Clear Home, Clear Heart

by Jean Haner

  How to Hold Your Dowsing Rod

  Just like with the pendulum, you need to learn how to use your dowsing rod. Here are some basic guidelines:

  1. Hold it in a firm but relaxed fashion. Make sure you’re not grasping it too tightly because when you use it, the rod will need to turn to point in different directions. If you’re clenching it in a death grip, it won’t be able to swing freely!

  2. Place your thumb very lightly on the top of the rod, right at the place where the bend is. But don’t press down hard with your thumb—again, that would prevent it from moving from side to side.

  3. Hold the rod out in front of you just a bit, like you see in the following image. Always keep the dowsing rod pointing straight forward. You can think of it as if you’re pointing a flashlight in front of you, trying to find your way in the dark.

  Using a dowsing rod

  4. Hold the rod parallel to the ground or else pointing just ever so slightly downward. If you point it up, it will tend to flop off to one side.

  Now you’ll learn how to use the rod to explore your environment. Just like the pendulum, the rod responds to the question you’re holding in your mind. In other words, it needs to know what you’re looking for. Practice by finding the flow of the energy in your house with the following two exercises.

  Exercise: Discover If the Qi Is Coming into Your House

  In feng shui, the front door of your house is called “the mouth of qi.” It’s where the flow of nourishing energy enters your space to feed its life-force, just like your mouth is where food enters your body. If a space is in a healthy state, there will be a good flow of qi coming through the front door. But if there’s stagnation or a buildup of stress held in the house, it can reduce or even block the qi from entering. So one early indicator of the health of a space is to use your dowsing rod to check if there is qi coming in your front door. Here’s how to do it:

  1. Stand inside your house to one side of the front door. (It doesn’t have to be open.)

  2. Hold the dowsing rod in front of you with the point facing forward.

  3. Tell yourself, I’m looking for the qi flowing in through the door.

  4. Walk slowly, parallel to the door, keeping that thought in mind.

  5. As you pass by the doorway, you should see your rod begin to turn to point into the house. If so, you’ve located the energy flowing in!

  Qi coming in the front door.

  You can think of it as if there’s a stream coming in through the front door, and as the rod came into contact with it, the current made it turn in the direction the water is flowing. (You can see a video demonstrating how to do this exercise at www.jeanhaner.com/clearingvideos.)

  If you find qi coming into your home, that doesn’t mean the space doesn’t need clearing! But it is a sign that at least you’re getting some nourishment from your environment.

  If your rod doesn’t turn but instead continues to point straight ahead as you pass by the front door, that means there is no qi coming in. This is usually an indication that there’s so much stress or residue built up, it’s blocking energy from coming in to support you in your home. In that case, you may even be using up some of your own personal qi to boost the vitality of the space—and this is not what we want! The space should be nourishing you rather than the other way around.

  Exercise: Follow the Flow of Qi in Your Home

  Even if your rod doesn’t turn at the front door, it doesn’t mean there’s no qi in your house! There will still be some energy flowing in the space. So now you’ll learn how to locate it.

  1. Choose a room in your house and hold the dowsing rod out in front of you as you’ve just learned to do. Tell yourself, I’m looking for the qi flow. Start to walk very slowly through the room.

  2. After a few steps, you may notice that the rod turns slightly. If it does, you should turn your body to follow it, positioning yourself so that the rod is still pointing forward, straight ahead of you. In other words, always keep the rod at a 90-degree angle to your body. If the rod starts to point to the left or right, move your body to follow, to keep the rod always pointing in front of you. (You can watch a brief video that shows you exactly how to move with the rod at www.jeanhaner.com/clearingvideos.)

  3. If the rod curves off in a certain direction, what’s happening is that it’s showing you how the qi is moving through the space. Keep walking while you hold in mind, I’m looking for the qi flow; the rod should take you on a looping journey throughout the room!

  When the qi flow is healthy, it moves in curves throughout the space, and it goes everywhere in the room. There should not be an area of the room where the rod doesn’t end up taking you.

  Healthy qi flow in a room.

  Do this exercise a few times until it feels natural to you. Common mistakes are:

  Walking too slowly. If you’re extremely slow or tentative, the rod won’t be responsive. Relax and try a slightly faster speed of moving through the room.

  Walking too fast. If you move too quickly, the rod won’t have a chance to turn. Slow down and keep your eyes on the rod; as you see it change direction, turn to follow.

  Getting distracted. If your mind wanders, you’re no longer focused on the thought, I’m looking for the qi flow. If you start thinking about what to make for dinner, the rod will wander just like your thoughts. With dowsing, the secret to getting the right answer is asking the right question! In other words, keep your mind focused on what you’re looking for and don’t let your attention stray.

  Just like with any new skill, it takes some practice before it becomes second nature. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you won’t have to concentrate so much, and the dowsing rod will feel like it’s part of you!

