I’m Yanting.

Growing up among crystals

I was born in China in 1990. My father’s mother, an accountant, collected natural jade. My mother collected crystals, Tibetan dzi beads, amber and beeswax amber. When I was five or six she took me to the biggest shopping centre in our city, and I would stand in front of the crystals for as long as she let me. Amethyst was the first stone I loved.

My mother and her mother took me to temples, where I learned to chant. In our Buddhist practice, flowers, gems and amber were offered to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, so from childhood these stones felt sacred, and a little mysterious.

Learning to live in the shadows

At 13 I was diagnosed with vasculitis, an autoimmune condition. Doctors told me it was chronic and might last five years, or ten. For around eight years I lived on daily medication and spent at least half of every year in hospital, on drips for hours at a time. Standing for more than a few minutes could open wounds on my legs that took months to heal. In the years after that, I looked after myself through compression stockings, diet, rest and, later, healing work.

I studied mostly from my bed, quietly proud of what I achieved and quietly ashamed of how fragile I was.

This is my own history, not advice. Please never stop or change medical treatment without your doctor.

For years I kept to myself. Even when I met good friends, I was afraid of becoming a burden, so I hid and tried to heal alone.

A scholarship, and a small green crystal

A scholarship brought me to the UK for my degree. I graduated with a first and an award, then a master’s with merit.

On one of those long flights between China and the UK, a flight attendant handed me a small gift, the only one on the plane: a natural green fluorite. I still have it. It isn’t rare, but it felt like being looked after by something bigger, a small light at a turning point. At Christmas markets and in little vintage shops I always found my way to the crystals, and around graduation I began collecting properly.

My first start-up, and my first failure

I had worked on investment banking projects, and in the trading room I felt like a machine, not someone living her own life. In January 2016 my student visa ended and I went home to China. My father had just been diagnosed with his first cancer. He didn’t want me to start a business: he worried about my health and wanted me close to family, in a steady job. But my health had been better in the UK, and that helped me persuade him.

With a university incubator’s endorsement, I came back to the UK in July 2016, once his chemotherapy was over, on a graduate entrepreneur visa. My idea was a platform joining HR and education, where anyone, from any background or starting point, could take on real projects, build experience and discover what they love and what they’re good at. I designed it to learn from people’s projects and feedback and match them to careers. Years later, friends called it LinkedIn 2.0, even AI, though no one around me was talking about AI then.

Angel investors, introduced through my father, funded the first phase. The developers I paid never delivered what we had agreed. It was my first failure, and one of life’s lessons. Later, projects with universities, the UN and governments earned me a Global Talent visa for digital technology. From the outside, everything was going well. I also wanted, more than I understood, to make my father proud.

I had built a life, but I didn’t know who I was

My father died of lung cancer, his second cancer. After the funeral I flew straight back to the UK and kept busy. I couldn’t cry. Everything looked successful and everything felt wrong. I began to see how much of my identity had been built for someone else, and that was frightening.

I tried many kinds of help. Nothing seemed to reach me. I was alive on the outside and closed on the inside.

A window opens

In the pandemic I lived alone and admitted that my career had been for my father. A well-known tarot reader who stayed at my Airbnb taught me to read cards, and for the first time I found a way to talk with myself. Each morning I made hot cacao, lit incense and meditated with a crystal in each hand, sometimes for an hour or two.

Then I booked a session with Shaman Durek. He named something I had never said aloud: that I had pulled away from everyone because I didn’t want to be a burden. For more than a month afterwards, tears kept coming. Slowly, I could feel again.

Starting again in Manchester

I moved to Manchester alone, knowing no one. When I walked into my flat I held on to the kitchen island and wanted to cry; it felt like home. At weekends I volunteered at a Buddhist temple in the Lake District.

Learning from many teachers

For three years I went to retreats again and again, working closely with shamans, medicine women and medicine men from Indigenous traditions, in Peru, Mexico and elsewhere. They taught me a great deal and did deep healing work with me. Since early 2026 I’ve continued on my own, with my own practice. Those years showed me that life can be much bigger than the textbooks: everything is energy, and everything keeps changing. I decided I would become my best self, however far away she seemed.

My Gem Closet literally started in a closet

In the summer of 2022 the temple asked me to help in its gift shop, looking after its crystals. Sitting at an old window in the dining room, journalling and searching for my direction, I decided to open my own crystal shop.

I closed my tech company and settled everyone’s accounts. All I had left was the credit limit on a card my father had opened for me years before, so I tried one more time, with the thing I loved. I photographed my first crystals on my phone in my hallway and on my dining table, and on 9 December 2022 the shop opened. The name is literal: its first home was the shelves of my wardrobe. I still run it from my flat.

Running, after 22 years

I met the healing teacher I still learn from. I was sceptical, and went to two of his healings within three weeks. Soon after, an intuition told me to try the treadmill I’d been told all my life never to use. I ran, and kept running every day for a month. I could stand, walk and work like everyone else.

This is my personal experience. I can’t explain it, and it isn’t a promise or a recommendation about anyone else’s health or treatment.

I put my savings into a year of healing training, and I’ve completed Level 3 of four. That year I also began offering healing in online groups, and gave free healings to many of my crystal customers.

Why I share this

“When you’re used to tending your wounds alone in the dark, and one day the wound heals and the sun comes up — that’s the feeling I want to share.”

I offer private healing one-to-one, readings through My Gem Closet, and one-to-one training for people who want to become their own healer. Group healings are moving to YouTube so anyone can join in their own time zone. I’m beginning to write each week on Substack, and developing Hermit Light, a project about the solitude that can come with becoming yourself, and how we find warmth, courage and connection along the way.

I’m still growing and still healing. Every connection, easy or hard, has helped make me who I am, and I’m grateful for all of it.