Smudging

[IrisRavenstar]

As well as my White Light Shielding (see thread by that name), I often smudge my house with sage and cedar to remove negative energy and with sweetgrass to bring in fresh positive energy. It's nice to do this when you clean your house literally, as it sort of finishes the job.

I usually buy the herbs at a local pow-wow, but they are also available at

www.mountainroseherbs.com

and probably a lot of other locations.

When you see this done at pow-wows, they generally use whole clusters of the herbs, because they are going around smudging a whole lot of people! When I do it at home, I use a large heavy shell set on a plate, and usually have some saved matchsticks that I kept after lighting aromatherapy candles. I make a mini-campfire with my matchsticks, and then place some of the herbs that I've snipped off on top of the mini-campfire. I like to make up my own verses for such things, so I walk into every corner in the house, wafting the smoke from the herbs, and I like to say, "Let all negativity, stress and distress, flow forth from this house, and bring in the best!" I say that in every corner of my house while the smoke flows. When I'm done, I thank the God/dess, and often will take that as a good time to do a Reiki meditation, as the house feels so positive and attuned to Spirit.

Smudging with these particular herbs is the Native American way, but I'm sure you've been to church services where frankincense is used in censors. It is much the same thing, serves the same purpose. I find sage, cedar, and sweetgrass a little easier on my nose, personally, but sometimes will put a chunk of frankincense on the fire, or a few lavender blossoms, just because I like it!

When I'm done, I set the shell on its dish on top of my stove, to let it burn out, and then I compost the residue in the shell and wash it and put it away for next time.

I hope that helps someone... it's easy, and you can make it fun by making your own verses, or you can hunt out standard rituals... it's up to you! But the point is, it should help remove negativity, and thus to lessen nightmares, especially if you also use the White Light Shielding.

All best to you!

[IrisRavenstar]

Refreshing...

[mwyna]

Thank you Iris

[IrisRavenstar]

You are welcome!

[Kathleen]

Thank you Iris! Very useful information.

[Sowelu]

Has it ever occurred to anyone who practices these types of things that what you're doing is denying what you attract? That you are basically saying that you reject a part of God brought to you especially for your edification? When something "negative" is encountered outside you in your environment, in your head, in your life events... look inside yourself for the cause. It lives in you. YOU attracted the "negativity" to reveal this to yourself. Your whole energy field is what generates your life experience. You. The love you are, whether it's conscious or unconscious, is what creates your life.

I wonder at the human perception of the Law of One. That there is only One life, in myriad form. That duality is an illusion. That what you attract, you attract because it is YOU... in some hidden form, typically. So what we label "negative" is the dark side of ourselves. And by rejecting it, sending it away... we will never embrace our totality but rather perpetuate the illusion of duality.

If we are never willing to unify with that which we label "negative" or "them" or "dark" or "other than"... we will never realize the truth of our existence: that we ARE that ONE life. That everything we see, attract, feel, think, believe... is our very own Self, being reflected to us for our edification.

How will we ever end this torturous game if people don't wake up to this fact of their existence? That this world is a mirror. Everything is a reflection of Self. And the idea is to see the reflection and realize it is Self, and integrate it into one's self identity. Once accomplished... that reflection is no longer needed. The next one will come along. Same process. Until all reflections are known and understood to be Self, in another form. Nothing to fear, definitely there to love and enjoy and appreciate.

Just curious, frankly. At some point every spirit-in-human-form has to come to these realizations about what they see all around them in this "dark world". Or they never really leave. So when is it time to begin this? Tomorrow? After you find yet another way to "protect" yourself (from yourself!) and create safe space in your draining life system? Next year? Next decade? Next life?

Why not now? Why keep deferring a learning that sits in front of you every day, in some fashion? It will never truly go away until you SEE it for what it truly is anyway (YOU), so why not forget the smudging and embrace the experience of getting to know a hidden, dark part of yourself that you've banished for who knows how long?

Fear is what creates these experiences. ALWAYS. And fear is SIMPLY: Love denied. The love that you ARE, being denied by you. You are Creator, in form. Your creative power is the love that you are. Where you have denied that love, it becomes what we know here as "fear". And that love-turned-dark then creates negativity in your life (because it is your creative power, moving in the darkness of self-denial)... so that you will SEE it. It is meant to reveal yourself to you, not offer you an opportunity to further deny your love! Reclaim the power of love in those negative experiences by opening to them, not rejecting them. They will add to your light if you let them, because they are love at their core. YOUR love. It is you, in your misperceptions, who has misidentified them as something "other" or "not you" or "bad" or "demonic" or whatever judgment you've come to about them.