  Clearing Emotional Residue

  If some emotional stress is held in the room, your dowsing rod won’t take you in graceful curves around the space. Instead, when it locates a spot holding some stress, it’ll usually turn in a tight spiral, meaning you’ll also end up spiraling around as you follow it.

  If this happens, congratulations! You’ve found your first area to clear. It’s a place where the qi is no longer flowing in a healthy manner but instead has become disturbed. Perhaps it’s where someone had a fright years ago, and the intensity of that emotion embedded itself there. Or maybe it’s where you sit when you pay your bills and have unknowingly downloaded some worry into the environment repeatedly over time. But you can clear it and then the energy will flow freely again.

  Here’s how to clear emotional residue held in a room:

  1. Use your dowsing rod to follow the qi flow in the room until the rod turns in a spiral. (You can see an example in a video at www.jeanhaner.com/clearingvideos.)

  If you’re curious about the origin of this disturbance, you can ask your pendulum, “Is this from previous occupants of this space?” If you get a “no,” then ask, “Is this from one of the current occupants?” You can even ask what kind of emotion is held there, such as anger, fear, anxiety, etc. However, you don’t have to get details about the cause; you can simply go ahead and clear it.

  2. Stand on or near the spot, holding your pendulum. Check over your palm to make sure you’re not switched. If your system is in balance, you can proceed.

  3. Tell yourself you’re going to clear the stress held in this one spot. And then, just like when you do a personal clearing for someone, your pendulum will start swinging.

  4. While the pendulum is in motion, just hold the thought in mind that you’re clearing this disturbance.

  5. Stay aware of how you’re feeling—just like when you’re clearing a person, you might get some impressions that have to do with the energy that’s being released. For example, if some anxiety is imprinted in the environment, then as it’s clearing, you might feel anxious or start breathing more shallowly. You might even get an image in your mind’s eye of what the person was stressed about. It’s just your system “reading” the information as it clears. And then you may feel a gentle, barely perceptible
little shift or even a big lovely whoosh as the clearing happens! But it’s not a requirement to feel anything.

  6. Trust your tools to guide you during the clearing. Your pendulum will let you know when the clearing is complete, just as it does when you’re doing a personal clearing: its movement will change when it’s done.

  7. Once you’ve cleared that little area of stressed energy, turn your dowsing rod to face forward and start following the qi flow again. Perhaps your rod will take you in curves throughout the rest of the room, but it’s likely it’ll soon locate another little spiral; then you’ll know you’ve found a second bit of stress held in the room. If your dowsing rod doesn’t move in a spiral but instead goes in a sharp zigzag motion or in a very straight line right across the room, these movements also indicate unhealthy qi flow. Stop, pick up your pendulum, and clear these spots just as you did the other one.

  8. Continue following your rod until it completes its journey around the room and starts to head back out the door. But before you leave, make sure that you have indeed traveled to each part of the room and the rod hasn’t avoided any major areas.

  If the energy’s stagnant in one corner of the room, for instance, the rod may not even take you there. You’re telling the dowsing rod to follow the flow of qi, but if the qi is blocked from going into that part of the space, that means there’s no flow to follow!

  9. If you do find a substantial area of the room where the rod won’t go, that means there’s something there to clear. In this case, just change the question you’re holding in your mind. Instead of saying, “Follow the flow of qi,” tell your rod, “Take me to the disturbance that’s blocking the qi in that area.” The rod will then move you there and spiral you around when it’s located the stressed spot, and you can clear it as usual.

  It’s really fun to use a dowsing rod as it leads you through the space and moves in different ways to let you know you’ve found some invisible energy that needs to be cleared!

  The Primary Disturbance (PD)

  The exercises you’ve just done with following the qi flow and clearing old emotions held in the space are good practice to help you develop your skills. When you do a full space clearing, however, there’s an initial step before you follow the qi flow. In any environment, there’s always one energetic imbalance that’s stronger than all the rest. This is called the Primary Disturbance (PD).

  The PD may be the spot where someone had a single traumatic experience decades ago. Or it may be the couch where you and your spouse have had repeated arguments over the years, each one adding to the layers of negativity until the disturbed energy develops quite a magnitude. It is often strong enough to keep some separate minor disturbances in place just through the power of its influence. So if you clear the Primary Disturbance first, it can affect the vibration of the entire space; then some of the minor disturbances that were held there just because of the PD will disappear, making the rest of the clearing go more quickly.

  So after you’ve determined the ratio of yin to yang and learned whether the qi is coming in the front door, your next step is to locate the Primary Disturbance. In most cases, it’s somewhere in the house. Once in a great while, it may actually be located on a neighboring property or even farther away but is transmitting a strong influence into your space. For example, one house I cleared had originally been the servants’ quarters of a mansion down the street. The PD was actually located in the mansion because the servants’ lives had been so entangled with their employers’. In another case, a neighbor was mentally ill and sending such negative intentions into my client’s home that it severely disturbed the energy there.

  How to Find the Primary Disturbance

  Ask your pendulum, “Is the Primary Disturbance located on this property?”

