Energy Practices to Clean, Balance, and Protect
Mastering the esoteric art of energy management is the greatest way to care for your well-being. In life, it’s all about energy. Learning to cultivate daily energy management practices is real self-empowerment and self-care. It paves the way for peace, health, alignment. Having energy is abundance. It is wealth. It is the essential foundation for real happiness and individual purpose.
Everyday, we interact with, absorb and accumulate energy. Just like the air we breathe, the energy we come into contact with is all around us. People emit energy. Nature emits energy. The environment you’re in emits energy. The food you eat emits energy (or not). You emit and absorb energy. We are in constant contact with energy of all frequencies. Being mindful and an active participant in the quality of energy you engage with is the ultimate act of self-care. Energy management is a relationship with life and it is about understanding your part in all of it.
I have identified practices from the beginning phases of my work that supported my endeavors in cleaning, managing, and channeling energy. These practices can support a range of abilities from beginner to intermediate.
Energy Cleaning
Energy cleaning is the most important practice. Just as we need to clear and clean physical waste, we must also clear and clean energetic waste.
In order to make way for the new, you must clear out the old. Real change cannot occur if you are still holding on to old energy and the past, re-living those patterns in your present life. Stronger health and regeneration cannot occur if you are still unknowingly storehousing and accumulating energetic waste inside of you. Raising your ‘energy frequency’ or ‘vibe’ and attempting to connect with divine energies and your higher self cannot occur without letting go of old, lower frequencies of energy. Lower frequencies of energy can stem from: old emotional wounds, hurts, traumas, resentments, anger, insecurities, unmet personal needs, and co-dependencies. All of which are unseen energies held in the physical and ethereal bodies that cloud our ability to see, feel, listen, and connect.
Energy cleaning can be done at all sorts of levels, from the superficial to the deep. Superficial energy cleaning can range from taking a shower, smudging palo santo or sage, going to a sound bath, or going to a ‘healer’ or external person. All of these things are ‘superficial’ because they can only help clear the energy in your energy field, but not the energy deep inside of you.
Deep energy cleaning is an intensive, long-term individual practice that requires consistency, dedication, time, space, stillness, quiet, and a whole lot of patience. To deal with the energy landfill that has accumulated inside, you have to do your best to cut off the accumulation of more energy waste. This includes periods of self-isolation, removing distractions, greatly reducing busyiness, letting go of things that violate your well-being, and making difficult choices and changes that deep down you know you need to make. The fear of being alone is the single greatest thing that prevents people from truly healing and connecting with themselves. In stillness and quiet, one is able to face everything inside of them: their past, their fears, their insecurities, their shadows, their illusions, their false desires, their unmet needs, their clinging, their present state of being. Once one begins excavating, one will find out how deep it really goes. It’s not for the faint of heart or the weak, to be willing to get messy and drudge up the past, old hurts, and everything one would rather not deal with inside. The process can feel like breaking yourself down. But to emerge healthier and stronger, one must be willing to exavate the old, the waste, the toxins, and the poison inside of themselves.
Energy cleaning is a practice that never ends, and should be employed ideally everyday.
Sample Deep Energy Cleaning Practice:
In meditation, tune into your body and how you feel. Give yourself time to settle in. Do not rush yourself. If you have mental noise, allow that to surface and pass. If the whole meditation is just releasing and surfacing mental noise, then let it be just that. Let it be that in every meditation so long as it is still there. If and when the time comes when mental noise has naturally cleared, that is your next phase and opening. You cannot rush this. It must happen organically. Then you can begin re-connecting with your body and energy through presence and observation. Feel your physical body and notice how it feels. Is there any strain, resistance, tension, or even pain or aches in the body? Do you feel like you are carrying weight and burdens, and they are straining the neck and shoulders? Curve your spine forward and notice if you feel any pain or tension in the spine. Locate where all of these physical tensions and pains are in the body and record them. These are areas you can meditate in and carve out space for to feel into and release. For more advanced students, they can also scan their energy field and the energy flowing in their body. What does the quality of the energy feel like? Does it feel strained and heavy, or light and fluid? Does it feel weak and faint, or strong and powerful? What does the pulsing of your energy tell you? Without judgement, notice and record your observations. Then return to stillness and tune into your emotional landscape. Give yourself time. Feel if any emotions want to surface and rise. Give yourself time to alow them to surface organically on its own. And if they don’t, then give it space and patience everyday until they surface on its own. If any emotion(s) do surface, allow them to rise, feel them, and allow them to pass like a storm. Sit in the space and allow the emotions to be in your energy field for as long as they need to. Even if you don’t know what it is or why, let go of any thoughts or judgements. These are old buried emotions stored in your body. When you give them space and time to process and feel them, then they can be released, so long as you do not hold on to them, cling to them or identify with them. If you do, they will return back to your body. Let the old energy go.
Chakra or Energy Balancing
In the beginner to early intermediate phases, chakras will likely be unbalanced on a regular basis. It is important to continue the work of deep inner energy cleaning. In the meantime, one can help stabilize their chakras, and even balance their chakras (more advanced) via practices.
