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For many of us, cleaning is a part of life. We clean our bodies, our homes, and our clothes. We clean our workstations, our pets, and even our cars. It is just understood that in the course of living life things get dirty and need to be cleansed and disinfected on a regular basis. But notice how these are all external things. How many of us take time to clean out our internal state? How many regularly cleanse our souls?
You might be wondering what a soul cleanse is exactly. Well, think about it. Just like filth and grime attaches itself to the body throughout the day, negative attitudes and thoughts can attach to the soul. We absorb so much more than we even realize. We absorb the annoyed feeling of someone’s Facebook status update. We absorb the anxiety of someone not responding to our text. We absorb the stress of the morning commute and the sadness of a news story. We absorb the grouchy attitude of our partner and the embarrassment from that socially awkward moment with a stranger. We might absorb the hurt of a friend blowing off plans at the last minute, or the disappointment of not getting the job. It can be anything, really. Even if we believe those experiences do not really get into us, they still get onto us from time to time. And the normal life moments that get onto us, can also stick with us after a while if we do not regularly and intentionally release them. Here are several ideas for ways to cleanse your soul.
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Does your soul feel burdened? Has it been forever since you have prayed? Do you just feel a little “off” spiritually? , I have the exercise for you! Do this exercise with an open heart and an open mind and reap the benefits.
Table of contents
Steps
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Make a spiritual place for yourself. This can be inside, outside, or anywhere that is your happy place. It should speak to you. It can be an elaborate alter or just a small place outside where you can light a candle.
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Pick up the following: incense, candles, a pillow to sit on, some sage, an egg and a bowl. Sage is really important. Also, matches to light everything. Bring a blanket to sit on if you are outside.
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Sit down in your spiritual space and begin to light your candles and incense. Begin to quiet your mind and ask your deity to listen and help cleanse your spirit.
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Put your hands in your lap and begin to scan your body. Where are you carrying tension? Is your heart heavy?
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Turn your mind inward. What is troubling you? What is going on in your life that is hurting your spirit? Examples of this could be negative people, a traumatic experience or just a bunch of stress. Whatever this is, concentrate on the feelings. Really feel these emotions. This can be uncomfortable.
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Take the egg in your right hand (still feeling these emotions), and put it on your forehead. While you concentrate on these feelings begin to imagine that they are slowly seeping from your head to the egg. Really concentrate and put all of your negative emotions into the egg. Make sure all of them are placed into the egg.
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Take the egg (still feeling all of those heavy thoughts in the egg) and then squash them in the bowl. This is very satisfying.
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Take the sage and light it. Wave it around and really get it into the air. Make sure you get it around your head and heart area. Once you are done, put the sage out.
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Now lay down. Relax your whole body. Start from your tippy toes and concentrate on one body part at a time. Don’t forget small body parts like your jaw and your finger tips. Pretend like your body is sinking into the floor in deep relaxation.
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Relax your mind. Quiet your mind. Just lay there in your happy place. Pretend that your body is melting into the ground. There is no tension. Your body should feel like butter!
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While you are laying there, begin to communicate with your deity. If you do not believe in a god, that is OK. Ask for a blessing from the divine and for your soul to become less burdened.
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When you are ready to get up, do so. Feel how much lighter you feel.
Community Q&A
Add New Question
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Question
What incense should I use?
The kind of incense is up to you. Choose one that you think smells good and makes you feel relaxed when you smell it.
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Question
What would be a good way to keep my mind on God?
I would focus on prayer and being mindful of the blessings in your life that God has given you. These are things you can do at any point during the day to keep your mind on God.
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How can I rid my house of evil spirits?
You can smudge your house by using sage. To do this, you burn the sage and take it into each room in your house, sweeping the burning sage across the room and telling the spirits to leave. Then, crack open a door or a window, allowing the spirits to exit. If you want a more Christian approach, invite a priest to cleanse your home.
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Question
Can eggs be used for spiritual protection, and if so, what are the specific instructions to perform such a ritual?
Asghar Malik
Community Answer
For spiritual protection, you need not eggs, but a strong soul, which can lead you to freedom and peace.
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Question
Can I use something other than an egg?
Yes. Use anything you can smash. The aim is to get rid of negativity present in you.
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Question
What if I’m gluten free and can’t use eggs?
Nowhere in the article does it mention eating anything, so you shouldn’t have any problem.
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Question
Why can’t I find love?
Love is a long journey. Have faith, and you will be able to find someone who’s waiting for you that will complete you.
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Question
What do I do with the egg afterwards?
You can simply dispose of it and with it you can dispose of all of your negativity, fear, anger, etc.
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Question
Instead of using incense and sage, can I use sage incense? Two in one?
MysticalExperimentation
Community Answer
Yes! That’s actually what I do. Having only one thing burning makes keeping track of your ritual items much easier.
