Clear Home, Clear Heart

by Jean Haner

  Remember to ask the friend you’re clearing to also quietly stay aware of how they’re feeling during the session; this will help them possibly notice things shifting, which can be encouraging for them. Sometimes they’ll have similar sensations to those you’re feeling, and that can be inspiring for both of you. But it’s also not unusual for them to feel nothing at all; again, that doesn’t impact the effectiveness of the clearing. Even if neither of you feels anything, the clearing is happening. Energy is invisible, subtle, and silent, and for most people, it takes training and practice to sense its movements. As you do more clearings, you’ll gain more and more awareness in this way.

  Before we talk about how to personally deal with the sensations you may have during a clearing, let’s first discuss how you should share them with the person you are clearing. Then, in Chapter 6, we’ll discuss when during a clearing you should share your feelings and how the actual process of that might go.

  How to Share Your Intuitive Impressions

  As you do this work and increase your ability to drop into an open, receptive state, your intuitive channels can really start to open up as well. But intuitive information usually isn’t so kind as to give you a nice crisp, clear message! Instead, you may glimpse a fleeting image in your mind’s eye or hear a few vague words, and it can be difficult to know what to make of that. As a result, you can get caught up in trying to analyze things, or expect your friend to know and explain to you what this means, which usually isn’t possible.

  The more you turn toward intuitive impressions and relax into them to welcome them, the more you’ll develop your ability to get a better sense of the message coming through. Eventually these impressions will become like a trail of breadcrumbs you can follow to get to a deeper meaning.

  So if you receive intuitive impressions during the clearing, don’t get too caught up in trying to make sense of them. In most cases, the information is about something to do with the other person, not you. If you try to interpret what comes to mind, you’re probably running it through the filter of your own personality and life experiences, so what comes out ends up being meaningless for your friend.

  In other words, if you get an image of a rabbit, that might bring up pleasant memories of the Easter Bunny, or it might make you remember that you’ve been wanting to spend more time out in nature. On the other hand, the person you’re clearing may have had a pet bunny as a child and what was releasing had to do with what was happening in their life at that time. The best action is to simply describe any feelings or impressions as raw information, without trying to make sense of it, because your interpretation might make it unrecognizable to them—just tell them you had an image of a rabbit!

  It’s best not to instruct your friend to figure out what your impressions mean either. For one thing, that puts them into their head to analyze things, which is not what we want. We want people to stay with their feelings even after the clearing because that allows their system to continue to process and relax into this new energy. Another reason is that you might be completely wrong about what you sensed! After all, no one is a clear channel. This is so essential to remember because some people too easily go into fear. If you tell your friend that you saw an airplane in your mind’s eye and ask what they think it means, they may immediately decide that they should cancel their upcoming trip! You never want to leave someone with fearful feelings.

  Be aware that many people will be looking for some “story” to explain things, and it can be tempting to give them one! One workshop student did a clearing where she got an image of teetering on the edge of a cliff and feeling frightened. The emotions associated with this vision were so strong, she felt sure this must be a memory of a past life for the person she was clearing. She ended up telling the woman that she’d been a princess in a past life hundreds of years ago and had thrown herself off a cliff because she was being forced to marry someone she didn’t love! Yet if the student had just conveyed the image and feelings she got, it would have made sense to the woman she was clearing, who had been anguishing over a life-changing decision and had literally been saying to herself that she felt as though she were teetering on the edge of a cliff!

  For all these reasons, when I work with someone, I tell them, “As I’m clearing, I sometimes feel sensations, or emotions, or get intuitive impressions. If I do, I’ll share the information with you. But if this happens, each of us has a different job to do. My job is to share the raw data and not try to interpret what it might mean so that my own personal filter doesn’t affect things. If you can’t relate to it, your job is to not try to make it fit just because I said it!

  “What I sense could just be how my own system is experiencing something releasing in your energy field, or I could have misunderstood an impression due to its vagueness. Or it could be predictive, and something may happen two weeks in the future that completely relates to what I described during the clearing.”

  It’s a wonderful side benefit of clearing that intuitive information can come through, but what’s most important is that clearing is happening! There will be many powerful releases in their energy, so remember that and don’t try to turn this into a psychic reading.

  How to Deal with What You Feel Physically

  Most of the time, if you do sense something physically as you’re clearing someone, it’ll be small and fleeting. For example, you may feel a tingle somewhere in your body, or you just feel “different” for a few seconds. Or it may be a more obvious and distinct physical sensation. Whether the feeling is barely discernible or quite pronounced, this is basically just information. In other words, it’s how your system is noticing the energy that’s coming up to be cleared. That tingle is just a sensation in response to what’s clearing; it’s not that there’s anything wrong with your body.