  If your pendulum says “yes”: Ask your dowsing rod to take you there.

  Point the rod forward and start to slowly walk, following the rod until it turns sharply or spins you in a spiral to indicate you’ve found the spot. The rod may take you on a bit of a wandering journey through the house because it’s responding to your attempts to hold the thought in mind and home in on that energy. So don’t be dismayed if you feel like you’re on a wild goose chase! Just keep holding the thought in mind that you’re looking for the PD and you’ll get there.

  If your pendulum says “no”: The PD isn’t on this property, and you can just clear it from where you stand.

  You don’t need to know the exact location of the PD or the source of a disturbance. Remember you don’t have to be physically present with a person or a place to clear it. What matters is that the clearing happens; you don’t have to turn into Sherlock Holmes.

  However, in this situation, you may want to determine the general location of the PD because that can help you understand what it is. One option is to point your finger in different directions and ask till you get a “yes” and then clear the PD from where you are. As usual, stay aware of what you’re feeling, as that can help you recognize what the disturbance relates to.

  So you could point to the north and ask your pendulum, “Is the PD in this direction?” If you get a “yes” and you realize you’re pointing toward the house of a troubled neighbor or the high school down the street, that can help you make sense of things. You could also use your pendulum to ask, “Is this to do with the neighbor/high school?”

  After clearing the PD, return to the front door to check the qi flow again.

  If qi wasn’t coming in the front door when you first checked, it’s possible that just clearing the PD released enough of the block so that the qi can now enter. You may find your rod turns to point into the house, to indicate the energy’s now coming in.

  Alternatively, you may be shocked to see the rod turn to point out the front door! Don’t worry, nothing’s gone wrong. This happens sometimes as a sign that disturbed energy is streaming out of the house; it’s a good sign.

  Continuing the Clearing

  Once you have released the PD, you can start following the qi flow throughout the house, room by room. Begin with whatever room or area you enter into from the front door, and then once you’re finished, let the rod decide where to go afterward. It may take you into the room right next to it, or it might lead you elsewhere in the house. Trust the way the dowsing rod is following how the energy moves in the space.

  In some rooms, there will be just a few places where your rod will spin to let you know some disturbed energy is stuck there. In other spaces, you may find that you have to stop to clear every few steps! It’s rare to dowse a room where your rod doesn’t find any disturbances at all.

  Most of what you’ll find to clear are the accumulated layers of thoughts and feelings that have been repeated there daily for years, like the stress held in your desk chair from all the times you’ve worked at your computer or the daily worries of a previous occupant as they cooked dinner at the stove. Occasionally, you’ll clear an area where a single intense experience was powerful enough to lock the emotion there. For instance, if there was an accident, an act of violence, or a traumatic shock, that event could be imprinted in that spot, even though it happened only once.

  No matter why the stressed energy is held in a space, you clear it in the same way: Let your pendulum go into its clearing movement, and pay attention to what you feel as you clear. At first, you’ll probably feel no different when you tune in to an area of emotional residue, but after some practice and experience, you may well start to get feelings or impressions, just like when you clear a person.

  How to Share Your Impressions

  If you’re doing space clearing for a friend, it can be interesting for them to hear about impressions you get while you’re clearing because they may be able to understand why you’re feeling that way. It can be helpful for you to hear their explanation as well. For example, at one house, my rod spun in a large open corner of the master bedroom. As I cleared, the energy felt thick and heavy—and then, oddly, sweaty and dirty! I made a joke as I shared this
with my client, and she laughed and said, “You have no idea how right you are! That’s where my husband and I dump our dirty clothes every night. I just cleaned it up because you were coming today.”

  In some cases, you may feel embarrassed to share an impression because it seems too vague or weird. Sometimes, you’ll be sure that you must be imagining things. I remember the very first time some clients paid for my airfare and hotel expenses to do space clearings. Peter and Marie were a married couple who hired me to clear the energy of several East Coast properties that they owned. I was so excited to work with them but also nervous that they’d end up regretting paying so much extra for all my travel expenses. So on my first day, as the two of them accompanied me to clear their family home, I had some performance anxiety.

  My nervousness only increased when my dowsing rod spun wildly by a rocking chair in their master bedroom and the distinct image burst into my mind of a pair of gigantic, bright red lips floating in midair! Furthermore, these lips were pursed in an expression of extreme disapproval and contempt. What in the world might this mean? I wondered.

  I desperately tried to download some more information so I wouldn’t sound like a total idiot if I shared this with my clients. But nothing more came through, and I was so embarrassed, I couldn’t even look at them as I mumbled, “Well, this is going to sound really silly, but I keep seeing a huge pair of lips, painted bright red, and they seem to be expressing some displeasure . . . Um . . . Do you know anything about the history of this rocking chair?”

  There was total silence in response. My anxiety got worse! I started having fantasies about being unceremoniously taken back to the airport and put on the first plane out of town. Then I heard a deep gasp, and Marie shouted, “Oh my god, it’s your mother!”