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Question
Can I use salt and water to chase away evil spirits in my house?
No, salt and water won’t be effective against evil spirits.
Show more answers
Unanswered Questions
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Tips
- Take a little time for your soul everyday. Read something inspirational, go on a quiet walk, pray, meditate, etc.
- Do this exercise with an open mind.
Warnings
- If this exercise feels wrong to you, do not do it.
- If you are outside, make sure that you put out the candles and sage immediately following your cleansing.
Article Info
Categories: Faith and Belief
In other languages:
Español: limpiar tu espíritu, Italiano: Purificare il Tuo Spirito, Русский: очистить свой дух, Português: Limpar seu Espírito, Deutsch: Deinen Geist reinigen, Français: purifier son esprit, Bahasa Indonesia: Membersihkan Batin
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Your soul is supposed to be perfect and divine. So why would you need to cleanse anything made from divine substance? Isn’t your perfect essence beyond the need for fixing or cleaning?
Well, it depends how you define Perfection.
Consider how your soul essence has experience after experience, lifetime after lifetime. Every experience leaves its imprint, like a muddy shoe print on your doormat. For example, that situation where you fell off a cliff in one lifetime left a bruise in your soul; the impact is still there, at a subtle level. And then, there was that situation where you were chased by the townspeople because you were a member of the wrong class, or religion, or tribe — that imprint is still there.
If you were in perfect, one hundred percent alignment with your original essence, you’d automatically re-align with your true self with ease, even after difficult events. But there’s a reason why automatic re-alignment doesn’t happen instantly. When you understand this, you can have compassion for your own self, because you will stop judging your natural reactions to events.
When you experience the difficulties of life, your emotional reactions are only human, and are nothing to blame your self about. You may be frightened, angry, sad, or confused by what is happening — likely a combination of these. You’re generating thoughts of every description as well, and these muddled thoughts get mingled into your emotions. Strongly experienced emotions and thoughts can create a pattern that makes an imprint in your aura, like a muddy footprint that makes its mark on the carpet.
Your soul expresses itself through your aura, and the brightest presence in your aura is your soul essence. Think of your aura as an energy field that expresses all that you are. Your aura reflects your divine essence, your hopes and dreams, your potential, and more. And your aura contains the patterns of all your accumulated emotions, thoughts, and experiences. These patterns can affect the clarity of your soul light, as a dirty window blocks the sunlight.
Is it enough to simply know that you are made of divine substance?
Some mystics say that your essence is divine, and that this is all you need to know. Certainly, it is very helpful to be able to confront all the troubling patterns you’ve acquired, and to contrast those patterns with your divine essence. This helps you remember your essential cosmic nature, and helps you disentangle yourself from the thousands of difficult experiences.
However, it is often not enough to simply remember your soul essence. This is because of a phenomenon called fragmentation. When you experienced all those thousands of difficult experiences in all your lifetimes — including this current lifetime — you protected yourself.
This is an automatic response mechanism that keeps you from becoming so scared or overwhelmed that your nervous system would become dangerously overcharged. The protective mechanism divides the difficult thoughts and emotions into separate fragments within your body and aura, so that their collective intensity doesn’t destroy you.
While this protective mechanism is well-intended, it creates the problem that you are dissociated from the trapped emotional energy that you need to release for optimum well-being. Also, the trapped energy thinks the problem is still happening, even though that event is now in the past — and in some cases, in a past lifetime.
When you understand that you have dispersed fragments of thoughts and emotions jumbled in your body and aura, then you start to understand how you can cleanse your soul. Recognizing your emotions and thoughts as energy is one key to liberating yourself from patterns. When you can examine a feeling or thought as a living energy presence, then you can talk to it. You can massage it, heal it, and shift it. The pattern is no longer mysterious; it is something that you can shift in healthy, creative ways.
Are you really allowed to do this? What gives you the right to shift your patterns? If an event has already happened, isn’t it locked into time and space as a permanent event? Well, it has happened, and there’s no denying that, but you don’t have to be eternally referenced to it. You can develop a neutral perspective to that event.
Remember, you are an eternal soul, and you have spiritual rights. Although your experiences really did happen, realize that these many experiences don’t have to define you. Yes, the experiences have influenced you, and you may still be carrying the patterns of those experiences. But you’re likely doing that out of habit, and not out of need. Remember that your eternal soul existed long before those experiences, and will exist long after.
Another empowering key is to recognize that events and patterns are temporary
Compared to the eternal nature of your soul, every event is a little blip in time. Tune into that the next time you find yourself responding dramatically to something or someone. Even if it feels that you’re imagining the idea of eternity, let yourself get a sense of what eternity feels like. It’s an actual spacious sense that opens up, and it helps you transcend the fears and judgments that you get stuck in so easily.
