Our story
We started this because it saved us first.
Before any of this was a shop on Park Avenue, it was the thing that brought the two of us back from somewhere neither of us could have found the way out of alone. That is the part worth telling you.
Before
A friend introduced us to each other in 2013. We fell in love, and from the outside we looked like two people whose lives were coming together rather nicely.
Joel had served six years in the Marine Corps and come home to a degree in business and a hundred small hustles, buying and selling anything he could make better before he passed it along. His days were spent working beside his brother as an air conditioning tech, up in attics and drop ceilings in the Florida heat, learning how a business actually runs by standing inside one.
Rachel danced four years for the Orlando Magic while she finished her degree in health and physical science. She was headed into medicine, and she was good enough to get there.
What nobody could see was that both of us were carrying something heavy. Rachel's body was already beginning to turn on her in ways that no one had a name for yet. And Joel was an addict, and it was winning.
The day her body stopped
Rachel was at practice when her body shut down.
Not slowed, not ached. Stopped. She went to the hospital, and then to the Mayo Clinic, and they ran every test there is to run on a person. Everything came back clean. There was nothing to name and nothing to treat, and she still could not get herself out of bed.
Her mother knew a Reiki therapist, who agreed to see her. The first session helped enough that she went back. On the second, the therapist asked if she could lay crystals along Rachel's chakras.
What Rachel remembers is rising out of herself. Looking down from somewhere above the table at her own body, the way you would look down at someone you love, and watching it begin to heal.
She called Joel that afternoon, still crying, trying to explain something she did not yet have the words for.
He was up inside a drop ceiling at a consignment shop with an air conditioner half apart in front of him. He climbed down the ladder, sat on the bottom rung with the phone against his ear, and listened to Rachel tell him that for the first time in months her body felt like it belonged to her again.
When the call ended he looked up. Across the room, in a shop he had been working in since early that morning and had never once properly looked at, stood a glass display case.
It was full of crystals, and he will tell you to this day that it was glowing.
He bought every single one in that case. The first thing he put into Rachel's hands when he walked through the door was a trio of amethyst.
The pendant
Rachel threw herself into learning. Yoga, meditation, Reiki, stones, anything at all that might explain what had happened to her on that table. And slowly, week by week, Joel watched her come back to him.
He knew by then that he needed something himself. He also knew his own stubbornness well enough to know he was never going to ask another person for it. Then came the conversation that people in his position eventually have, the one where somebody who loves you sits you down and tells you plainly that this ends one of two ways and you still get to choose which.
So he did the only thing he had ever known how to do with a problem. He studied it. He read that kyanite was the stone people reached for when they were trying to break an addiction. He found a kyanite pendant, put it around his neck, and stopped everything that same day.
He has not had a drink or a drug since.
He does not wear the pendant any more. A while back he met somebody who was fighting the same thing he had fought, and it seemed obvious that the stone belonged around their neck instead of his. So he took it off and handed it over. That is more or less the whole idea behind everything that came afterwards.
A sound neither of us had heard before
Rachel's body was never going to take professional dancing again, and medicine is a long road for someone still learning how to stand up in the morning. She needed something of her own. And the two of us had just been handed the only thing either of us wanted to talk about.
So we decided to give other people what had been given to us.
There was no plan. In 2018 we drove around to Ross and TJ Maxx looking for boxes we thought were beautiful, filled them with small raw chakra sets, and listed exactly one of them on Etsy. Rachel began writing about everything she was learning, aimed squarely at beginners, because a year earlier that is precisely what she had been.
A month later we were sitting on the couch when one of our phones made a sound neither of us had ever heard. Somebody in another state had bought a chakra set. We just looked at each other.
The next week there was another one. The week after that, three. By the following month it was one a day, every day.
At the start of that year we had written down a number we wanted to reach. Fifty thousand dollars. On the thirty-first of December we finished at $50,400. Joel handed in his notice not long after, and he has not been in anybody else's attic since.
We got married in August of 2019, a year on from that first chakra set. By then the thing that had brought the two of us back had quietly become the thing we did for a living.
Today Loving Thyself Rocks is a real shop at 339 S Park Avenue in Winter Park, on a street the two of us used to walk down together and point at. Pieces that came through our hands have gone out to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. The friend who introduced us in 2013 works here now, which is not something either of us saw coming.
What we look for has changed enormously since those boxes from TJ Maxx. What we are looking for it for has not changed at all. Somebody out there is sitting exactly where Rachel was sitting, and something is going to be the thing that gets them up.
The heart
A friend of Rachel's had been trying to have a baby for years, and had reached the point where she was willing to try anything at all. She came to us. We told her what had been told to us, which is that carnelian is the stone people reach for when they are hoping to conceive.
She picked out a heart. There was a mark inside it, and every one of us standing there saw the same shape in that mark. She took it home and laid it on her belly every night.
Months later we were away in North Carolina when Rachel woke up with a feeling she could not shake off all morning. She called her friend and asked her outright whether she was pregnant.
She had taken a test a few hours earlier. It was positive. She had not told her husband yet. She had not told anybody.
She has two children now, and a family she waited a very long time for.
The mark is not in the stone any more. We have no explanation for that, and we are not going to invent one.
What we believe
We are never going to tell you that a rock cured anything.
We do not know why Rachel got up off that table. We do not know why a man who could not stop drinking put a pendant around his neck and never drank again. We do not know what was in that carnelian heart. Nobody does, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something.
Here is what we do believe. These things came out of the ground long before any of us and they will still be here long after we are gone, and we think they were put here as tools. Sometimes that means nothing more than something beautiful on a shelf that makes a hard week a little softer. Sometimes it means finding your people. And sometimes, for reasons none of us can account for, it means a whole life turns around.
They are worth giving a chance. That is the whole of it.
Always love yourself first.
Joel and RachelLoving Thyself Rocks, 339 S Park Avenue, Winter Park