Written content - Clearing Tools
Connecting, Clearing and Curiosity are three interconnected aspects of the Energy Checking journey. Attending to each one moves you closer to the whole point/goal of Energy Checking, which is to consciously live within Divine Reality, so you can respond to life from the strength of that understanding.
This post is about Clearing. Before I get into it, I’d like to say a few words on healing tools and culture.
HEALING TOOLS AND CULTURE
As I started to collect the tools I wanted to write about here--tools I’ve used over the last decade--I was confronted with the fact that the ones I am able to most readily identify come from the context of whiteness/white supremacy, which is tightly wound around capitalism and patriarchy. Because of this intertwining, whiteness is good at compartmentalizing and commodifying. It feels important to consider this point before getting into the nuts and bolts of particular clearing processes.
This realization made me reflect about my own healing journey within this context. I remember pining for workshops that cost thousands of dollars to learn this or that technique from the experts. I felt held back from what was possible for me because I didn’t have the resources to experience and learn these tools in depth.
One such tool I longed to have an in-person retreat experience with was the Sedona Method, which is a short process for divesting yourself of unwanted thoughts or emotions. Although I never went to a workshop, here’s what I informally gathered from YouTube videos: Hold a pen in your clenched hand. Turn your hand over, palm of clenched hand facing down. Open your hand. Voila, pen released. Then, to translate this physical exercise to its energetic counterpart, you name what you’re feeling and from your heart simply say, “I release it now.” That’s it! Yet in my own psyche, within the materialistic context in which it was presented (and I also happen to live 24/7), I still believed I needed to spend thousands of dollars to really get this, and I was disappointed when I wasn’t able to do so.
Compare this--which I find to be relatively common in the white alternative healing community--to what I’ve observed in healing spaces of people of culture, where energetic clearing practices are woven into the course of daily living. It’s not separate. It’s not commodified. In this video Sobonfu Somé talks about creating sacred space inside one’s home and at minute 1:30 in the video she casually mentions that she just releases at her front door what she doesn’t want to take inside her house. SAME CONCEPT. She uses her physical space to ground this practice so it becomes a part of living. To contrast with the above example, it’s not a technique that’s been isolated, lifted out of context and made to be A THING separate from the rest of life that needs to be bought and certified to be able to use.
If we don’t orient ourselves to see the healing technologies embedded in the everyday living of people of culture, we miss these gems and it further reinforces the narrative that whiteness is the “expert.” And please hear this! Because healthy energy maintenance practices naturally embedded in the life of people of culture don’t pop up at the top of a Google search for “energetic clearing practices”, we need to actively seek out, cultivate and affirm this understanding. I now look at videos of the workshop spaces I once coveted and find it very incoherent that in these rooms full of white people doing energetic clearing exercises, the tools are never used to clear toxic understandings about race or cultural ideas about materialism, consumption, happiness and individuality that have exceeded the bounds of moderation.
To further illustrate this point, I recently listened to two white women talk about the profound and tangible healing properties of sound and the cutting-edge research that is now scientifically proving this to be true. No reference was made to the fact that the healing properties of music have been known and used for centuries by enslaved and oppressed people as a tool of survival, healing and joy. It’s galling.
I’ll be real: I haven’t figured out how to navigate this fractured landscape other than to notice it. My hope is that we will collectively start to examine the tools we practice with to one, appreciate their lineage beyond the small scope of whiteness, and two, see how they can be used in a way to simultaneously dismantle our own internalized oppression and further our understanding of oneness.
With the above in mind, I’d like to share a couple of frameworks to help us understand how we form our ideas about how life works. We are engaging in a process of investigating those belief systems and seeing if they match up with Divine Reality. If we find that they do not, it’s time to let them go.
OVERVIEW ON CLEARING
Clearing can be (and is) very, very simple. At its essence, it’s the intention to let something go.
This can be done by simply saying, “I release anything that no longer serves me.”
You may not have a firm idea of what all you’re releasing, and that’s okay. Your intention to release what is no longer serving you sets you on the path to understand the more specific things to be cleared in the process. This comes with practice. You might think of it as energetic hygiene--just like you regularly brush your teeth, shower and (when push comes to shove--no? Just me?) tidy your living space.
There are two types of energetic blocks that we encounter. One is energetic pollutants we accumulate just by living in the current cacophonous landscape of a world raging with adolescent energy as it wrestles with its coming of age. A real-life example of this is when you’re around someone who is grumpy, and you, my empathic friend, start to feel grumpy too--but it wasn’t yours to begin with. Two, there are also energetic blocks we’ve accumulated over a lifetime of interpreting the circumstances and traumas of our lives, or we’ve inherited from our families, epigenetically. We did what we needed to do to survive, and it worked brilliantly, but now we need new understandings to thrive.
Here is the general anatomy of a block: Circumstances trigger thoughts. Thoughts cause emotions. Emotions cause actions and actions cause results. These results provide evidence that our thoughts about our circumstances are true. This self-fulfilling loops keeps us from seeing and living in Divine Reality. Clearing, Connecting and Curiosity are all facets of the process of Energy Checking that help us purify this whole erroneous self-created loop so we are able to perceive Divine Reality and Its operation in our lives.
