Aim them. Turned outward a point sends or releases, turned inward it draws in, and the two instructions collide at the bedside, so it helps to hold a default. Away from you, for anything you are not awake for.
A point is the only crystal shape that arrives with an arrow on it. Everything else you own is a lump, a slab or a ball, and none of them ask anything of you when you put them down. A point asks one question the second it touches the table, and the question is which way. You answer it whether you notice or not.
The practice turns out to be less about which stone you bought than about what sits at the other end of the line the stone is drawing.
The arrow points two ways
The whole rule fits in a sentence: a tip turned outward sends or releases, and a tip turned inward receives or draws. Grids, sweeping a room, a stone held through a sitting, a piece stood on a shelf, every one of those is an application of that single line.
The trouble is that plenty of situations can be read either way, and sleep is the clearest of them, because sleep is both a putting down and a taking in. Turn the tip away from the bed and the stone carries the day off you. Turn it toward the bed and it feeds calm into you. Both instructions are in circulation and both are given with complete confidence, so reading further mostly gets you more of each.
A desk poses the same fork. Do you want the point aimed at you to hold you steady through the afternoon, or aimed at the door to keep the afternoon off you? Both readings are coherent, and the tradition is not going to break the tie for you.
Points that grew loose
Before any of the choosing, there is a second kind of point that changes the question, and most quartz is terminated at one end only. The Handbook of Mineralogy gives the species habit as enantiomorphic prismatic crystals terminated by two sets of faces, and in practice a crystal growing off the wall of a cavity is anchored at the base, so only the free end ever finishes. That anchored end is the reason your point has one tip rather than two.
Some crystals never attached. Geology.com, writing about Herkimer diamonds, explains that they are doubly terminated as a result of the crystals growing with very little or no contact with their host rock, in their case inside cavities in a dolostone laid down about 500 million years ago. No anchor at either end, so both ends finished.
Practice treats those differently, and sensibly. A doubly terminated point is worked as a flow rather than an aim, so it goes between two things instead of at one: laid between two other stones in an arrangement, or set on a shelf between two parts of a room. If your question is about a relationship rather than a direction, that is the piece to reach for.
Aim it at something you can name
For everything with one tip, my default is away from you, for anything you are not awake for.
An arrow needs somewhere to land, and only one of the two directions gives it one. Point the tip outward and you can name what is on the far end. The room. The door. The day you have just come home from. Point it at yourself and the far end is you, which is not a place and cannot be aimed at, so the instruction quietly stops being one.
The exception falls out of the same reasoning. Turn a point toward yourself when you are there for it, holding it through a short sitting with the tip against your palm and the far end of the line being the specific thing you are working on. That has a target in it. When you leave the room, turn it back.
At a bedside that means the tip goes toward the wall, and on a desk it means the tip goes toward the door or the window and not at your chair. A carried point rotates all day, so the tradition has no rule for a pocket and you should not go looking for one.
Where the aim has somewhere to land
The strongest placements have a threshold in them. A doorway, or the gap you walk through on the way in from work, is a place with genuine traffic, so a direction aimed at it is aimed at something real. The sweeping practice, walking a clear or smoky quartz point tip outward around the corners of a room, holds up for the same reason, since the motion and the aim agree with each other.
Grids are the other place the rule does real work, because a grid is an arrangement built entirely out of tip directions, with points either turned in toward a central stone or out from it. That form wants a longer treatment than a paragraph, and how to set up a crystal altar is where the arrangement side of it sits for now.
The weak placement is a point stood upright on a shelf, because a vertical point is aimed at your ceiling. It can still be a lovely object. We have a rainbow fluorite spike, about eight centimetres, cut and polished. Its colour runs from a transparent purple base through indigo and blue into green, then back toward blue near the tip, and the zoning spirals, so every rotation of the piece gives you a different path through it. Stood up it is good to look at. Lying down and aimed at something, it is also doing the job.
Whether a given point grew that shape or was cut into it is a separate question with a real test behind it, and what crystal points, spheres and clusters are shows you how to run it.
For the quartz underneath all of this, the Crystalance Mineral Library goes over habit and hardness and how a crystal ends.
None of it works until you can finish the sentence. This point is aimed at that. If you cannot name the far end, turn the stone until you can, and if there is nothing in the room worth aiming at, put it in the drawer with the other ornaments and stop expecting anything of it.
