How to Live with Shungite — The Shungite Medium, Chapter 20

Nobody adopts a mineral all at once. · Chapter summary · from The Shungite Medium by Gary Fong

Nothing in my house arrived as a kit. It came one object at a time, over years.

It started with a Type 2 pendant: roughly seventy-five percent fullerene-bearing carbon, threaded with quartz and pyrite flecks, reinforcement rather than impurity. Later I moved to a raw ECN cut from Deep Mine Grade, the rarest sub-grade of Elite Type 1, and worked with my miner on an adjustable cord so I could aim the stone rather than park it. A raw DMG rode in a cloth bag in my pocket. For a long time that was it.

A polished Type 2 plate went on the back of the phone; I switched between the hexagon and the circle on preference, not instrumentation. Bracelets crept up to four, all Type 2, on a joint dense with nerves and vessels. A polished worry stone with the fullerene molecule etched on its face replaced the pocket stone, which kept breaking. I use it with the physiological sigh, a double inhale through the nose and a long exhale, and less every year. There is a DMG at every workspace now, each in a mug of water between uses, a mala of 108 Elite Type 1 beads by the bed, a two-pound rock from the mine for the bath.

The water is central. A walnut-sized Elite Type 1 stone in filtered water, two to twelve hours, two jars rotating. On camera, untreated distilled water read plus 410 millivolts on an ORP meter, plus 334 fifteen minutes after the stone went in. I never boil them. The last piece was the skin: shungite ground ultrafine in organic avocado oil, agitated fourteen days in darkness.

From the chapter

For deep cleaning, a pendant worn against skin for a year, a jar with hard-water film, ultrasonic is the only thing that fully restores a coated stone. High-frequency sound waves fill a chamber of water with thousands of microscopic vacuum bubbles; each one collapses against the nearest surface, reaching into pores no brush or sponge can touch. A few minutes and the stone comes out the way it came out of the mine. Every stone I sell passes through an ultrasonic bath before it ships, and any ordinary jewelry ultrasonic cleaner does the same job at home. And ignore the internet's full-moon advice. The stone in your hand is approximately two billion years old. It formed in the Karelian deposit during the Paleoproterozoic Era, before complex life, before nearly everything the word ancient usually means, and it has been absorbing whatever it absorbs for the entire intervening period. The idea that one night on a windowsill adds anything to it is a category error. If the moonlight ritual is meaningful to you, do it; it will not hurt the stone, and meaningful rituals are valuable. But the stone was working a billion years before you were born. It does not need the moon's permission to continue.

— Gary Fong, The Shungite Medium, Chapter 20

This is a summary of one chapter of The Shungite Medium: The Groundbreaking Exposé of History's Most Miraculous Stone by Gary Fong, LSH Publishing, first edition 2026, 259 pages. Three chapters are published here complete: What Is Shungite? · The Corporate Sticker · How to Tell Real Shungite from Fake. The reference apparatus is complete too: the studies, the glossary, the bibliography and the endnotes.