Rituals to Clear your Mental Space
This article appears courtesy of Healing Headquarters www.healinghq.com.
We’ve all heard of feng shui (pronounced ‘fung shway’) – perhaps you’ve been introduced to it as a way of arranging your furniture to draw a new romantic partner into your life! While it can certainly be used to create living spaces more inviting to certain opportunities, at its heart, feng shui is the Chinese art of creating energetic harmony. Indigenous cultures were keenly aware of the energetic fields of the planet and all life forms, including trees, stone, water, animals, plants, and objects. They are also aware of the polarization of energies that result in both positively- and negatively-charged energy fields, as well as different vibratory rates, and the subtle effects these energies can have on us.
You may hear New Agers talking quite a bit about “vibration.” This isn’t some far-out imaginary way of describing experience – it’s scientific. Physics recognizes the principles of magnetism and the existence of energetic fields. Living beings are made up of cells that literally vibrate. Life forms generate energy fields that can be measured. When our understanding of reality expands to include energetic fields, we become more sensitive to our own energy and the energies around us. Heightened sensitivity to energy fields is demonstrated by senior practitioners of energetic healing arts, such as qi gong, tai chai, reiki and shamanic doctors. These metaphysicians literally ‘tune in’ to energetic fields (qi) and manipulate them – clearing out collected pockets of lower vibratory energy so that the energies in a particular region are harmonious and able to move freely.
Indigenous world-views include an understanding of the invisible realm of energy fields and the ability to harmonize the energies present in a particular location. Many healers choose to work in this realm to target disharmonious energies (sometimes referred to as ‘stagnant qi’) because they believe that disharmony within the energy field can result in illness and disease. Disharmonious energy can result from a variety of influences, including:
- Painful emotions (anger, depression, fear and sadness);
- Material decomposition (garbage bins, dead plants / trees, graveyards); and,
- Destructive, habitual thought patterns (self-hate, negative messages).
Realizing that energies can become polarized, and polarization creates conflict, a peaceful home and mind are best achieved by dispelling the polarization and harmonizing the energies.
There are a number of techniques you can use in your own home to clear and harmonize your personal energy field. They are:
- The use of sound (bells, gongs, singing bowls, instruments, voice, music);
- The burning of purifying herbs (sage, sweetgrass, incense, moxa, or joss);
- The practice of ritually cleaning your home and keeping it free of clutter and garbage;
- The practice of purifying your energy field through auric cleansing (salt water baths, sauna / sweatlodge, smudging); and,
- Meditating on fire.
The Use of Sound
This is perhaps the most obvious. Sound has resonant vibration and by making harmonious sounds (ringing bells, gongs, singing bowls, practicing mantras, singing and playing concordant music) you create a resonance within your space which vibrates outward and alters the vibration of the space to match its own. Try purchasing for yourself a singing bowl or meditation bell that you particularly like the tone of. Ring it every evening at dusk, and once a week, carry it through your whole house, allowing its sound to penetrate the entire space. You can actually alter the quality of a home’s atmosphere for the better with this technique. Be mindful: the sounding of discordant music, or the repetitive playing of depressing or angry music will do the opposite. Pay very close attention to your emotions in response to sound: does certain music make you feel happy or heavy? Use sound to attune yourself to the emotional states you want to experience regularly.
Smudging
Smudging is a purification ritual used by indigenous North Americans prior to entering group ceremonies or performing sacred acts such as prayer and fasting. Homemade incense of cedar, sweetgrass, sage,or tobacco are traditionally used. You can find homemade incense bundles in your local new age or health food store. Traditionally, you would be offered the opportunity to smudge yourself with herbal incense prior to entering a healing ceremony such as a sweat lodge or sharing circle. Smudging is a very respectful and nurturing practice. At home, you can light your incense bundle and hold it with one hand, while pulling the smoke toward you and passing it over your whole body, front and back, including your legs and feet. The logic behind smudging is that the smoke of this plant maintains a high vibratory rate, and passing it over you will harmonize your energy field with it. You can also walk through your home with it once a week to clear your personal space of any stagnant or disharmonious energy accumulated during the week, and you would definitely want to use this prior to inhabiting a new home.
