Spiritual House-Cleansing
By Michelle Belenger
http://www.kheperu.org/index.php
As beings made up of both matter and spirit, we humans are constantly moving in two worlds at once. Even if we are completely unaware of our spiritual side, we cannot help but affect the subtle reality around us. Our very passage can alter it, and strong emotions can leave an indelible stamp on the places we have been. Consider dust in the physical world. Do you know where dust comes from? Dust is almost completely made up of shed human skin. Wherever we live, we leave a physical trace of our living there. On the subtle level, we leave traces as well. Emotions, especially, build up in the places we live. Consider spiritual residues our subtle "dust".
When we live in a place and we never clean it out, the dust gets thick. There are always places in a house where dust seems to gather in droves. If it isn't cleaned out, it will build up and build up until there's huge, ugly drifts of it. The same goes for the subtle aspect of the places we live in. If we don't cleanse things out spiritually once in a while, all that cast-off energy and emotion builds up. The worst part is that most people have no idea they need to cleanse their spiritual living places, let alone how to do it. So they just let things build up.
Most often, the spiritual residues you will come across were formed from strong emotion. For example, some friends of mine rented the bottom half of a house in college. It was in a good enough neighborhood, inexpensive but not run-down. A few weeks after they moved in, my friends, who had never had any interpersonal problems before, began to fight. The way they described it, all of them could be in the best of moods right up until they came home. After they had come home and settled down for a bit, however, they got angry and frustrated. Every little thing would piss them off.
Despite their personal differences, they still wanted to have a housewarming party. They set a date and invited a lot of friends. It was the worst party I have ever been to. The minute anyone walked through the front door, they seemed to develop a foul mood. Tempers flared over the most ridiculous things. By the end of the night, everyone had gone home angry at everyone else.
As it happened, I ran into one of the people who had rented the house before my friends moved in. We stopped and had a chat on campus. I asked where he was living now, and he mentioned an apartment complex a few blocks away. Then he started telling me how grateful he was to be out of the house - because he and his roommates had experienced the same trouble while they were staying there. The house just seemed to breed anger, and the more angry people got in the house, the more the emotion built up in the walls.
Just like dust tends to always build up in the same places in your house , some places are more receptive to spiritual residues than others. And sadly, negative emotions seem to build up more quickly than positive ones. They certainly are gunkier. Even if someone is not sensitive to subtle impressions, they will still unconsciously react to them. It is the nature of a spiritual residue to inspire the same kind of emotions that created it. That way it perpetuates itself. It doesn't necessarily intend to perpetuate itself. There's almost never any sentience to a spiritual residue. But it projects the kind of emotions that created it, like a mushroom producing spores. Your best course of action when encountering something like this is to clean it up as well as you can.
If you are adept at energy manipulation, one way to clean up a home is to simply go through each room and "scrape" away whatever negative energies have built up on the subtle level. Different traditions and different people of course have different techniques for this, but the basic idea is to reach out with your subtle body, scrape down the walls, corners, and closets, gather all the negative energy into a ball, and dispose of it.
When I clean a home out in this fashion, if it's a multiple story structure, I start from the top, working my way down. On each floor, I go to the room farthest away from the main entrance and work my way toward the main entrance, gathering all the "ick" up as I go. All closet doors, cupboard doors, and other potential hidey holes need to be opened up and left open until the cleansing is finished. No corner should be over-looked; you should make a special effort to clean out those areas that are often forgotten or left to gather clutter and dust. Just as these areas gather physical clutter, so do they gather clutter on the subtle level. I usually try to move counterclockwise through a room, starting with the least used areas (closets, cupboards) and moving everything out, toward the door. I go clockwise because deosil implies unwinding or unmaking, and the process of spiritual house-cleaning seeks to undo things that have been unintentionally done to the subtle reality of your home. It doesn't really matter what direction you move in, but you should try to be consistent so you don't miss or overlook any part of any room.
Once I have gone through all the rooms, moving from top to bottom and from the back to the front, always ending at the door, I usually have a good armload of spiritual gunk collected from the house. I have someone open the front door for me (or whatever door is used most often for entry into the house) and I walk a short distance from the house and release the dirt into whatever grounding matter I've chosen. For me, a bucket of consecrated water works as a good focus because it reinforces the idea of housecleaning. A bowl of salt will work just as well to disperse the negative energy.
Another way of cleaning house is to do just precisely that. Going from the top down and from the back to the front, always working toward the doors, clean out your living space. Dust, straighten, wash the walls, and while you are doing this, also focus your activities with the intent of cleaning more than just the physical aspect of the house. As you wipe away dirt from the walls, reach out on the level of the subtle reality and also scrape away any negative energies that have built up. As you clean out the cramped closets and back hidey holes, throwing away the worn out junk you don't really need anymore, try also to mentally throw out any old ideas, attitudes, or habits that you also don't really need to keep around any more. Consecrate the water you clean your house with beforehand, and dump the energy you want to disperse into your bucket of cleaning water as you go. Open the front door and sweep out the dust and refuse, focusing on the broom so it sweeps away more than just physical dirt. Finish up by burning incense in every room and fuming the living space so it smells clean and fresh.
Just as you should try to keep up on the regular house-cleaning, so should you try to make an effort to clean out your psychic space as well. All of us respond subconsciously to the subtle aspect of our surroundings. If a place is cluttered, cramped, dirty, or oppressive, it can only have a negative effect on our spiritual well-being. And it really doesn't take a whole lot of effort to clean things away. Regularly cleaning out the subtle residues from your living space will make your home a healthier and more peaceful place for you, your family, and all who come to visit.
Michelle Belanger