You can clear thoughts, emotions and actions, which all have an energetic component to work with. As I said above, with practice you’ll become more sensitized and will develop precision in perceiving what exactly needs to be cleared. This honed ability is what leads to your being able to do very targeted inner-session work to clean up glitches in your story line so that what’s left is an understanding of how Love was/is operating in your life.
My first instinct here was to create a mega list of all the clearing tools I’m familiar with, but I started getting overwhelmed (not only with the lens of whiteness through which I learned them, but the sheer amount of options) just thinking about it. So I decided to start with the handful of tools I relied most heavily on in the early stages of my journey with learning how to energetically clear debilitating emotions. So here we go:
LITERALLY SPEAK IT. As stated above, setting and stating an intention to release whatever isn’t serving you is simple and powerful. Have this spoken intention infuse whatever action feels right in the moment: Speak this intention out loud as you take a shower, walk through the woods, pray, tidy an area of your home, angrily pound the pavement with your feet, or cry it out. This intention sets you on the path of discernment and specificity in the clearing process. This will come with persistent practice over time.
IMAGINE IT FLOWING. The exercise of running earth energy through your entire system and releasing it back down to the earth through imagined branches sprouting from your head is very cleansing and feels great. This is a part of the grounding, centering shielding exercise you can listen to here.
The simplicity of these two practices can fool our minds into thinking they’re ineffective. A return to the experience of the practice reminds us this isn’t true.
USE EMOTIONAL FREEDOM TECHNIQUE (EFT). Tapping helps emotional energy move and be processed out through the body. Here’s the deal: procrastination is less about avoiding doing a certain task and more about avoiding THE FEELINGS associated with the task (for more information, read this great article here). Imagine these feelings as physical objects that impede our forward movement and even block our ability to see the path in front of us.
Here is an abridged version of tapping you can use to face and dissolve those feelings. Give it a try: identify something you’re procrastinating. Notice the discomfort you feel thinking about it. Give the intensity of this feeling a number, 1-10. By staking this flag in your shifting internal landscape, you’ll be able to see where you’ve traveled. Start to give words to the feeling as if you were telling your best friend about it. While you talk out loud expressing your discomfort and naming the feelings, start to tap up and down your spine from the nape of your neck down to your tailbone. If you can’t reach the middle of your back, use a wooden spoon to reach those areas. Your energetic meridian lines run from your spine to different places all over your body. Rather than remembering a sequence of points in different places on your face and body, without much thinking, you can run through all these same points along your spine. The action of tapping your energetic meridian lines both releases what no longer serves you and helps strengthen what is true. Check back in with the intensity of the feeling. Has it changed? As you tap and rant and check in on the intensity from time to time (what number is it now?) you will notice the discomfort dissipating. Notice that as this emotional obstacle dissolves you are better able to see the way ahead. What are you open to now that you couldn’t see before? Name it: “I am open to….” This begins to replace the void created by what you’ve released with what is more true. Notice your relationship with the thing you were previously avoiding. How has it changed?
You did it! You cleared an emotional block that was weighing you down and tripping you up! You experienced increased clarity and internal freedom for maybe even just a little moment. Don’t get discouraged if you soon feel clouded over again. You’re building your capacity to hold the awareness of your true nature for longer and longer. Not to overwhelm, but just like in cleaning a room there are many phases and tasks that all contribute to you being able to really enjoy and benefit from your space. It takes a while to get a room to the point where its beauty and functionality are revealed, AND there is a system to keep it that way. I mean, think about everything that goes into making a room feel GREAT: everything needs to be picked up; everything needs a place assigned to it; what is no longer needed has to be sold, given away or thrown out; a system needs to be in place for using something and putting it back; cleaning needs to happen regularly and not to mention arranging and beautifying the space in a way that resonates with who you are now. The only way these things happen is one step at a time.
EXPLORE THE EMOTION CODE. Once you’re really humming with your Energy Checking practice (and the more you clear, the more you’ll be able to trust your Energy Checking), the Emotion Code is a great tool for identifying trapped emotions that may not be as easily identified by your conscious mind. You can download the flow charts and instructions here. I use this as a part of my inner session journaling. I freewrite, Julia Cameron/Artist Way-style, asking questions, Energy Checking answers, and, when the time is right, use the Emotion Code list to Energy Check trapped emotions that can be released with Divine assistance (Divine Teachers! Holy Spirit! Archangels! Light Beings! The Concourse on High! Ancestors! Your Guides! --just ask for their support) and a magnet that you run over the top of your head. It’s uncanny how often the emotions I’m guided to release are related to what I was working through in the rest of my inner session. I’ve also noticed I start yawning profusely as these trapped emotions get released. I’m left with an increased sense of lightness, clarity and sense of the presence of Love working in my life.
So that’s me! I would love to hear what you are currently using that’s working for you.