Clear Home, Clear Heart

by Jean Haner

  We can do a visualization to help understand this. Imagine you’ve just made a mistake and are immediately anxious about it. Eek, I turned in that report with those typos in it! Envision that as you’re sitting there, a helium balloon with the word “anxiety” written on it floats up beside you. You grab onto that balloon’s string, and off it carries you, up, up, and away! You’re lost in anxiety—your body flooded with physiological changes, your emotional state ungrounded—and it can take minutes or hours to come back to earth again.

  After practicing clearing for a while, you may find that the next time a mistake happens, you notice the balloon with “anxiety” on it rising up beside you but you don’t grab onto its string. Off it floats without you. You’re so proud of yourself for managing that feeling differently, but then a second anxiety balloon floats up, and you just instinctively grab that one and off you go again. Darn! But as you continue to do clearings, you further develop the ability to not go into reaction. You make a mistake, the balloon rises, and you don’t grab on. Another balloon comes up, and still you don’t reach for the string. Soon the space of time between the balloons becomes longer and longer, and still you’re sitting there, centered and in balance while the feelings come and the feelings go.

  You never had the opportunity to have a conscious moment of choice before because your reactions were so immediate and below the level of your awareness. But now, because of the training you’ve received, things are different. You are naturally developing that “sacred pause” that allows you to make the healthy response, not only to what passes through your mind but also to what you experience in your external world. You make a mistake and you fix it. No angst necessary.

  Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, who wrote the wonderful book My Stroke of Insight, discovered that when you have an emotion, it takes only 90 seconds for it to be processed through your body and flushed out of your bloodstream. The only reason you would continue to feel anxious after 90 seconds is if you are making the unconscious choice to run that program again. She described the solution: “By paying attention to the choices my automatic circuitry is making, I own my own power and make more choices consciously.” This is what clearing trains your system to do, but without the struggle it normally takes to try to deal directly with your internal programming.

  Regain Your Adaptability

  As you become less and less stuck in old patterns, your energy regains its vibrancy and is free to flow with new resilience and flexibility. Chinese medicine defines health as “aliveness and newness moment to moment.” Ancient texts described life as being a perpetual changing—a constant process of adaptation. The more we’re able to go with the flow of events, the more in balance and healthy we are, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

  Chinese physicians believed that the only times the qi of your body, mind, and spirit is perfect are the moment after your birth and the moment before your death; every moment in between is a matter of adapting to changing circumstances. You can visualize it as if you’re balancing on a surfboard, riding the waves. Your original self arrived here with that ability, but most of what’s happened since you arrived has diminished it, and that’s affected how well you can stay in balance. You have baggage, and if you’re on a surfboard carrying baggage, it’s pretty difficult to not tumble off into the water!

  To regain the inner adaptability that allows you to adjust to whatever comes your way, two things are required: let go of your baggage, and don’t take any more on! As you clear what’s been stuck in your energy, you’re releasing layers of that heavy burden you’ve been carrying for so many years. Simultaneously, you’re developing a new relationship with your own thoughts, feelings, and reactions in life, and so you’re less likely to take on new baggage. You gain a new lightness of spirit, and the ability to dance with life changes rather than struggle with them.

  It’s fascinating that the ancient Chinese pictograph for the word “sage” or “master” is an image of a dancing child! In her brilliant book, Five Spirits, alchemical acupuncturist Lorie Dechar says that Taoists alchemists regarded the “ultimate goal of a human being’s psychospiritual journey” to be “the return to original nature,” or “the birth of the sage.” From this, she says, comes the ancient origin of the character.

  The Chinese character for the word tzu, master or sage, is a picture of a dancing child. The character reinforces the idea that the master is one who has returned to origin, someone who is capable of combining the wisdom of experience with the unbroken spontaneous innocence of a child.

  The ancient and modern Chinese characters for Sage.

  What a lovely image to hold in your mind, the sage in a state of aliveness and newness from moment to moment like a dancing child. This is where clearing can take you.

  Next, let’s look at the stages you’ll move through as you learn this work, as well as some real-life stories that can inspire you as you move into this new way of being.

  chapter 14

  Stages of Learning

  * * *

  There are predictable stages you’ll go through with this work. At first, you’ll likely struggle to feel confident that you’re doing anything at all. In fact, the biggest challenge people tend to have with clearing in the beginning is that it’s so simple, it’s hard to believe anything’s happening. So if that’s how you’re feeling at this point, congratulations: you’re right on schedule!

  As you continue to practice and gain experience, you’ll get past that phase because you’ll start to see results. You’ll feel noticeably different after getting or giving a clearing. Things will happen after a session that range from tiny changes to mind-boggling developments. You’ll start to recognize that your own daily life is transforming, just as a consequence of the training you’re receiving, effortlessly, as you do clearings. You’ll be far less stressed by what used to stress you because the tension around that thought, feeling, or memory has been released, and you’re developing a different way of relating to your new experiences. Gradually, life becomes full of ease, grace, and a natural sense of joy.

