Clear Home, Clear Heart

by Jean Haner

  Ask: “Is there anything to clear in Metal?” If “yes,” clear; if “no,” continue on to do the next two steps.

  Clear for Integration.

  Clear for Grounding.

  End with a quiet conversation with the other person, sharing what you each may have thought about, felt, or sensed as you worked. Explain how they might feel in the hours afterward.

  NOTE: You can watch a brief demonstration of a clearing at www.jeanhaner.com/clearingvideos.

  Congratulations—you’ve learned how to bring a person’s energy back into balance! But remember, it’s not just people that can carry stress. Each of us lives and works in places that can hold stuck or imbalanced energy that can affect how we feel there. So now we turn to clearing the energy of environments!

  chapter 7

  Emotions Can Linger in a Space

  * * *

  One of the very first professional space clearings I did was for Monique, a single woman in a severely cluttered bungalow. There were so many belongings stacked everywhere that she could open the front door only a crack to let me in, and we had to navigate narrow paths in the hallways to squeeze between the piles and boxes.

  My first thought as I entered was, This is ridiculous. This woman doesn’t need a space clearing. She needs someone to pull a gigantic Dumpster up to her house and shovel all this stuff out. I tried to talk her out of the clearing, saying that I thought her first step should be to bring in an organizer to deal with the clutter, and then I’d be happy to come back to do the space clearing. I didn’t want to take her money for something that would have little effect. But Monique insisted, saying she’d considered that but her intuition told her this was the necessary first step. So we sat down and I asked about what her experience there had been.

  Monique told me that she and her husband had bought the house seven years ago, right after they were married. They’d gotten a great deal because it had been a run-down rental house previously occupied by a motorcycle gang. In fact, the neighbors informed her that there’d been such violent fights at the house, the police were often called in to break them up!

  Within a few months of moving in, Monique and her husband began arguing more frequently, and then he started hitting her. He’d never acted this way before, but he became increasingly physical with her. After three years, the marriage ended in divorce. Since that time, she’d fallen into depression, and the clutter began to grow. So unhappy in her job that she could barely force herself to go to work each day, she craved a new direction but felt stuck and hopeless.

  The energy in the house was palpably heavy; it was like trying to walk underwater. As I did the space clearing, I felt shifts in the flow but was still doubtful this would have much impact, considering all the clutter crammed in every room. At the end, I did a personal clearing for Monique as well, and I felt her sincere desire to move beyond all this stuckness. Still, I left that day feeling guilty that I’d let her pay me anything because I couldn’t imagine my work would have much impact.

  Two weeks later, she called me and said, “Jean, I just had to let you know what happened after your clearing. The very next morning, my doorbell rang and there stood my two best friends, and in the driveway was one of those huge industrial Dumpsters. They said they couldn’t stand seeing me or my house this way anymore, so they’d paid to have the Dumpster brought in, and they were going to help me shovel out my house!”

  So my very first impression as I arrived, which I had never mentioned to Monique, immediately manifested after the clearing! She went on to tell me that a few days after emptying out her house, she bought a lottery ticket on a whim and won $25,000. The next day, she realized what she really wanted to do was be a massage therapist, and this money would let her quit her job and go to school. She was actually calling me on the way to the airport because she was giving herself a celebratory vacation in Hawaii first!

  Talk about energy moving! What most likely had happened is that the disturbed energy of the former renters influenced how she and her husband felt in the space, creating an atmosphere that supported arguments, if not worse. The clutter that had built up was a visual reflection of the thick fog of emotions that had accumulated in the space from the gang members’ personalities as well as Monique and her husband’s problems, let alone whoever had lived in the house previously.

  Of course, we can never know for sure if the space clearing had any part in her transformation, but I’ve seen so many seemingly “magical” breakthroughs like this over the years that I’ve come to trust this work. It’s not about magic but simply how effortlessly things can unfold once the energy returns to balance.

  And that’s what space clearing is all about. Just like a personal clearing brings an individual’s energy fields back into balance, the same thing can be done for an environment.

  The Residue of Emotions Left in Your Space Affects How You Feel There

  The energy of your surroundings affects you on many levels. Over time, in any building, the qi (energy) can become stagnant or stressed. When that happens, it can keep you stuck in life or be a detrimental influence on you mentally, emotionally, and even physically.

  One thing that could make the energy in a space become this way is the accumulated effect of the thoughts and emotions you have as you live there. Each time you have a feeling, you make a little imprint of that vibration in your environment. Over time, these gradually build up to form layers of energetic residue, like invisible house dust, that then begin to affect how easily the qi can move through the space.

  When energy can’t flow freely, stagnation occurs, and your own energy can start to become sluggish as well. Physically, it could make you feel increasingly lethargic. Mentally, it can interfere with your clarity of mind. Emotionally, it can block your natural optimism and can even contribute to depression. Stagnation in your space can be part of why you feel stuck in life overall.

