Practice #1 Cleansing with water

Practice #2 Ritual Smudging

Smudging your way to empowerment. Smudging is such an amazing way to remain spiritually hygienic while acting as a protective barrier to keep unwanted energies away. You can use different tools.

Choose a tool that is not Cultural Appropriation important.

Many cultures around the globe have traditionally burned herbs, incense, or other materials as a spiritual ritual.

So if you’re looking for a cleansing ceremony, you might want to start by learning more about your own heritage.

But the idea of ‘smudging’ is distinctly indigenous to the Americas according to Dr. Keene. Within North and South America, it’s important to note, different communities use different medicines and rituals for cleansing.

The practice has a long and rich history that extends way before white witchy practices brought it onto Instagram feeds near you.

In fact, before smudging was popularized, it was illegal — at least, for Indigenous folks — and often violently suppressed.

If you have used herbs to cleanse your space in the past and enjoy the ritual, you don’t have to give it up in order to do so in a culturally conscious way.

Smudging refers to a specific cultural and spiritual practice, but smoke cleansing offers an alternative to smudging for folks who aren’t Indigenous.

This form of cleansing can look a bit like smudging, but it’s just the simple act of burning herbs, wood, incense, or other safe-to-burn materials that possess cleansing properties. The smoke is then waved over the area you want to cleanse.

Many cultures have historical and spiritual practices connected to smoke cleansing — everything from herbs and woods to incense and roots. For example, frankincense and myrrh were burned in ancient Egypt for prayer, and rosemary was historically burned in hospitals in France in order to clear the air of infection. It may even be personally fulfilling to find out if and what your ancestors burned for cleansing.

To smudge yourself, all you have to do is light up your choice of tool. Starting at the bottom of your feet, without touching your skin, wave the tool moving upwards until you reach the crown of your head. Do this both on the front side and back side of your body.

You can even clean yourself every morning before leaving your house to create a protective barrier. and doing preemptive damage control, you’ll lessen the chances of observing someone else’s unwanted energies.

It’s also important to smudge your home on a constant basis, the way you regularly clean your space. You want to remove all of the residual energies that have been building up in your home so that they don’t get hoarded.

Cleansing should also be done with some healing energy because it increases potency.

This brings me to the next step.

*If you are a Non-Indigenous, you should not be using these tools. Copal, Palo Santo, and White Sage(which are the most used).

Practice # 3 Use Reiki as a protection ritual.

Reiki is a form of energy healing that focuses on the chakras within the body. Each human has 108 meridian lines connecting to a total of 8 chakras located within the body. 

Chakras are always open And can easily get them balanced. Especially if you’re around someone who tends to have an uncanny ability at draining your energy.

When the chakras are out of whack, all you need to do is conduct an energy-healing session. If you don’t have the funds to pay for one, you can always do it yourself, as I believe we all have the ability to be our own self healer. 

How do I practice Reiki self-healing on myself?

1. Support the body in a sturdy sustainable posture.
2. Honor your intentions.
3. Meditate making sure to draw upon your breath at a rhythmic box breathing technique. 
4. Create a Mantra for what you are healing.  I usually use, I surrender to release any and all energetic difficulties in my body. 
5. Call upon your guides. Hands in prayer form I call on my abuelitas and abuelos from both sides of my lineage to guide me through releasing anything that no longer serves my body. 
6. Use hands-on healing. Although you must receive attunements from a Reiki master teacher in order to channel Reiki, anyone can channel love with the power of their intentions, awareness, breath, and spiritual guides. As Jalapa Dhaduk, a Reiki master says, “we all possess Reiki and use it daily without knowing.”
7. Giving thanks.  Making sure that you always give thanks to your lineage for helping you through this process is essential. 

Since we are energy it’s super important to consistently remove energy from my body. Even more so, if we’ve been around someone who sold zaps it out of you and permeates you with their own energy.

This is why energy healing is such an effective way to remove all unwanted energy. 

Which brings me to the next step.

Practice #4 Nature & Recharge

Ok, this one is a big one for me since my lineage is literally called the people of the land.

For those of you who use logic, science is constantly proving what our ancestors and essentially what has been passed down through our DNA already knew, that we thrive more easily in a natural, green environment.

A large body of research is documenting the positive impacts of nature on human flourishing—our social, psychological, and emotional life. Over 100 studies have shown that being in nature, living near nature, or even viewing nature in paintings and videos can have positive impacts on our brains, bodies, feelings, thought processes, and social interactions. In particular, viewing nature seems to be inherently rewarding, producing a cascade of position emotions and calming our nervous systems. These in turn help us to cultivate greater openness, creativity, connection, generosity, and resilience.