You judge yourself when you do this (as if anything that exists is not God, therefore not borne of Love... the very love that you are) and it comes back at you in scary, sometimes unseen and sometimes seen, "negative form". Why? BECAUSE IT IS YOUR CHILD, ABANDONED. It wants it's parent. It wants to come home. To you, it's source of life. When you deny the powerful love you are, you give birth to a dark child. That child will haunt you until you recognize it as your own love, denied.

There is nothing else that creates negativity in one's life. And if it's happening to you, then YOU are who hold the fear (your own love, wisdom, awareness... denied). That's the fuel for your own experiences. For nightmares, for paranormal experiences of a "negative" nature, for all "negative" experiences of every kind. And let's not forget... it's hidden within you, so you likely are not consciously aware of it. THAT'S how it has the power it does to create your experiences. And when you finally turn around and face it, see it for what it truly is (your own wisdom and truth of self denied), it will no longer have the power it seems to have, to create negative experiences. It will become a part of the Light that you are, enabling you to create far more joy and truer love exchanges in life, etc.

A little fed up today with dualistic "spiritual" dogma,
Sowelu

[IrisRavenstar]

Dear Sowelu,

I am not talking about denying any part of myself. But if my SELF is squashed like a bug, quaking in fear, stressed out to the point of dysfunction, how can it possibly be in a position to examine anything at all? I've been through a clinical depression (1976-85), and survived it despite one suicide attempt, and went through nine years of psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy to get through it. I was blessed with a therpist who believed in teaching his patients how to continue with their own therapy. Believe me, I know all of myself very well! If you read my dream interpretations, that might become obvious to you.

I did find the drugs used during therapy utterly abhorrent, plus had a lot of side-effects and allergic reactions to them. If you want to complain about something that takes part of life away, complain about those! Being a guinea pig for a drug cornucopia was the really awful part of the depression. And I mean it when I use the term "guinea pig." Ask a doctor why psychotropics work, and the answer is generally, "We really don't know; we discovered it when the drug was used for something else." This is the psychiatric community's answer to everything nowadays, as psychoanalytical therapies become less and less available due to their expense, and quickie behavior modification with drugs takes over due to cost controls.

There are natural ways to deal with the overwhelmingness of all the negativity constantly being thrown at us that do not require swallowing drugs. There are ways to bring it under control to a degree that will enable us to be more self-examining. They work far better than drugs, because they are the ways of the Divine. They work gently, to bring us into a place where we *can* examine ourselves, and grow, and heal.

It's not about ignoring anything. It's not about killing off anything, except the fear itself. You can't look in the mirror if you're too caught in fear to open your eyes, can you? If you tell me you can, then I say, you simply haven't experienced enough yet to know.

See, Smudging IS love. White Light Shielding IS love. The love of the God/dess, by whatever name people wish to call Hir. With that as a foundation, we can examine anything. We can keep our eyes open while we look in the mirror; we can "look through the glass darkly, and see face to face," as it says in 1st Corinthians 13.

Have you ever noticed at night, when it's dark outside, but we have lights on inside, we can't see through the glass at all anymore. We only see reflections of what is in the room. We look through the glass, darkly. And maybe outside we hear the growl of a wild animal. Or we hear a scream in the distance, or a car alarm going off down the street. We get a pang of fear, and the last thing we want to do is go outside in that darkness. We want to stay inside, where it's safe and there is light. But eventually, you know, morning comes, and the sun comes up, and then we can see through the glass, and the neighbor's car is fine, and you may hear later they accidently triggered the alarm with their electronic key, the wild animal, probably a raccoon, has crept back to it's lair after knocking over another (screaming at it) neighbor's trash can. It won't knock over mine though, hasn't in over twelve years, because I use White Light to protect it when I put the trash out. White Light IS love, love from the God/dess.

It's not about denying any part of myself. It's about fostering an atmosphere where I can grow and learn and come to a place of understanding.