  Your feelings get imprinted in your surroundings. The thoughts and feelings you have just in the course of your normal daily life are enough to build up and eventually block the qi flow. But the quality of those vibrations also matter. If you have repeated feelings of anxiety and worry, or frequent negative and self-defeating thoughts, those don’t just affect your inner world. They set up a resonance in your outer world as well and increase the likelihood that you’ll get locked into feeling like that again each time you’re in the space.

  For example, when I’m doing a space clearing, I often find an area of stressed energy in front of the kitchen sink. This is where people often stand for a while as they prepare a meal or put dishes in the dishwasher and, at the same time, run that repeating loop of rumination inside their heads. It may be frustration with their spouse, or worry about their child, or resentment about co-workers, or all of the above and then some. People often tend to think about the same issues day after day, week after week, so an invisible fog holding that information gradually develops in that spot. Then every time they stand there, they’re triggered to have those same feelings again, like a vicious cycle.

  So as you live your everyday life, you repeatedly broadcast those same vibrations out into your environment and alter its energy. And if you have an intense experience, such as a heated argument or an upset in a certain spot in the house, it can embed that one feeling there. Even though it may have been a single event, if the magnitude of the emotion felt there is powerful enough, it can linger to affect you each time you’re in that place again.

  For instance, Leah had a horrible fight with her boyfriend as he broke up with her. It took place as they sat on her living room couch, and from that point on, every time she was on the couch, she’d melt into tears as feelings of sadness and betrayal overwhelmed her. Because Leah’s habit was to head for the couch after dinner, she was spending every evening lost in her pain, far more so than if she wasn’t sitting in the spot where the breakup happened. It was keeping her locked in to reexperiencing the original shock and hurt.

  When I cleared Leah’s hous
e, the anguish held in the couch was acute. I wasn’t surprised to then hear her explain what had happened there. But I felt the painful feelings clear beautifully, and Leah reported afterward that she could now sit on the couch without any tears coming. In fact, she felt her heart was healing enough that she was about to have her first date since the breakup.

  Previous Occupants’ Energy Also Leaves Invisible Clutter

  So your stress can build up in your environment like invisible clutter, but the energy from past occupants of a space can also leave a residue there as well. Who lived in your house before you? Did they have a difficult relationship that could have left negativity lingering there to affect how your marriage goes? Was someone an emotional eater, leaving the imprints of their constant cravings in the house, which can then influence your own discipline with food? You have your own problems—why live in a house infused with the issues of the previous owners too?

  One space clearing I did exemplified how this residual energy can affect businesses as well as homes. I was brought in by a company that had grown so fast, they had to move into a new, larger headquarters much earlier than expected. They told me they attributed their quick success to the warm and supportive relationships among the staff. Everyone felt such a camaraderie together—until they landed in these new offices. Then, they said, people suddenly started “stabbing each other in the back,” and “staff meetings turned into bloodbaths.” Business took a nosedive as a result.

  When I arrived to do the space clearing, I could tell that management was immediately relieved to see that I showed up in a suit and heels, carrying a clipboard. (I think they half-expected me to wear veils and dance around with incense!) The nice thing about doing this work is that once you’re proficient, you can simply walk through a place and clear it without anyone knowing. So instead of employees wondering what the heck is going on, I can be introduced as a “space planner” if necessary. I walk around with my clipboard, making notes as if planning a new interior design; in fact, I’m actually clearing imbalances as I sense them. And, wow, was I sensing them there from the moment I arrived!

  This company’s century-old building was full of energetic disturbances, far more than I’d expect even for such an old place. I sat down for a brief interview with the CEO and asked if he knew what the building had been used for prior to their moving in. He said, “Oh yeah, it used to be a pig slaughterhouse. If you look under the rug, you’ll find the channels they carved into the floor to let the blood flow out. We just put down the carpeting, brought in the desks, and got to work!” Oh my. So the decades upon decades of knives, blood, fear, and death had left a deep imprint, creating a psychic atmosphere supporting “backstabbing” and “bloodbaths”! Fortunately, this energy cleared surprisingly easily; as often happens, it felt to me as if the stress was yearning to be released.

  The greater the length of time that emotions are felt repeatedly in a space—whether it’s due to the experience of violence or, more commonly, just your own daily stresses and anxieties—the more the energy will lose its healthy flow. If you move into a brand-new house, there will be little of this buildup. Sure, some of the construction workers’ personal “stuff” might remain, and perhaps a little of the real estate agents’ or potential buyers’ qi could linger there. However, because these weren’t people relaxing and sinking into their private feelings as people do at home, there won’t be much residue. But if you move into a house that had previous owners, or if you’ve lived in your home for more than a few years, there are layers and layers of “psychic house dust” that can stress your system or tire you out. And if there’s a history of more traumatic experiences in a building, the people in the space will be more severely affected, as was the case with the business in the old slaughterhouse.