  One way to help us understand this is to compare it to all the other ways we get “information” in everyday life with our regular five senses. For instance, let’s say you go to visit a friend, and when you walk in her front door, you smell curry. So you know she probably just cooked a curry dinner. You don’t freak out and run away, thinking a problem in her house has made something go terribly wrong with your nose! It’s just that one of your senses has let you know about some information in that environment.

  When you have a physical sensation during a clearing, it’s just information that your system has noticed. Once you leave your friend’s house, you won’t be smelling curry any longer, and once you finish a clearing, you won’t still be feeling tingly! It wasn’t “yours”; it was something releasing from the other person’s energy field, and this was how you experienced it.

  There are two main reasons you may feel something physically during a clearing: One is that it’s how your body is reacting to the energy as it clears. The second is that there’s some stress that’s been locked into that part of the other person’s body, and you’re feeling it shift and release. So if, for instance, you felt a little contraction in your throat as you cleared your friend, you have a few options about what to say:

  1. Simply describe the sensation you had, and make sure to add that this could just be how your system was experiencing what was clearing and it might have had nothing to do with their throat at all.

  2. Explain that a difficult emotion or memory can get stuck in ways that affect certain parts of the body that have nothing to do with illness. For instance, a contracting sensation in the throat might actually be related to a struggle with feeling like they can’t speak up. If you find that your friend relates to that, it can make the clearing even more meaningful for you both and open up a deeper conversation.

  3. Decide not to mention what you felt in your throat. Just because you felt something, it doesn’t mean you are required to share it with your friend. If they’re the kind of person who’s anxious or tends to make mountains out of molehills, it may not be helpful to give them an opportunity for something new to worry about!

  If you decide to describe a sensation in a clearing to a
nother person, be very aware that it’s easy for them to begin to worry they have some disease and you are feeling its “symptoms.” If they can’t relate to the sensation you describe, assure them this is just how your system is experiencing the clearing so they don’t go into unnecessary fear.

  How to Understand Emotions You May Feel

  It’s not unusual to feel some emotions pass through your awareness as you’re doing a clearing. For instance, a wave of sadness or frustration may come up, or you may suddenly feel lonely. These feelings are likely associated with what’s releasing for your friend. It’s essential to recognize them as just signs of energy moving, as some information you’ve tuned in to during the clearing process.

  It can be both fascinating and deeply moving to have the experience of actually sensing another person’s feelings: in other words, true empathy. But there’s a distinction between feeling an emotion and getting lost in it. If you tune in to your friend’s sadness about their divorce, it can be too easy to get caught up in feeling so sorry for them—or to remember your own divorce and then get personally flooded with emotion. If either of those things happens, it’s like falling out of the boat into the water. You become so awash in the feeling that you start to drown in it, and then you’re no longer in balance and available to clear.

  Imagine a doctor treating a patient in crisis: They don’t get caught up in their patient’s panic or stressed by their own painful memory about a time they suffered. They maintain a calm attitude, being compassionately present but not letting their own emotions run away with them. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to make good decisions about the treatment.

  Another example that might help is to imagine the scenario of a parent and child. Suppose you’ve taken your child to play in the park, and the child falls down or has a fright. They come running to you, shrieking and crying, and what do you do? Do you also freak out and scream and cry as well? Of course not! It’s not that you don’t care; in fact, your heart goes out to them, and you want to make them feel better. But you know that in order to do that, you can’t get upset; and you know there’s actually nothing to be upset about. So you scoop them up and embrace them with a calm, loving energy, and that’s what allows them to let go of that terrified state and come back into balance.

  When you’re doing a clearing, you don’t have a detached attitude. You feel genuine empathy and compassion for the other person, but you maintain “nonattachment”: you don’t get swept up in their drama or let it trigger your own. You hold a caring presence and stay mindful that the clearing is bringing healing to the situation. I love the way Russell Targ and Jane Katra describe this kind of “presence” in their book Miracles of Mind:

  The practice of quieting one’s mental noise and creating coherence with a patient allows a healer’s caring intentions and state of consciousness to become an avenue of this spiritual healing. . . . A healer’s prayerful state makes available a type of “healing template,” which appears to activate a patient’s own self-healing capabilities. . . . It is actually an information transaction, involving a relationship in which need, helping intentions, and quiet minds are the important elements. . . .

  The basis of this spiritual healing resides in an attitude of openness and attunement to a greater universal mind, working through a person with helping intentions, in an environment of trust and surrender of personal ego.

  There’s an even greater and more profound benefit that comes from paying attention to what you feel when you clear someone. It not only develops your ability to bring balance and flow to another person’s life but also simultaneously trains your system to respond to your own life in a completely new way, to let go of your stress the moment it appears. You’re learning how to relate to all your experiences without going into reaction in your usual ways. With each clearing that you do, you create a more spacious and peaceful place for you to stand within your own life. (We’ll talk more about this in Part III.)