Sample Superficial Chakra Balancing Practice:
A superficial way to help unblock and stabilize chakras, or energy centers, is to utilize crystals. Like training wheels, they can help an individual find a superficial sense of calm, grounding, and balancing. It’s important to utilize crystals that only belong to you and that you feel a relationship or bond with. You must feel safe with each one, and be able to feel its energy vibe with your hands. If you do not feel any energy vibe with your hands, then you should not use them. This also requires an individual to be at a level in which they’re able to feel energy. Otherwise it will be harder to discern which crystals are beneficial or not.
First, make sure the crystals are clean. Run them through palo santo and rest in sun or moon light if so (some crystals need sun, some need moon). Higher frequency crystals for throat to crown generally need moon. Lower frequency crystals for root to heart generally need sun.
When you have your clean, recharged, reformatted crystals, place the appropriate crystal on each chakra center on your body while laying down. Ask them to help you unblock the energy centers in each chakra, and to help stabilize and balance the energy there. Lay down with the crystals on your body for as long as you’d like. Afterwards, remove the crystals when you feel like it, and then check each chakra with your hands to see how well energy is flowing and moving at the center. If your hands naturally move with the energy vortex or swirl, then energy is moving and flowing. If it feels weak, then additional focus is required on the chakra, which means deeper examination and changes are necessary.
Sample Deep Chakra Balancing Practice:
A chakra, or energy center, is unbalanced, weak, underactive or overactive when the energy is insufficient, too much, or unhealthy. Each chakra or energy center represents a suite of energy that is connected to our whole functioning. And every chakra builds upon the one before. For example, the root chakra is the foundational energy center for all of our other energy centers. Without a strong, balanced foundation, everything else will be weak and can crumble. The root chakra represents, well, our roots, our foundation, our sense of home and belonging, connection, source of nurturing, how well be care for and take responsibility for our selves and our needs, etc. An unbalanced or weak root chakra can feel like you have a lack of footing in self and life, a sense of disconnection, feeling lost, insecure, unstable, lacking a home, not getting basic needs met, feeling undernourished or malnourished, etc. It can also feel like one is clinging to home, fearful, scared to leave “home” or the familiar, overly needing too much stability, predictability, and security. Both indicate an unbalanced root chakra and foundation of the self and life. When a constant state of imbalance exists, then one needs to go deeper and examine why this is the case. This is tied to deep energy cleaning, and one must dive down to the root or origin of the problem. They must go their past to feel and understand why they are still experiencing this now in their present. Only then can they understand what they must process, release, change, and do for themselves to correct and heal the imbalance.
Energy Protection
Beginner to intermediate students learning energy cleaning and management will also need to learn how to protect their energy. The need to do this regularly will wane as one becomes more advanced, however knowing when and how to establish and reinforce energy barriers is an essential skill in energy self-mastery. Energy protection is the conscious act of knowing where your energy is going. Beginner students will learn how much of their energy has been leaking out, or how they’ve been consistently draining or giving away their energy, or how they’ve unconsciously given consent to external people and energies to latch on to their energy (what is commonly called ‘energy vampires’ or leeches.) This can be a person, a spirit, an unseen entity, or even a corporate entity, a culture, spiritual or religious collective, or any social movement with its own energy and goals that require the collective energy of human souls but without a real energetic benefit in return. Vampiric behavior is actually quite embedded in our culture and people do it to themselves and others without even being aware. Energy vampiricism is the unconscious or conscious need to get something, take, or benefit from the use of another. This behavior stems from our cultural programming and inability to meet our own needs and care for ourselves. Like capitalism, we treat our energy like currency, giving it away through consumerism, and attempting to ‘buy it back’ through the consumption of people and products. Most people are energy vampire, not necesarily because something is inhenrently wrong with them as a person, but because it’s how we’ve been trained to ‘be’, and, because most people are so low in personal energy reserves while also being simultaneously overwhelmed with low quality energy. To compensate for low energy, they may learn how to feed off others or aim to draw energy from other because they do not know how to self-generate and manage energy for themselves.
With that said, in the act of ‘energy protection’, this is more about personal discernment over where your energy is going, how you are using it, and being willing and able to put up boundaries when external energies attempt to feed on you or draw energy from you. Cultivating a strong energy protection barrier comes with healing the self inside. Just like the body has a skin barrier to protect it from foreign particles and toxins, the ethereal body has a energy barrier to protect it from foreign energies and toxins. It is important to care for your energy barrier just as you would care for your skin.
Reflection for Energy Protection:
take an inventory of where your energy is going everyday, and decide for yourself if it actually feels good, and if it benefits you in a healthy and empowering way.
decide for yourself what your real intentions and goals are.
say no, cut out, stop doing the things that feel draining, depleting, unhealthy, unbeneficial to you, or have no real benefit to you. this includes activities, events, people, conversations, content, etc.
discern which activites, people, etc are actually situations where you are giving your energy and power away.
discern what is healthy information and content to take in.
Energy Practice for Energy Protection:
At the end of your meditation and energy cleaning practice, visualize a white light bubble being drawn around your entire body. Starting from the top of your head, or crown chakra, imagine white light pouring down from above you, to envelop you in a white light bubble surrounding you, closing off beneath your feet or sits bones. State an intention to yourself. This can include asking to reinforce the energy barrier surrounding you, repelling all energies that do not support your highest good. Ask for assistance as you learn how to better ‘see’, realize, understand, and discern what actually serves you and what does not. Know that nothing can actually hurt you or take your energy away unless you choose to do so, give consent, or participate in the action.