by Jean Haner
In geography, entrainment is said to be what happens when water surrounds soil and carries it away in its flow. In meteorology, entrainment occurs when one current of air envelops another and they become one. So, for example, we might visualize how this applies to what happens in a clearing when you tell your mind, “I’m clearing Disturbing Effects of Others.” As your pendulum is swinging, your mind is scanning for those areas of stress held in that person’s field. Then, when you find one, your awareness embraces that energy and carries it away like water does to the soil or like one breeze surrounding another to flow together.
Ancient Chinese medicine has a concept similar to entrainment but they call it “resonance.” They believe the greatest physicians are ones who are able to harmonize their qi with the qi of the patient, like two temple bells sounding in unison; and in that moment, true healing happens.
One last important truth about the effects of entrainment: As you clear someone, you’re actually creating a new energetic template for them, and giving their system a chance to reprogram itself. Each time you hold one stressed, unloved part of their energy in compassionate awareness, neither resisting it nor giving it power, you’re subtly demonstrating to their unconscious self how they might choose to respond to their experiences from a place of acceptance and not reaction.
You don’t have to say any of this out loud or try to explain it to them. Remember that through the process of entrainment, your frequencies come into coherence. This isn’t a mental exercise, and that’s why it has such power—because it’s a direct energetic exchange happening beneath the surface of awareness.
Activating Your Compassion
As you sit and clear with a kind, receptive attitude, you’re holding a compassionate place for that person’s feelings to “be,” just like a mother holding her child in her arms. Interestingly, in Semitic languages, the word for “compassion” is related to the word for “womb,” which brings to mind the sense of a mother’s love for her child. The archetype of Mother represents the one we turn to for comfort and understanding; she loves us and accepts us unconditionally, without judgment, no matter what we do. In Christianity, this loving Mother energy is represented by Mary, the mother of Jesus. In Chinese culture, the goddess of compassion is Quan Yin, whose original Sanskrit name translates as “She who hears the cries of the world,” also conjuring an image of Mother. When things fall apart, you can always go home to Mother. It’s the safest place in the world to be.
In a clearing, we activate the power of our compassion as we’re available to hold the space for another’s stressed feeling. Because of the way the process of clearing is designed, we can do it easily and naturally. Just as a mother doesn’t greet her crying child by crying herself, but instead with a calm heart and a warm lap, we do the same for the person we’re clearing.
As you practice clearing others, you’ll become more and more able to effectively clear yourself because this new compassionate approach will also begin to extend to yourself. But even during this learning stage, what you may be surprised to find is that just in the act of clearing someone else, you end up feeling better yourself because of the time you’ve spent in that special state of mind.
Additionally, you’re also learning a new energetic template for yourself. As you learn to transmute the charge someone else is carrying around a feeling, you’re reprogramming how you respond to your own feelings as well. Every day your spirit becomes lighter and lighter. (We’ll talk more about this in the next chapter.)
When you first start to learn to do clearings, you’ll naturally have some level of hesitation. Perhaps you’re anxious that you might feel something unpleasant, or you doubt your ability, worried that you’re not going to be effective enough. Because this work seems so simple, it can be hard to believe you’re really doing anything! This is a normal stage that everyone moves through, and that’s part of the learning curve. As you get more practice, you’ll relax into the process and have more confidence because you’ll see and experience the results on so many levels.
Up to this point, I’ve been talking about personal clearing, but all these concepts also apply to a space clearing too, of course. Whether you’re connecting to stress held in a person or an environment, it’s all the same process. This could really be thought of as learning how to hold a place of peace and balance within yourself no matter what you encounter, which then directly affects the people and places around you.
This can be seen in the story Carl Jung was told by Richard Wilhelm, the sinologist whose translation of the I Ching introduced so many Westerners to ancient Chinese wisdom. At one point during Wilhelm’s 25 years in China, there was a terrible drought and the situation became quite dire. Finally, the Chinese sought out a rainmaker, similar to a shaman, and brought him to their village to make his magic. He locked himself up in a house for three days, and then suddenly, on the fourth day, clouds appeared and there was a great snowstorm!
As the whole town rejoiced, Wilhelm went to speak to the rainmaker, to ask him how he did it. But the old man said he wasn’t responsible for making the snow. Wilhelm replied, “But what have you done these three days?” The shaman’s reply was that in this province, things were out of balance, which put him out of balance as well. It took him three days to get back into harmony, and then the environment naturally did too; so the precipitation came.
Clearing is really just about bringing balance back, either to a person or a space. In fact, the principles on which clearing is based may actually be very familiar to you. In the next chapter, we’ll look more deeply at those to help you make even more sense of the practice.
chapter 13
Clearing
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a new approach to mindfulness
What I’ve been describing may sound familiar to you if you’ve had any experience with the mindfulness movement over the past few decades, thanks to brilliant teachers like Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and many others who have made a long study of Buddhist meditation practices. Although clearing is not based on Buddhism (or any religion), there are many parallels with Buddhism’s teachings and with its beneficial results.