  A Note for Highly Sensitive People

  If you identify as highly sensitive, you might worry that it could be too intense an experience for you to open up and connect with another person’s energy. You’re already feeling too much, for heaven’s sake, and the last thing you want is to feel more and be put into overwhelm!

  In fact, this work doesn’t expose your system to anything new at all. What you’re actually doing is something you’ve already been experiencing 24/7 for your entire life. Whether you’ve been aware of it or not, you’ve always been open to the energy of other people, but without the ability to turn it off. Now, with clearing, you’ll still be open but you’ll be doing it with conscious control.

  The truth is that learning to clear is like being given the solution to finally managing your sensitivity and not being so inundated by the information around you. You now have a way to clear anything that you’ve taken on, and through learning to do this work, you’re developing the ability to become immediately aware when something you’re feeling is “not yours.” Just having that mindful moment can keep you from being impacted by it.

  There’s one more amazing gift that this work brings to sensitive people. What I’ve found is that learning to use the pendulum to do clearings gives you an “on/off” button. In other words, your system gets trained so that when you pick up your pendulum, you’re “on”—open for business, available to the energy around you. When you put down your pendulum, that’s the signal to your system that you’re “off”—closed for business and with reestablished boundaries. You have gained conscious control of your energy system—and this may well be the very first time in your life that you have the experience of actually turning off your sensitivity!

  Within just a few weeks of developing this new skill, what you’ve learned can start to click into place in your everyday life. You don’t have to walk around holding a pendulum all day. Just through the practice of clearing, you gain an automatic ability to open and close to the world around you as needed. With time, you can even refine that control so that you’re not just open or closed but instead can choose to open up 20 percent to the information around you, or 85 percent, or whatever is appropriate to the situation.

  Learning clearing teaches your system how to develop healthy energetic boundaries and how to feel safe again, to walk through the world without being overwhelmed by everything that you feel. I’ve had so many highly sensitive people tell me over the years that this work has changed their lives—and I can certainly relate.

  If You Don’t Think of Yourself as Sensitive

  Of course, you don’t have to be a highly sensitive person to be affected by other people’s energy! It happens to all of us every day. (Remember what we discussed in Chapter 1 about how we’re all affected by the invisible energy around us?) If you’re in a staff meeting and you start feeling depressed, well, it may be your depression or it may be that the person sitting next to you is broadcasting their depressed feeling. Here you are, minding your own business, and suddenly your mood plummets.

  In normal life, we usually don’t realize when an emotion has infiltrated from somewhere else. If we start to feel depressed, of course we identify that feeling as ours. Then as our mind and body believe it, we can become depressed. Oh, what’s the use, life is hard, nothing ever works out . . . If you’re around depressed people every day, it’s possible to take those feelings as yours and sink deeper and deeper into them.

  As you learn to do this work and start to sense subtle things happening during a clearing, you’re training your system to recognize when a feeling belongs to someone else and to then respond to it in a new way. Very soon, if you get slammed with a depressed feeling, you might immediately say to yourself, “Whoa, that’s not mine!” Often, that awareness is enough to keep you from absorbing it; you don’t have to quickly pull out your pendulum and clear! Then that feeling goes wandering off to look for someone who will believe it’s theirs.

  How Long It Takes to Clear Each Field

  Usually, it takes only a few
minutes to clear any of the fields. But when you’re first learning, it’s not unusual for one of two things to happen: clearing a field can take just a few moments or it can seem to take forever!

  If you clear one of the fields in about five seconds, it’s not that you’re the world’s best energy worker or that the person is highly enlightened and has little that needs to be released! More likely, your lack of confidence interfered with your ability to relax and be present. It’s normal to have some performance anxiety in the early stages of learning anything. Alternatively, you could have been trying so hard to “help,” to make things better, you were no longer in clearing mode and were unable to maintain a calm and neutral state of mind. When these kinds of situations happen, your pendulum can change its swing to indicate you’re finished soon after you’ve started, or even just cease moving at all. This reflects that you’ve stopped being able to clear, not that there is nothing left to clear.

  Or the opposite might happen—your pendulum could keep swinging and swinging and not change its motion, so that 15 minutes later, the clearing in this field seems to be still going on! This could be an indication that you were doubting yourself, or trying too hard, or tightly concentrating on technique. In cases like these, you’re not actually still clearing; you’re back up in your head, and your pendulum is spinning just like your thoughts.

  It’s common in the early stages to have things like this happen. No worries—it’s not a problem. As is the case with any skill, there’s a learning curve here. So if clearing DEOs finishes in a flash or seems to go on forever, just take a relaxing breath and begin again. With a little more experience, these things won’t happen any longer. It’ll take a few minutes to clear the field, and your pendulum will accurately indicate when you’re done.