  It may sound strange, but I suggest that you start out clearing people you don’t know well. This is because you have so much personal knowledge about your close friends and family, it’s very easy to have a judgment about what you think is right for them! This can prevent you from being in an open, receptive state of mind during the clearing, or even make you have an attachment to its outcome. You know your husband should just be better organized so he won’t be late for everything, and that belief can infiltrate the clearing you do for him. It may very well be true, but there may be other things that need to clear and other outcomes that need to emerge before he suddenly starts showing up on time!

  So it can be helpful to start out by clearing acquaintances. But having said that, I do have to add that it can be a beautiful experience to clear those dearest to you since you already love them so completely. You naturally have strong feelings of compassion for your own child, for instance, so you can already hold such a more expansive space for them than you could for a stranger. So don’t disregard clearing the people you love; it’s wonderful to do so. Just practice on others as well, so you can develop your ability to stay objective.

  No Attachment to the Outcome

  One mistake many people make in their journey with this work is to focus on the problem presented or the result that seems obvious to aim for. In other words, if you’re clearing a friend who is suffering from a broken heart or has a health problem, it’s so tempting to think the right thing to do is “clear so she can find forgiveness” or “clear his kidney problem.”

  Any of these intentions, though sincere and full of love, come colored with a very limited understanding of how energy actually works. So, again, a reminder that you can’t possibly know what needs to happen for balance to return. It may be that something entirely different has to come up for clearing first—some ancient pain or trauma that you couldn’t possibly know about, or some other issue that
needs to be resolved—before change can happen with the emotional or physical problem that your friend is dealing with currently.

  And watch out for your own personal judgment that the situation is “bad” and therefore has to be eradicated. When you look back at your own history, can you see how often what seemed “bad” at the time actually was a very necessary stage in a process that brought you to a wonderful new level in your life, and without it, you’d have never gotten there?

  Even more important is the fact that if you’re clearing with the belief that a certain outcome is desirable, or if you’re trying to “send love and healing,” you are “doing,” forcing your own energy on the situation. No matter how well intentioned, your personality is intruding where it does not belong.

  Here’s what to do: just clear. If you need to have an “intention,” then just let it be for balance to return. If you’re worried about what thought to hold in your mind, remember, that’s already part of the protocol. You are clearing a certain field, so hold in mind, I’m clearing Metal or I’m clearing this disturbed magnetic field—wherever you are in the process of a personal clearing or space clearing.

  We are so conditioned to think we have to figure out how to get what we want, and that’s what’s gotten us into this mess in the first place! Remember that boy when you were 16? That boy who you knew was your one true love and that your life would be over if you didn’t marry him? And now you thank your lucky stars that you never married him because he’s doing 20 years in prison! We have such a narrow view at any moment of what’s right for us, and often what we so earnestly desire is just a reflection of our current imbalance, or of the degree of personal evolution we’ve achieved so far.

  Sometimes people are too shy to ask for clearings, so they only give them. This is a great way to get tons of experience, but it’s essential to get cleared as well. If you’re showing up still carrying years of your own stress and tension, you will not be able to hold much of a space for the person you want to clear. The more you can show up “empty,” the more effective you’ll be with this work. Recognize how your own personal patterns of not wanting to impose, or difficulty with receiving, may be preventing you from finding balance, not only with this work but also in life overall.

  The good news is that there’s a worldwide community of people already trained and available to practice clearings with you! You can connect with them at: www.facebook.com/clearhomeclearheart.

  The Four Stages of Learning

  Please pace yourself, and don’t go around space-clearing every house in the neighborhood or clearing everyone you know in the first few weeks, no matter how enthusiastic you feel! This is powerful work, and the simplicity of it can be deceptive. When you do a clearing, energy is flying around, and things are invisibly shifting and transforming on many levels.

  You need to gradually develop your abilities with lots of practice and experience over time, or you can soon feel overwhelmed. If you were climbing Mount Everest, you wouldn’t go to the top in one direct climb; you’d stop at base camps along the way, to get used to the new altitude! It’s like this with clearing too. You need to get used to new levels of expertise before you can move on to the next.

  Western psychology defines four stages of learning something as: (1) unconscious incompetence, (2) conscious incompetence, (3) conscious competence, and (4) unconscious competence. When you first picked up this book, you were in a stage of “unconscious incompetence.” You didn’t know how to do clearing and you may not have ever heard of subtle energy.

  The next phase is “conscious incompetence,” kind of a training-wheels stage, where you’re at the start of the learning curve. You’re aware you don’t know how to do it and you’re just beginning to figure it out. Then comes “conscious competence,” where you’ve learned the how-to, but doing it takes a lot of your concentration to stay on track and remember what to do when.

