Journal · Cleansing
What Cleansing Actually Means
No phrase in my work is more misunderstood than this one. Some people hear it and picture a film — candles, smoke, something dramatic being driven out. Others hear it and assume it is a way to strike at someone they are angry with. Both are wrong, and the second one matters enough that I want to deal with it first.
It is never done against a person
A cleansing clears what you are carrying. It is not aimed at anybody. It is not a working placed on your ex, your sister-in-law, or the man who cheated you. I do not do that work, at any price. I will not put anything on anyone, and if a reader offers to — for you or against you — you should leave and not go back.
That is not a marketing position. It is the line my grandmother drew and my mother kept, and it is the whole reason this practice is what it is. What I do is on the other side of that line entirely: I help people set down weight. I do not hand weight to anyone.
So what is actually being cleared
Ordinary things, mostly. Grief that settled in and never moved on. The residue of a relationship that ended badly. A house that held years of somebody else's anger before you signed for it. A stretch of work that took more out of you than you admitted at the time. People pick things up. Most of us never put them down, because nobody ever suggested it was something you could do deliberately.
The tell is a heaviness that does not match your circumstances — the feeling of pushing through water while your life, on paper, is fine.
What it looks like in my room
It is quieter than people expect. We sit down and you tell me what has been sitting on you, in whatever order it comes out. There is a candle. There is sage — the smell is half of why it works, because scent reaches somewhere that argument does not. There is prayer, in the tradition I was taught in, and there are long stretches where nobody says anything at all.
It usually takes between twenty and forty minutes. You keep your clothes on, you keep your dignity, nothing is done that you have not agreed to, and you can stop at any point. Most people find the silence the most useful part, because it is frequently the first uninterrupted half hour they have had in months.
What it can do — and what it cannot
It can lift a weight. It can end the bracing. It can give you back the clarity to make a decision you have been circling for a year. I have watched all of that happen more times than I can count.
It cannot make a choice on your behalf, and it cannot undo a thing that has already happened. It will not cure an illness — if something is wrong in your body, go to a doctor, and go first. It will not make a person love you, and I would not attempt it if you asked. It is not a substitute for a lawyer, a physician, or a counselor, and any reader who tells you otherwise is putting you at risk.
How you know it worked
Almost nobody reports a lightning bolt. What they report is sleeping through the night for the first time in a long while. Walking into a room that used to tighten their chest and noticing, an hour later, that it did not. Realizing their shoulders have come down and having no idea how long they had been up.
It is a subtraction, not an addition. You do not gain something. You stop carrying something — and the difference shows up in the ordinary hours afterwards rather than in the room with me.
If this is the first time anyone has described it to you in plain terms, that is rather the point. Call and ask me anything before you decide. Your first question is free, and I guarantee my work.