crystal like Obsidian?
Nicholas: Yeah. So, you know, I think there are a couple threads here that are gonna intersect. You know, 1st and foremost, when we look at the genesis of Obsidian, it's made out of a lot of things we find in comparable rocks. So I think it's helpful to, like, get a couple definitions here, like, what makes a crystal a crystal and a mineral a mineral and a rock a rock? A crystal is usually a homogeneous solid substance with this kind of unit cell that repeats as this little tiny fundamental, like, building block.
And it has a high degree of symmetry, a high degree of order. Given enough space, we get crystal faces. We don't always get that because there's not always enough space. I mean, look at a piece of agate. We can't see those crystal faces, but they're still in there on the microscopic level.
And minerals are what happens when we get naturally occurring inorganic crystals. So it's still gotta have that regular composition, that regular structure at that kind of fundamental level. And rocks are what happen when minerals combine, but then we get to something like Obsidian. If we were to hypothetically take a thin sliver of it and look at it with a scanning electron microscope, we could zoom in at a cluster of silica or titania or alumina and and see that there is kinda sorta a unit cell here, but it doesn't repeat, and it doesn't attach to anything else. So when we zoom out, we notice that that short range order doesn't extend into long range order.
It's not like our agates and chalcedonies, which have both short and long range order. We can see that a little piece of silica attaches to a longer thread of molecules, which, you know, may not make a perfect, you know, hedral or well formed crystal face in terms of the, you know, perfect quartz crystal, but it's still identifiably quartz. With Obsidian, it's not quite there. It's halfway between the solid and the not so solid. In fact, because it is a glass lacking that long range order, material scientists often will describe the makeup, the structure of glasses as being supercooled liquids.
They do not flow. That is an old wives' tale, but they lack the other defining features of most solid substances. However, when we look at those little protocrystals, those not quite crystals that are forming, they are really mineral dense. They're full of things that, you know, we're gonna recognize, pretty darn easily. You've got silica, alumina, potassium oxides, sodium oxides, iron oxides of varying kinds depending on which state of iron it is, and you're gonna find any number of other things.
So it's not definitely far from being pure quartz, but the same ratios are the same things we're gonna find in rhyolite and granite and a few other kinds of igneous rocks that are kind of birthed out of the same kind of primordial liquid. And it's that way that it belongs to the rock cycle that I think gives us access to it with equal weight,
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