[Sowelu]

I spoke from experience. But you're right, it was my own, not yours or someone else's. I used to do the very thing you described in this thread, until I became aware of it's impact on The All and of course on me and my life. Once I saw the statement I was making to Creation (my creation) by "clearing negative energies" in what amounts to an external/false way, and saw (inner seeing) how such actions actually manifested the very fearful states you described that I also once encountered though wished to no longer experience, I realized it was not a practice I would continue. We each have to make our own path, though.

Apologies if my tone was harsh, btw, it was not intended or directed at anyone. You'd be amazed, though, how deep the rabbit hole of fear goes in the human condition. Again... most of the fears that manifest things unwanted and unseen are unconscious in human beings and stem from original intent of spirit, not as easily seen or identified at the human conscious level. In fact many of them are relabeled as some kind of "common sense" followed faithfully and blindly by people for centuries (that was the plan, the reason for the original intent to begin with, so no worries either way). Nonetheless, they are ignorance-turned-fear for most. And still... these fears are ourselves, our own truth and love of Self, denied from the start of our human excursions, in order to have these human experiences.

Thanks for your response (((hugs)))

Blessings,
Sowelu

[IrisRavenstar]

Hi Sowelu,

Well, I don't agree at all that using White Light and Smudging are either external or false. It's done with awareness of inner connection to the Divine, and I happen to think if everyone did it, there'd be less people controlled by fear, and things would change for the better. But then, when developing a clinical depression, I would wake up screaming my head off in the morning, and pounding my poor head on the wall (literally) for half the day. I didn't remember the dreams, usually, just the terror. Somehow, people have to deal with negative energy. They just have to! Otherwise, it acts out in very harmful ways, and impacts the people around them in very harmful ways.

Don't you ever KNOW that there are things you could NOT do? I do! Not everything I see happening around me is something I have to accept that I'm capable of doing myself. I know better than that! I have many things I know I could not, would not, do. Locking myself in the bathroom and pounding my own head on the wall in frustration was better than beating my hyperactive children, though I also knew I had to get well in order to stop affecting them negatively by frightening them. Besides, pounding my head on the wall was a dangerous thing to do to myself. But I could not beat my children, or put them in a frying pan, or drown them. I could not murder my ex-husband, though there might have been times I wished I could. I could not rob someone deliberately, even if I were broke and hungry. I know this too, about myself. Don't you? If not, why not?

Other things I do, those are learned from experience. Im not perfect anymore than anyone else is. Maybe the things above were learned from experience in past lives, I don't know. I just know I couldn't do them. There are other, smaller, things I couldn't do either, because I have done them, and learned from the mistakes.

I'm not talking about ignoring our fears, ignoring our dark areas. I'm talking about having clean energy around us so that we can work with all the things we need to work with. That's all. It's just like it's easier for me to do things in my home when the home is fairly clean and organized.

Hugs to you too!

[Sowelu]

There are many factors that make up a person's perspective. Mine stems from a great deal of life experience that generated many, many questions, firstly. Most humans on the planet these days have a wealth of harsh human experience under their belt... with purpose. Indeed I'm one of them, as well.

So once these questions arose regarding the how's and why's of my own awful experiences, the discovery process began in earnest. Nothing in the external world around me provided any answers that resonated with the truth that lived in my heart, however. Not psychology or science or religion or even spirituality as it's understood and practiced in modern humanity.

So the second phase began. I sought inward. In truth the inner connection was there since childhood because as a child there was no one in my outer environment to turn to for help, guidance or love (pre-planned set up to encourage me to look inside). Once I chose to look inwardly, I was presented with the opportunity to explore the essence of what manifests as experiences here. The root causes at the energetic level. The essential energy that finds it's way up through the belief structures of humanity and eventually manifests as experiences.

Of course once you gain access to the essential level, you also have to explore how it moves all the way up to the surface of life. This involves exploring human beliefs, memes, addictions and all sorts of things. Exploring life force from whence it springs while being in human form (and all that goes along with that) has been a very difficult but extremely edifying journey. Sharing what I've discovered in the process is part of what I'm here to do. It is not a common perspective, no. It tends to trigger defense in most, as well. That has also been very difficult for me, being one who really just wants us all to know and share the love we are!

So I apologize if my sharing seems to invalidate your experience, nothing could be further from the truth. I do appreciate your experiences and your point of view, IrisRavenstar.

Thanks again for the dialogue. (((Hugs)))

Blessings!
Sowelu