Realize that you have the right to shift your mind, and to change how you choose to interact with the items in your memory. This is not denial, but is a choice to experience life in a more empowered and centered way. As a soul, you can make these empowered choices. You can benefit your body, mind, and soul, by changing how you perceive and interact with a particular situation.
This awareness shift makes it easier for you to bring your reference point back to your essential soul energy — the timeless energy of your essence.
But why do you hold on to patterns if you aren’t benefiting from them? You have been influenced by strong, unpleasant experiences, and you temporarily forgot that your divine soul doesn’t need to keep holding on to those patterns. Of course, you experience everything to learn, but that doesn’t mean that you have to hold on to the hurt or the fear forever. If it has become pointless to hold the problem in your body, mind, or aura, then you can explore letting the pattern go.
Releasing patterns without denying the events
Of course, it’s easier said than done to let these old patterns go — but why is this such a challenge? Remember, layers of difficult situations made you temporarily forget your divine nature. And your soul, in its effort to help you, conveniently divided the pain, fear, sadness, and anger into tiny compartmentalized sections in your body and aura. And at a subconscious level, you promised yourself that you’d keep protecting yourself with fragmentation, and not remember your original, complete self.
This is one explanation of why you hold on to problems, but there is yet another reason. You have become identified with the problem. You might not realize it, and maybe it does seem a bit absurd to suppose that you are identifying with a problem that happened in a past lifetime, or an issue that happened in your childhood. When you forget your divine nature, you still need an identity — you identify with a lesser identity, and that lesser identity becomes part of your definition of who you are.
Until you re-write your definition, you’ll keep getting your sense of identity from your lesser, problem-oriented self. It would be easy if you could just reconfigure yourself today, and be forevermore enlightened, but more realistically, you’ll want to re-align with your soul identity daily. This is because these issues exist in many layers, and you gradually transform the layers over time.
You may wonder why your soul, supposedly eternal and wise, would not automatically help you with these essential understandings about your cosmic identity. However, your soul exists at many levels, and some are much more aware than others. At its essence, your soul is truly aligned with universal love and wisdom. However, your lifetimes are for learning, and the younger aspects of your soul have had many challenging learning experiences. This raises another question:
Why do you need to learn in each lifetime, if your divine essence already knows everything?
When your soul was created, it was made from universal substance — a divine spark made from the substance of the cosmic creative intelligence of the universe. This spark — you — was given a unique identity, unlike any other soul in the universe. And this individual spark was given Free Will.
Understanding this helps you know why you co-created all the learning experiences over many lifetimes. And, it helps you understand why your soul essence doesn’t automatically fix the problems in your younger soul aspects. If it did that, then the younger aspects wouldn’t grow and mature. Just as a child learns school lessons by doing the homework — if the parent does the homework for the child, then the child doesn’t learn.
Though you’re made of universal substance, your individual spark needs to learn for itself — free-will means that you are learning to make choices in each moment. You wouldn’t really learn if you were just following external orders. Divine learning emerges from your inner wisdom, in each moment, because you are discovering the universal truths for your self. In order to do this, you need to discover how everything works, and this includes finding out how your emotions and thoughts function.
When you have all the thousands of experiences that you have, each situation gives you an opportunity to be centered — or not. Will you reactively blame yourself or others — or quietly stay centered, to access your deeper understanding? So don’t blame yourself for having natural upset reactions to things — it’s not a bad thing. However, though automatic reactions aren’t exactly bad, your reactive responses do create more difficulties. This is why you are gradually discovering healthy options to your automatic reactions.
One important key to cleansing your soul is to look at a situation, and experience that situation in a fresh, new way. This is the technique that you are going to explore now. It helps your soul release the patterns that are clogging your aura with stale memories of troubling feelings and thoughts. You don’t have to know all the details of the situation that you’re healing. Even a general idea of a difficult situation is enough to practice these soul-healing techniques.
Meditation to liberate you from stuck ways of seeing a past problem:
1. Look at a situation that affected you in your childhood.
2. Imagine seeing the situation from a completely different angle — for example, imagine that you could experience that situation from a bird’s eye view, or even from outer space.
3. Notice how you breathe, and how you feel in your body, as you relax and experience the scene from these very different vantage points.
. Now see it from yet other vantage points — from the side — from the rear view — and from various angles that are different from your original viewpoint in the scene.
5. As you play with these different vantage points, notice how you breathe, and how you feel in your body as you experience each vantage point.
6. Now you can shift the sound within that scene. Replace the sound with different voices; add an amusing soundtrack; lower the volume on abrupt noises or shouting, so that it becomes very quiet, as if you were using a volume control for the scene.
7. Notice how you breathe, and how you feel in your body as you experience the scene with these entirely different sounds. Look at any detail in the scene, and notice how that aspect begins to feel somewhat different when the scene is accompanied with a different set of sounds, or a quieter set of sounds.
