Thoughts on House Cleansings

A very special thanks to WSPIR for having me at their last meeting.  My presentation on Psychic Protection for Paranormal Investigators went over very well.  There’s nothing like presenting to an intelligent and engaged audience to really put the cherry on a good weekend.  Before my presentation I had the pleasure of attending their general meeting where several ongoing and recent investigations were discussed.  One of the issues that came up was house blessings/cleansings for clients and it got me thinking.

House blessings and cleansings are one of things I am asked about most frequently and one of the things most people have misconceptions about.  A house cleansing is not like having the kind of exorcism that you see in the movies or on tv, even the ones you see on “reality” tv being performed by “experts.” 

First and foremost, if you are experiencing a haunting of some kind a house blessing may or may not actually get rid of whatever’s causing the problem.  A house blessing/cleansing cleans out negative energies that are present in your house.  It does not necessarily address any of the underlying causes that brought that energy into your house in the first place and it may or may not ward against those energies coming back.  As Darren of WSPIR so aptly pointed out, doing a house cleansing is a lot like vacuuming; you can’t do it just once and expect to never have to do it again.  Energy flows; it changes all the time.  Sweeping out negative energy can stop the effects of a haunting, remove negative entities, and even positively affect your mental health for a time.  However, just like dust, energy moves around and negative energies can come back if you don’t do something about them on a regular basis.  I recommend that everyone, whether you think you’ve got a problem with negative energy or not, perform a house cleansing at least once a month (I prefer to do it on the new moon) to keep your home’s energy flowing healthily. 

As I mentioned, a house cleansing may or may not deal with whatever brought negative energy into your home in the first place.  Negative energy and entities can enter a home in a number of ways: it might have been there before you, it might be attracted to a psychic sensitive in the household, it might be attracted to negative energy given off by the household, it might drift in from a troubled neighbor, etc.  One of the things brought up at the meeting was the fact that many people who experience hauntings are actually psychic sensitives or empaths who simply do not understand what they’re experiencing and don’t know how to take control of the situation.  A sensitive could do a full house cleansing every day and still experience phenomena he found unsettling if he didn’t learn about his abilities and take control of them.  A person who constantly effervesced negative energy would probably attract negative entities regardless of how often she smudged.  A house cleansing will almost never make a situation worse, so please when in doubt perform a cleansing – just don’t expect it to be a cure all if that’s all you do.  

Sometimes what’s needed in a situation isn’t a house cleansing at all, but a cleansing of the person involved.  Sometimes it’s not the place that’s being haunted but the person.  Sometimes this is the result of attachment, though more often it’s the result of the person involved being shiny (certain people have energy that just attracts the paranormal – I call these people shiny because their energy is highly visible on the other planes).  In such cases a personal cleansing (often in the form of a mild hex-breaking) will help clear away energies and entities that have attached to that person, although it won’t keep them from coming back unless the person learns how to control their own energies (and that’s a whole different post).  And sometimes, if you’re really unlucky, you come across that terrible combination of mental illness and attachment.  Unfortunately, people whose personal energies are compromised by mental illness are both more likely to think there’s something pestering them if there’s not and are more likely to actually be afflicted by the paranormal.  Their mental imbalance actually makes them more vulnerable to the paranormal and there are many unsavoury entities that find them particularly tasty.  In such cases all you can do is work with their therapist to try and address both problems simultaneously.  A therapist alone can help heal the mental imbalance but won’t necessarily get rid of the attachments, while getting rid of the attachments without addressing the imbalance is only a temporary solution.  I generally stay away from these situations for fear of becoming liable if something goes wrong. 

House cleansings are both incredibly useful and important for maintaining a healthy environment, but they are not a magic bullet.  A one-time cleansing will make things better for a little while, but not forever – don’t expect it to.