Why Energy Cleansing Is Important (and How to Do It)

Cleansing the energy of the spaces where you live and work and the things you use for energy healing, such as crystals or singing bowls, is an essential part of good spiritual hygiene. I recommend people cleanse the energy of their spaces at least once a week--and more if there's been negativity such as illness, arguments, stress, etc.--and cleanse tools they use at least once a week or even more if they get heavy use. For example, I cleanse the crystals I wear once a day, and I cleanse those I use with healing partners after every use. The crystals that just sit in my house and mostly look pretty, I cleanse once a week. Before we get into the hows of energy cleansing, however, I want to get into the whys. 

​Energy and Entrainment
Back in the 1600s, a Dutch scientist named Christiaan Huygens discovered that objects with different energy frequencies locked into phase when placed in physical proximity to one another. He noticed when he hung two pendulum clocks side by side on the wall, although they started with the pendulums swaying in different rhythms, they soon moved into the same rhythm. This gradual shifting of vibration to lock into phase is called entrainment, and it is a repeatable scientific phenomenon. The video below demonstrates this principle with 32 mechanical metronomes all started with a different frequency that eventually begin to move together. 

 Entrainment is an important principle when it comes to spiritual energy as well. Everything has a vibration. All physical matter is made up of tiny vibrating strands of energy; from the chair you might be sitting in right now, to the cells of your body, to the hair on top of your head. Everything in your environment is made up of these strands of energy existing in close proximity to one another. And, as we established, when two bodies oscillating at different frequencies are located next to one another, each adjusts its energy to the other so they begin to vibrate at the same rate.

​This is happening all around you all of the time. People who are sensitive to energy can feel it as it happens. For example, have you ever been somewhere alone and felt the energy shift when another person walks into a room? That is their energy and yours reacting to one another and shifting to meet somewhere in the middle. 

In an ideal world, lower vibration would always climb to meet higher vibration while the higher vibration stayed the same. But that's not what happens. Generally, when there is a vast difference between the vibration of one object and the vibration of another, one raises, the other lowers, and the two meet somewhere in the middle. So the higher vibration comes down a bit and the lower vibration raises. That's why energetic cleansing is so important. If you bring an energy tool, such as a crystal, into your environment, it will raise your vibration, but it will also drop to meet the lower vibration of other objects around it.

Energy cleansing is like a vibrational reset button. Using energy cleansing methods helps return the tools you use and the spaces you inhabit to their natural higher vibrational frequency after they've been in contact with energy of a lower vibration. By bringing them to a higher vibration and then using them in the same environment again, the environmental energy rises once again while the tool's energy drops slightly, but they have a new, higher middle to in which to meet. The goal is to keep the energy tools cleansed so they return to their original higher energy, making the "middle" a new, higher set point after each cleansing.

​How To Cleanse
There are many ways you can cleanse tools and your environment. My go-to is to use Reiki to cleanse things like crystals and spaces where I live, work, and teach, but I realize not everyone has Reiki available, and sometimes I feel other types of cleansing are called for, as well. Some tools you can use for cleansing include:

• Sacred sound instruments such as tingshas, bells, ghanta and dorje, drumming, or singing bowls
• Incense
• Sacred herbs such as sage, palo santo, cedar, sweetgrass, or a combination thereof

When you cleanse a space, move through your space in clockwise pattern starting at the front door either sounding your instruments or wafting the smoke from your herbs or incense. At every opening to the space (doors, windows, drains), run the sound or smoke around it in a clockwise direction. Be sure to get into corners and closets, too. When you return to your front door, run the smoke or sound counter clockwise around the door to seal the energy. If you burn sage (which empties out all energy), always follow up with something that brings in positive energy, such as burning palo santo or playing sacred sound.

To cleanse any tools you use in energy healing, hold them over the sacred smoke so they are coated in smoke, or run them through the sound waves of a sound instrument. For example, you can put crystals in a singing bowl and sound it or use incense smoke around and in a singing bowl. 

Making cleansing part of your ritual can help you to maintain higher vibration with any energy healing tools you use, as well as in the spaces you work, play, and live. By attending to spiritual hygiene with this important step, you can help maintain a vibration that continues to rise. 

Image by Alexandre C. Fukugava from Pixabay ​