Ritual Cleaning
Now this is likely something the majority of you will groan over. Cleaning? Not many people like housecleaning. However, as you begin to develop greater environmental sensitivity, you might want to consider how the state of your living quarters is reflecting your inner states. Practitioners of feng shui will recommend that you avoid cramming furniture along walls and into corners – this is because healthy energy moves freely, and stagnant energy sinks in its vibration. Think of air or water flow: you are delivered the freshest air when your windows are wide open, the screens are off, and there are no objects blocking the breeze from circling through your house. How does a house feel when the windows are all shut, the shades are all drawn, and all the inner doors are closed? After a while, the air is going to get stale, isn’t it? It may even get smelly after a while from all those pizza boxes you left laying there from last week. You get the picture. Likewise, consider water. Can you see a difference between the water that is flowing quickly in the middle of the stream and the water that has gotten pooled off in a muddy little pond at the edge? Once it’s been cut off from the steady flow, it is no longer fresh – perhaps some algae will grow in it and it will begin to smell bad and fester.
The energy in your home, and thus the emotions you feel in your day-to-day life will improve if you make it a habit to create a living space that is free of debris, garbage, clutter, and residue. If you don’t believe me, try it.
Salt Water Bathing / Sauna / Sweatlodge
Salt water bathing is very simple: salt neutralizes the negative charge. If you are in the process of emotional cleansing and you have just had a big cry after your last massage session, have a bath with 1 cup of Epsom or Sea salts in it to clear your auric field of the emotional charge. This is also helpful for removing physical pain from the muscles (for muscular pain and / or intense sadness, increase the salts to 3 cups and add 1 cup of hydrogen peroxide as well). The heat will help your muscles relax and your pores open, and the salts will absorb some of the toxins from your muscles.
Sauna will also open your pores but has a slightly different effect. The sweating allows your body to enter a natural process of dispelling toxins through the skin. This can be helpful during a colon cleanse. Avoid this if you are feeling weak, or fasting.
If you have the opportunity to participate in a sweat lodge ceremony, you may gain significant release of emotional and energetic stagnation. A word of caution, however – not all sweatlodges are the same. These days there are an endless number of New Agers claiming to hold authentic indigenous North American healing ceremonies. We want to be mindful that indigenous cultures maintained a tradition of lifelong apprenticeship in strictly-guided lineages before practicing shamanic arts. Sadly, most new age imitations lack the rigorous training and spiritual depth of knowledge to provide an “authentic” shamanic healing. While on your healing journey, it is good to keep in mind that many have good intentions, but few have accomplished true mastery. You do best to trust your health and care with true Masters, and avoid well-intentioned frauds. One key tip off - how much are they charging? A traditional sweatlodge requires a spiritual gift – usually a donation of sacred herbs such as tobacco or sage, sometimes hand-made prayer ties, and some food for the feast afterwards. If someone is asking for more than $50, you should probably say ‘no, thank you.’
Meditating on Fire
Meditating on fire can be performed with a simple candle in your apartment or a campfire outdoors on your holiday. The important thing is to recognize what fire is, and to focus your eyes and your attention on it. Fire is so commonplace these days we pay little attention to it. We have such a command of it, we carry little lighters in our pockets, drive cars with combustion engines, and cook all our food over a stove that turns on instantly. It is a good practice to realize the deeper nature of fire, and to use it mindfully and with respect.
Fire is the energy of the sun being released from a form that has absorbed it over time. Think about that for a moment. The fire in your possession is the fire absorbed from the sun. When you ignite an object, you force it to release its stored solar energy in the form of fire.
Fire is a major energy release. The next time you observe a fire, look into it, and absorb that energy into your eyes. Let that energy mingle with your own life force energy. You are also solar-powered. Did you realize that? Everything on this planet is powered by the sun. Since you are powered by energy absorbed from the sun – you either absorb it directly through your eyes and skin, or by eating plants and animals that absorbed energy from the sun. It is a great practice to meditate on fire, by looking directly into it, absorbing that energy through your eyes, and meditating on the fact that you are solar-powered, that all life is solar-powered, and that this great ball of fire in the cosmos is the source of your life. That is a lot of energy being directed through space to get to you and empower you to live. The mindful gazing into fire, as well as sun-gazing at dusk and dawn when the sun is less intense on the eyes (try closing your eyes partway or even looking through your eyelids) will purify your energy and connect you directly to the source of all life on this planet.
For more information, check out the Resource Guide.