We come up with all kinds of ways to shield ourselves from “city” stimuli, such as withdrawing, looking at other people less, or putting on headphones.

The mechanism in the brain that you use to ignore stimuli and to make yourself focus can become exhausted.

In nature, this ‘attention mechanism’ gets to recharge. Someone who sees a lot of greenery is therefore more capably armed against exhaustion.

We all know the powerful recharging powers that being in nature can provide us. The smells, sounds, textures, and primal energy of nature can center us, relax us and recharge us.

In some cultures like Japan, they call this “forest bathing“.

For myself, I call it grounding standing on the earth barefoot as a way to use the power of nature to recharge myself. I also learned from my beautiful cousin to lean on my favorite tree and release any negative energy and ask the tree to transcend it into viable useful energy for Pachamama.

So go connect to nature today. But your feet into the earth. If its cold and snowing stick your tongue out and allow that child to come out and connect to nature and its transformative powers, make it a point to create a spiritual ritual that involves the earth and its natural properties.

Which brings me to the next step

Practice # 5 Meditate Your Way to Serenity

Meditation isn’t just for calming your mind. It’s a great modality to prevent and get rid of negative energies.

To prevent negative energies:

Sit in silence for at least five minutes and visualize yourself being immersed in your own bubble of love and positive vibes. Silent isn’t your thing? Try mindful meditation infused whatever activity you’re doing with intentions of love beauty harmony in peace. The more you practice this, the more you gain your mind to treat your body as a negativity repellent.

To remove negative energies:

All you have to do is sit in silence and focus on the energy clearing your body of everything that you don’t desire and that isn’t serving you to your highest good. 

If sitting in silence isn’t your thing conduct a mindful meditation. You can do in mindful meditation while you’re going for a walk, doing yoga, folding, laundry, or doing the dishes.

For at least five minutes, visualize the negativity leaving your body. You can also give the energy a physical form if this makes it easier for you. You can imagine balls of toxicity stored in your body being pulled out.

The bottom line is that you can use meditation as a form of relieving some energies that are around you and that is stuck to you. If the word meditation alone ignites a strong aversion, I know it used to before I learned how to quiet my mind try listening to some music instead.

Which brings me to the next step.

Practice # 6 Listen to music

Music is by far one of the best forms of therapy in my opinion. Making them both so many emotions and transforming your entire reality in just a few minutes. Which makes this is the perfect protection ritual to reclaim your power. 

All you have to do is listen to some mellow and calming music with a cup of tea and savor the moment.

Flow with the tune that you’re listening to and feel the music in your body. Get lost and carried away at the moment.

Dance your way to empowerment.

Our bodies store emotions that we haven’t worked through, including negative ones. Because emotions are energy, moving your body will force all the trapped ones to escape. 

The next time you need a pick me up, let the music be your muse for solace. Now, let’s move into the next technique of how to clean your energy.. 

Practice #7 Clean your energy with salt

Salt has been used for thousands of years for good reason. It accesses a natural preservative, flavoring for foods, and is even in our bodies.

It was such a hot commodity at one point that it was used for trading. The word salary is even derived from salt.

But we’re not here to discuss the history of salt. Only the specific benefit today is to cleanse yourself.

Three ways to use salt for removing negative energy.

The first way is to line the outside of each entrance of your home with salt so that negative energies cannot enter.

The second option is to place a salt bowl by each entrance on the side of your home as a collection for negative energies. Just be sure to refresh the salt bowls every few days.

The last way you can use salt is to carry a small vial of it with you. Keep it in your purse or pocket. Even carrying an extra one in your car and keeping one in your office is great if you’re encountering negativity from others at work. Again you want to make sure that you’re consistently refreshing the salt.

The type of salt you use is whatever you’re preferential to. I find that Atacama Salt when I can get it is my preference but when I can’t I use Pink Himalayan salt, a great detoxifier, mixed with activated charcoal, a purifier and black is a potent energy remover, to be an awesome way to keep the negativity at bay.

So there’s something you already have at home so you might as well just put it to good use by saying good riddance to all unwanted junk. There you have it all seven protection rituals/ceremonies to reclaim your power. 

It’s only natural that we’re going to encounter people who won’t always vibe with us. But it doesn’t mean that it needs to ruin our days. All you need are a few tools at your disposal to protect your aura.