LITMIR.BIZ

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life. I would ever so mindfully put the roses in bottles of water and try to sell my potions outside our house. Looking back now, I can really appreciate how naturally I was drawn to the beauty of these sensory rituals. Can you remember connecting with the beauty of Nature as a child? Can you remember the things you loved to pick, to hold, to make? Can you remember how simple things like colour, sound and smell made you feel? Building outdoor dens, making daisy-chains, picking buttercups and holding them under a friend’s chin.

       How to make a rosewater spritzer:

       Rosewater Spritzer

      Collect a couple of handfuls of freshly picked rose petals or organic dried rose petals.

      If freshly picked, quickly rinse the petals.

      Place the petals into a bowl and pour in just enough distilled or filtered hot water to soak the petals.

      Place the bowl in the fridge overnight.

      In the morning, sieve the water into a jug and discard the petals.

      Add a couple of drops of rose essential oil to the rosewater.

      Pour the rosewater into a small, glass spritzer bottle.

      Add a couple of small Rose Quartz chippings.

      Spritz away!

      Keep the spritzer somewhere cool or in the fridge. It will only stay fresh a few days.

      Like the petals of the rose, my childhood connection to beauty unfolded in so many different directions. I had a real passion for art from a young age. I got really inspired by artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, whose work would speak directly to that place of beauty inside my heart. I channelled this energy into my own art. I could spend months working on one painting, completely focussed on the intricate details, often of flowers, shells or stones. Painting became a real heart-expanding meditation for me. As the saying goes, ‘love is in the detail’. I think this pretty much sums up how I approach most things in life.

      Some of my most precious childhood memories are of walking the beaches of Mallorca with my mum, looking for the prettiest pebbles, just feeling a sense of wonder, even at this young age, for the beauty of Mother Nature and her magical powers. We’d bring these pebbles home and place them on my Grandmother’s gravestone. This ritual is an ancient Jewish practice; in the Kabbalah, the soul is said to be carved from the stone of a mountain, and so the placement of stones on a grave is an invitation, welcoming the soul of the departed to come down and rest upon the tombstones during a visit.

      But even at times in my life when things definitely weren’t so rosy, there was something inside me, something magnetically drawing me to the beauty of the world, that continued to unfold. I remember buying my first spiritual book, called The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav, after watching an interview with him on Oprah Winfrey. I guess this was the first step into my own ‘adult’ spiritual path. I’m laughing now, remembering the first time I tried to meditate. I was about sixteen years old, sitting on my bed, just waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen … but with one eye open! Looking back I really appreciate the innocent way in which I was searching for something deeper.

      The love of beauty and sacred ritual magically wove its way into my adult life. I became a make-up artist, moved to London from Leeds and began assisting celebrity make-up artist Mary Greenwell. I soon created my own career as a make-up artist in the fashion and music industries. Putting on make-up can of course be a kind of ritual in itself. There is something meditative about it, the attention to detail, the repetition, the time for self-care. And so, as I developed more of an interest in crystals, meditation and conscious living, my approach to my make-up work naturally evolved. I started to create little sacred spaces for my clients, using crystals, essential oils and meditation, which seemed to add a deeper, more sacred dimension to the make-up ritual. My clients started to tell me that they experienced a kind of peacefulness and inner joy that had a real, positive impact on them before their shoot or big event. This new sacred dimension I was bringing to the beauty process was especially helpful and grounding to myself and clients when we were on the road. As we’d travel from city to city, and from country to country on music tours, I’d bring a portable sacred space with crystals and oils, and even got some of the band wearing crystal necklaces to bring good energy on stage. All of these rituals really helped us to ground ourselves and re-connect to a space of stillness in the midst of busy tour life.

      Inspired by this growing connection to Inner Beauty in my life as a make-up artist, I started to look deeper into beauty rituals and became especially interested in crystals as a tool for Inner Beauty. I discovered to my delight that crushed crystals like Malachite and Lapis Lazuli were used in Ancient Egypt as sacred make-up mineral blends for living goddesses. Just imagine for a moment what kind of a sense of beauty might have existed at this time, if people were consciously adding spiritual materials into their beauty products. People have clearly recognized for a long time that nurturing beauty is not an exercise in vanity, but an essential process to keep you closer to the divine.

      As I look back, I can now see the universe has been guiding me along my spiritual path, and this path has been lined with crystals. I first became interested in crystals during a difficult time in my life. I was feeling quite down emotionally, I’d just had a flare-up of Crohn’s (an inflammatory auto-immune condition of the stomach), and I was seeking extra support and self-healing. I started going for crystal healing myself. I remember my first ever healing session, entering the sacred space and feeling the energy of all the beautiful crystals laid out before me. I was immediately transported to that same place of tranquil beauty and inner peace I had felt on the beach as a child collecting pebbles. And so, my love affair with crystals was born.

      When I met my husband Louis, my spiritual journey was accelerated. He was running a therapeutic education provision at the time, teaching meditation and providing therapy to troubled teenagers from London. We soon realized a wonderful way for us to combine our passions would be to set up a meditation group, where Louis would lead the meditations and I would bring the shanti vibes with my crystals, oils and singing bowls. The friends who came to these groups really seemed to find a deeper sense of connection and meaning in the sacred space and ritual we were offering.

      After we got married, we took a sabbatical travelling around India, starting our journey in Kerala and meandering our way North. Mother India really blew my heart wide open. I remember feelings of awe and joy at the rainbow of colours, the smells of incense on every corner, the exquisite textiles and jewellery. I was touched by the fact that India has proudly held on to this sacred knowledge for thousands of years, using beautiful objects, smells and colours to keep people connected to that place of Inner Beauty. During our adventure, we immersed ourselves with the local culture, staying with Indian families and experiencing first-hand daily rituals, religious festivals and ceremonies, where we learned how spirituality and a sense of the sacred was ingrained in so many aspects of daily life. In Pushkar, we became friends with a beautiful spiritual teacher, Jaggu, who had a very simple ashram built around a Banyan tree on the edge of the holy lake. In this small space, he would simply share his wisdom and love freely as he sat by a sacred fire that was kept going twenty-four hours a day. Around this fire, in this very humble space, there would always be laid out beautiful flowers, oils and incense. To celebrate this spirit of beauty and sacred ritual, I started to collect the most beautiful things I found. This was where the seed of The Colourful Dot came into bloom. My vision for this online shop was to create a space to help nourish that precious and sacred connection between inner and outer beauty, stocking crystals, sacred oils and other inspiring objects to be used in creating sacred spaces and Inner Beauty rituals.

      My appreciation for sacred ritual deepened whilst on a mountain pilgrimage with wisdom-keepers around Peru and Bolivia. I had the great honour of travelling with indigenous elders from the Q’ero, Quechua, Ayumara and Chumash tribes. In these indigenous cultures, rituals aren’t something we do just to gain personal benefit, but are above all a way of showing deep gratitude and respect for Pachamama (Mother Earth). The one idea that really stuck in my heart was ayni, the native Andean concept that

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