  The imprint of the emotions experienced in your surroundings is one important aspect that we work with in an energy clearing. So let’s move on to see how to clear the energy in a space!

  chapter 8

  How to Clear the Residue of Emotions Held in a Space

  * * *

  When you first start a space clearing, it can be helpful to just get a general “read” on the overall quality of the energy in the place. You can do this by using your pendulum to check on how much “yin” energy and how much “yang” there is in the space as a whole.

  You may be familiar with the concept of yin and yang, with yin energy being more quiet, internal, still; and yang being more active, external, in motion. There are always both yin and yang qualities to everything, just in different measures. For instance, some people seem more yin: introverted, quiet, and shy. Others appear more yang: extroverted, talkative, and sociable. But all of us and everything in nature have both yin and yang in a certain ratio.

  The energy of an environment also has certain amounts of yin and yang. It’s the yang energy that gives you the get-up-and-go vitality to leave your bed in the morning and head off to work. The yin energy helps you to relax and rest, as well as stay in touch with your emotional side. In general, the ideal ratio for most homes is about 60 percent yang energy and 40 percent yin because a little more yang energy helps you stay alert and get things done.

  However, as you have your daily emotions in the space, the balance of yin and yang in your home can change. Most emotions are yin, which means that as the residue left from your feelings naturally builds up over time, the percentage of yin in the space rises. Instead of 40 percent yin, the environment slowly rises to 45, 50, 55, or 60 percent yin, or more. The result can be that it’s harder to get out of bed in the morning, and once you get home at night, all you can do is sink into the couch and watch TV till bedtime. You can feel lethargic, unmotivated, and stuck, and eventually this can support depression or even illness.

  It’s certainly possible for an environment to be overly yang instead. The two most common causes for this are frequent episodes of intense anger or violence in the space over time, or earth energies that have become stressed. (We’ll talk about earth energies in Chapter 9.) If the place has too much yang qi, you may find you can’t sit still or relax, or your sleep is disturbed. You might also be working constantly or often get caught up in frustration or anger.

  Checking the Balance of Yin and Yang in a Space

  So one of the first things we do in a space clearing is use the pendulum to find out what the ratio of yin to yang is in this space. To start, hold your pendulum over your palm to check to see if you’re switched. If you’re in balance, then ask, “Is the energy in this space more yin than yang?”

  If you get a “yes,” you then determine just how high the yin percentage is. I find you get the most accurate answer by counting backward until you get a “yes.”

  For example, ask: “Is it 100 percent yin?” Most likely your pendulum will say “no” because it’s virtually impossible for a place to be completely yin! You then continue counting down by 10 until you get a “yes.”

  “Is it 90 percent or more yin?” “No.”

  “Is it 80 percent or more yin?” “No.”

  “Is it 70 percent or more yin?” “No.”

  “Is it 60 percent or more yin?” “Yes.”

  So you now know that the yin energy in this place is somewhere between 60 and 70 percent. You don’t have to continue on to calculate the exact percentage because that’s not really important. Knowing the range is enough to alert you to just how much of the clearing will probably be to release emotional disturbances.

  A New Tool to Use for Space Clearing!

  In addition to a pendulum, there’s a second tool to use in space clearing: a dowsing rod. You may have seen pictures of someone using dowsing rods to look for underground water so they can find the best place to dig a well, but that’s not the only way they can be used. A dowsing rod is simply a tool you can use to locate something unseen in an environment. In our work with space clearing, we use a dowsing rod to locate different kinds of energy in a space.

  People have been using dowsing rods for thousands of
years. Egyptian carvings dating back to the times of the pyramids show images of men dowsing with sticks. There were dowsers in ancient China. In medieval Europe, miners used the rods to find precious metals underground. In modern times, the U.S. military even used dowsing during the Vietnam War to locate underground tunnels dug by the Vietcong. Albert Einstein, who was also a dowser, wrote, “The dowsing rod is a simple instrument which shows the reaction of the human nervous system to certain factors which are unknown to us at this time.”

  If you’ve seen pictures of people dowsing, you probably noticed they used two rods, one in each hand. For instance, if someone was dowsing for water, they’d walk holding the rods in front of them. When the rods turned toward each other to form an “X” shape, that meant they were standing on a spot where they could successfully dig their well. But in fact, you don’t need two rods in order to dowse for something. You can get the same result by holding one rod; when it turns, you know you’ve found what you’ve been looking for. So when you do a space clearing, you need only one dowsing rod, not two. This is convenient because it gives you one hand free to hold your pendulum, which you’ll also use in space clearing.

  Just like your pendulum, a dowsing rod is a simple tool; it has no magical or mystical powers! It’s usually just an L-shaped metal rod as shown in the following image.

  A dowsing rod

  You can make a dowsing rod out of a metal clothes hanger or any bendable metal, such as a thin, 12-inch length of welding rod from a hardware store. You may want to start out with a simple homemade dowsing rod, so you can jump into learning right now. In the long run, however, just for ease of use, it’s better to get one that’s been deliberately made for dowsing. (I’ve listed Resources in the back of this book to help you.)