  Finally, the last phase, “unconscious competence,” is when clearing becomes effortless and automatic. You can do it while carrying on a conversation. You walk into a room where some stress is stuck, and the stress just melts away because it’s second nature for you to clear it without having to think about it. Just your presence brings balance back.

  So after you’ve gotten enough experience with this work, you may discover that at times you’re dropping into clearing mode without even picking up a pendulum. What I found in my own life after doing clearings for a while was that whenever I encountered stressed energy, my system just started clearing because of how it had been trained. So if I’m sitting next to someone who’s stressed in an airport, or if I walk into a store where the energy’s out of balance, I find myself starting to yawn, and I feel the clearing happening automatically. (Remember, yawning is a common symptom of clearing.) Of course, the people around me must just think I didn’t get much sleep the night before!

  This doesn’t mean you’re going to be out of control, with clearing coming over you at any moment! If I’m driving or it’s not appropriate for me to be clearing for any reason, I simply tell my system that I’m not open for business right now, and that ends that. I do still use my pendulum each time I sit down to purposely do a clearing, as continual practice for my sensitive self to regulate how open I am to any particular energy at any one time.

  Clearing Stories

  The following are some examples of the kinds of stories I hear from people after they learn how to clear. They may inspire you to clear in your own life!

  Kristy was awakened the morning after attending a clearing workshop by a strange sound in her kitchen. She jumped out of bed and ran toward the noise, only to see a man trying to crawl in the kitchen window! She screamed at him, and startled, he backed out and ran away.

  But Kristy felt furious that he’d tried to violate her home. Her eyes landed on the dowsing rod she’d left on the kitchen table after coming home from the training, and she grabbed it. If I can use this to find information in an environment, she thought, then maybe I can track down this burglar!

  She walked out of her house holding the rod, not even caring what the neighbors might think to see her walk down the street in her pajamas, pointing a metal rod in front of her! She held in mind the thought, Take me to the guy who just tried to get into my house. The rod led her on a winding route for a few blocks and then into the parking lot of an apartment complex where it turned, indicating she’d arrived at the location she was asking for.

  She stood there, looking around, suddenly feeling quite foolish. There was no one in sight. Oh well, she thought. It was worth a try. Then in the next moment, the door to the apartment building opened, and out walked the man who’d just tried to break into her home! When he spotted her, he quickly dashed back inside.

  Even though she knew the police wouldn’t act if she told them her story, she felt triumphant that her dowsing skills were already so good after just a weekend workshop. In fact, the history of dowsing has several examples of criminals being captured because someone was able to track them with a dowsing rod!

  There are so many ways we can use this work. William space-cleared his home and then thought, Why not give it a try with my car? So he just sat in the car, held the thought in mind that he was clearing any imbalances there and let his pendulum tell him when the clearing was complete. Because he had always kept careful records of his gas mileage, he was able to see in the weeks after the clearing that he got 25 percent better mileage than before!

  Shannon’s e-mail to me is typical of the ones I get from parents on a regular basis:

  I’m so thrilled that I can clear my children, and I’m seeing how it benefits them in so many ways. My son used to have anxiety attacks and these have disappeared, and my daughter now comes to me when she’s upset and says, “Mommy, will you clear me?” rather than throwing a tantrum. I feel empowered as a parent with this work.

  Grace wrote to me about her experience with a medical emergency with her child:

  Our family went camping last week
end in the mountains and did a hard hike on the second day. Both of my children have Type 1 diabetes, so keeping them hydrated is crucial. But the hike, combined with the altitude we were at, definitely took a toll on everyone’s hydration.

  That evening, unbeknownst to us, my daughter’s insulin pump failed, which meant she didn’t get any insulin for eight hours. So the next morning, she woke up in ketoacidosis—a dangerous situation which normally meant rushing to the hospital and an overnight stay. But we were eight hours away from home in the middle of nowhere!

  I decided to try clearing her. Then a miracle happened: within two hours, she dropped from a very high level of ketones to a manageable level and was even able to keep some fluids down. We’ve been in this scenario with our kids a few times and have never seen this happen. Usually it takes more than a day to get things under control and always with a hospital stay and an IV.

  I’ll never know for certain if it was due to my clearing, but in my heart, I believe it was. I’m just so grateful and amazed to know this work!

  Donna bought a dozen roses to celebrate the event of her space clearing and couldn’t believe her eyes when two weeks later, they were still as fresh as that first day. She continued to report to me that over the next three months, not only did the flowers survive and the water in the vase stay crystal clear the entire time, but also the stems were sprouting new buds and growing roots!

  I’ve heard so many stories from people that they clear their animals and now their dog won’t go to sleep at night until they’ve cleared him, or their “schizo cat” has become calm and affectionate. One woman cleared the geopathic stress in her garden and soon found birds flocking there, some of which weren’t even common to her area. She set up a camera with a telephoto lens and ended up starting a new business selling images of the birds as greeting cards and framed prints. Her intention when she first came to my workshop was to clear the way for a new career. It certainly happened in a manner she could have never expected!