Mindfulness techniques teach people how to observe their thoughts and feelings and just “be” with them, rather than suppress them or drown in them. Sound familiar? In Buddhism, this is achieved through practicing meditation, where you train yourself to sit quietly and just notice what passes through your mind without giving power to it, to view your thoughts like clouds floating across the sky.
One student’s description of her experience learning meditation is what you often hear from people who’ve benefitted from this practice: “I came to see that my thoughts were simply that: thoughts. I didn’t have to judge them, act on them, or do anything about them. They were no more than ‘events’ that arose in my mind and then dispersed again. They did not, as I’d previously imagined, have the power to undo me.”
Once people learn this technique in meditation, the next step is to try to use this way of being as they go through their daily life as well, to notice a feeling as it comes up but not go into their usual automatic reaction to it. Buddhism calls for taking a “sacred pause” to claim a moment of conscious awareness about what’s happening inside, so there’s an opportunity to choose a response. For example, if someone notices they’ve made a mistake, they might instantly tense up and think to themselves some version of, Oh crap, I can’t believe I did that; I’m so stupid! But after studying mindfulness techniques, they might instead notice a mistake and then observe that a self-critical thought is rising in their mind. They might then think, This is some tension and anxiety about having made that mistake.
These two different choices have very different effects on their system. The first reaction floods their body with biochemicals that make physiological changes based on that negative message and strengthen the synapses in their brain, making it more likely they’ll continue to cringe with self-critical feelings again with the next m
istake. But in the second choice, they’re observing the feeling instead of identifying with it. They’re not even saying, “I am anxious and tense,” which would have the same effect of convincing the body, mind, and spirit to become that way. They are instead recognizing the way they’re feeling with a “this is” statement, and that helps their system not take it on.
Fortunately, there is an ever-increasing number of studies showing how beneficial mindfulness is for stress reduction as well as emotional and physical health. When you can just accept a feeling, just “be” with it, you create a moment of peace. This is a very different outcome than what usually happens, when it brings you a moment of stress instead. Add up all the thoughts and emotions you go through in the course of a day, and you can see how a lot of little stresses can compile to disrupt any chance of a healthy balance.
We’re not educated in how to “be” in our culture. All our values revolve around how to “do”—to achieve, to look for what’s wrong and fix it, to get results. As soon as we reach one goal, we’re taught to start toward the next one. Forward movement is the key to success! It’s wonderful to have a sense of drive, but if we’re in constant “drive” mode, it throws our systems out of balance, first on a spirit level, then an emotional one, and eventually a physical one as well.
Chinese medicine teaches the value of yin and yang in every aspect of life. All that doing is very yang, and that’s great. But we need to balance it with equal time and energy devoted to yin: stillness, peace, and allowing ourselves to feel. In other words, being.
Doing and being are not only about your choices in your external life. They happen internally as well. If your mind is always racing with everything you have to get done, that can frazzle your energy and contribute to burnout, even if you’re not acting on all those thoughts. Every time you have an internal reaction to a thought, some version of the “Oh crap!” response, it creates activity in your system, physiologically as well as mentally and emotionally. And that means you “do” something about it, even if you don’t physically take action.
But if you can learn not to go into that kind of reaction, all that frenzied activity doesn’t happen; your wires aren’t fraying as they would otherwise. So on many levels, we can understand the value of learning to just “be” with a thought, to just observe it but not give it power. When you can do this, it’s like making friends with your mind, and that brings a new sense of peace that can feel like water in the desert.
So people try to use mindfulness techniques to reeducate their system in how to respond to their experiences, and the thoughts and emotions they have, as they go through their day. But there are real struggles with this practice. The fact is that they’ve spent years creating their personal drama! These patterns of reaction have become a part of them, automatic reflexes engraved in their systems, and it’s not so easy to try to mentally undo decades upon decades of that programming.
Additionally, those thoughts often are connected to memories or beliefs that are painful. If you’re recalling the time you got fired or an argument with a friend, or are falling back into your story about being all alone when everyone else is in a relationship, it causes you discomfort. It’s not easy to neutrally observe thoughts like those, and in most cases, your reaction is so immediate, it’s often not possible to catch yourself before you fall in that hole. You may be able to get to the point where you notice soon after it’s happened and crawl out! And that’s certainly helpful, but by that point, at least some negative energy has been coursing through your system.
This is why it can take years of seriously practicing meditation before people begin to notice truly significant life changes as a result. Like all of us, they’re just too programmed with those instantaneous reactions that come from a place below their conscious control.