8. Next, shift your size in the scene, so that you are a giant towering over the scene. See the people in the scene as if they were tiny dolls.
9. Breathe, and notice what you feel in your body when you are a giant looking down on the scene.
10. To integrate, breathe gently, breathe into your body, and notice that you are safe in the here-and-now. You are not stuck where you were; you can see and feel that situation in a new way now. You will continue to notice the fascinating shifts in your body and mind.
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Does this meditation produce a complete shift? Probably not entirely — but do notice the subtle shifts in your awareness. Is it easier to breath, and more comfortable in your body when you think of that past scene? Play with this meditation again, and each time you do it, the scene may feel lighter and easier to you.
There’s no judgment here. Your way of escaping by fragmenting is what we all do, so you’re not better or worse than anyone else. Everyone divides himself or herself in order to escape from overwhelm. At the same time, everyone has the means of using their consciousness to awaken to their potential. That means that you can bring consciousness to all your parts. You can bring your divine essence to the parts of you that need that blessing.
Meditation to bring your soul essence to your parts:
. Imagine your soul essence as the vast, cosmic being that it truly is. Use your imagination — pretend, if you like.
. Imagine seeing and feeling life as your soul would see and feel reality — pretend that you are actually seeing and feeling from the experience of your soul essence.
3. From that soul perspective look down on a scene from your childhood.
. Reach down into that scene, with your mighty cosmic soul arms, and lift your younger self up and out of that scene.
. Hold your younger self in your celestial arms, and let your cosmic love and light shine sweetly from your divine heart and mind into that younger self.
6. Say the encouraging things that you are inspired to say to your younger self.
7. Continue to re-assess the scene, making any adjustments you’d like, from the perspective of your vast soul essence.
8. Let your body and soul face each other — the body and soul are really recognizing that they are both aspects of each other.
9. Explore the shift between your soul essence perspective, and your in-the-body, here-now experience. Gently shift back and forth between your soul perspective and your here-now perspective.
10. As you move back and forth between body and soul awareness, the two begin to meld together. Don’t force it. Just gently be with the shift as your body and soul recognize their essential oneness.
11. To integrate, be in present time. Breathe into your body, and gently sweep your awareness through your body, so you can notice how you are more present, and more at peace.
12. Let yourself notice the interesting details in the room around you, and become aware of the subtle enjoyable details that you are able to appreciate more easily in the present moment.
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As you explore this shifting between soul and body awareness, you start to recognize that your soul is always available to you. You realize that your soul’s love and wisdom belongs to you. Your soul has its own empowering cosmic perspective, and that perspective is available to you whenever you choose to access it.
There is a fascinating moment when you really recognize that your soul is your true essence. And, this body is a living, breathing expression of that true essence, in the unique opportunity called This Lifetime. You can use the cosmic perspective of your soul to help shift stuck feelings and thoughts. The shift can help you look at situations that always seemed stuck or hopelessly difficult.
This earthly lifetime offers an amazing lesson in focus and alignment
By the way, what value does your body bring to your soul, if your soul is already so wise? Your body helps to ground and focus the vast and universal soul perspective. Embodiment has its own extraordinary rewards. Remember this the next time a well-intentioned spiritual expert tells you that nothing is real on this earth. It’s all relative — your body is getting a deeper divine understanding from your soul, while your soul becomes more polished and focused when it grounds itself into the slower presence of your body within this earth plane.
But, as some will tell you, you’re already clean — you don’t need to be cleaned. This well-intentioned advice comes from those who have correctly perceived that your essence is perfect. However, what they may have forgotten is that the human tendency to fragment means that you have to do a bit of inner healing work. You integrate your fragments, release the excess tension, and re-align with your divine essence. Simply knowing that your soul essence is perfect doesn’t automatically heal those fragments and make them magically unite together.
If all of this means that you now have an easier way to cleanse your soul, that’s a beautiful thing. Remember, the knowledge that your soul essence is perfect is true. And, the realization that it takes some work to cleanse your soul is also true. As you now know, that’s because your soul exists at many levels. Let yourself learn from the deeper essential soul truths that your essence shares with you. And let yourself help the less-aware aspects that got stuck.
These meditations liberate you to shift the patterns that you thought you were stuck in. They’re fascinating, and even enjoyable at times. At the very least, you’ll get a chance to play with some deeper self-healing abilities, and discover how you’re more empowered than you had thought possible.
Please share your experiences with these meditations in the comments section below. Your experiences and discoveries help the next person, and make it easier for that reader to give himself or herself permission to transform. May your body, mind, and soul unite with ease and grace.
Many Blessings,
Joel Bruce Wallach
Founder, Cosmic-Living for spiritual empowerment, tele-classes and self-paced mp3’s
cosmic-living.com