Accelerated Meditation
This is where clearing may transform the principles of mindfulness into a practice that brings easier and much more immediate results. Remember the meditation teacher who compared clearing to “accelerated meditation”? Clearing takes that same practice but instead of applying it to your own thoughts and feelings, you do it with someone else’s! This streamlines the process because it bypasses the issue of your having to confront your own “stuff.”
It’s really hard to not take your own thoughts and feelings seriously. To your mind, there’s a reason you feel this way! You had that bad experience years ago . . . You’ve always struggled with self-worth . . . Anyone growing up with a father like yours would feel like this! You can practice and practice observing what comes up in your mind, but it can be like Sisyphus rolling that boulder up the hill, the same mental exercises every day.
You can absolutely benefit from using mindfulness techniques if you keep at it over time, but what if we took a slightly different approach—one that might bring results more quickly and effectively?
Clearing applies the same exercise that mindfulness offers but with someone else’s thoughts. It’s incredibly difficult to be objective about your own thoughts but far easier to hold that place for someone else’s because you carry no personal tension around them.
When you do a clearing for someone, you make a connection with patterns of thought and emotion that are adversely affecting them. These have built up quite a charge in their system, but they don’t have the same effect on you. These aren’t your issues. And because of that, you can greet each one without tension or resistance; you have no fear of it because you know it’s not going to stress you as it would them. It’s just some information you’ve observed, and so you’re able to stay in balance, which is the goal of mindfulness training.
So every time you do a clearing, it’s also subliminally teaching your own system how to respond to your own stress in a different way. You’re practicing mindfulness, but with someone else’s mind! This process bypasses all the problems you’d normally encounter in a regular mindfulness practice of trying to deal with your personal patterns that you’re so attached to.
Doing clearings for others is a training for you to develop a new way of being within your own life. Every time you clear a stress held in someone’s energy, you’re welcoming that feeling without resisting it or losing yourself in it. And at the same time, you are learning to do that for your own feelings too.
I remember how astonished I was to see results after doing clearing this way for just two weeks. I regularly went for long walks, not only for exercise but also to de-stress. However, what I was actually doing was spending the entire time ruminating on all my problems and trying to come up with new ideas about what to do. That was helpful, but I always seemed to end up with more on my to-do list after a walk, which then gave me more to worry about! Sure, it was valuable to blow off steam physically, and it was good to devote time to focus on problem-solving, but it was keeping me spinning in a loop of stress and worry.
Then the results of doing clearings and the subsequent training of my own mind started to kick in. I went for a walk, and an hour later, I returned home and realized that I hadn’t had a stressful thought the entire time. In fact, I had gone for a walk, and . . . I’d walked. I hadn’t been up in my head at all. I noticed the beauty of nature all around me, enjoyed the birdsong, felt the sunshine on my skin and the pleasure of exercising my body. I had been totally present. Afterward, I felt a coherent energy flowing through my system in a way I’d never experienced before. And, somehow, my to-do list got smaller.
What had happened? As I’d been doing clearings for other people, I was reprogramming my system, developing a new relationship with my own mind. Every time I embraced someone else’s stress without giving it power, I was also beginning to translate that ability for my own use, to not give my own stressful thoughts and feelings power either.
Release and Transform
Remember Malcolm Gladwell’s “walk the line” story in Chapter 2, and the two transformations you’ll need to do that in your life? One was to release the old stress that was stuck in your energy, and the sec
ond was to transform how you react to new stress from this point onward. Receiving clearings accomplishes the first, to release old energy. Giving clearings brings you to the second transformation, to no longer react to your experiences as you have in the past.
As you practice knowing “It’s just a feeling; it’s just information” when you clear someone else, you reprogram your system to automatically respond from that place to your own feelings too. Rather than try to force this through directly grappling with your own story, this way it gets slipped under the door, so to speak, so it’s effortless.
When I talk about accepting and allowing a feeling, that doesn’t mean passive resignation, or ignoring everything that passes through your mind. Instead, this practice creates a new way to respond to your thoughts and feelings. You begin to develop an easier sense of discrimination, one that helps you know which feelings call for action and which should not be acted upon or given power because they’re just supporting the drama you’re trying to free yourself from.
This ability to choose to respond to your thoughts in a different way comes from a more conscious moment of choice. Remember how we talked about the fact that there’s an instant when a feeling first starts to rise inside you? And in that tiny moment, you unconsciously choose whether to suppress the feeling, get lost in it, or allow it? As you practice doing clearings, that time period starts to expand in your awareness so it’s no longer just a fraction of a second. Now it becomes a more spacious span of conscious awareness, where you observe the feeling coming and make a balanced decision about how to respond to it.