You sit down in a restaurant. You expect a clean table, not one with other people’s food spills still on it.
You order your food. You expect clean plates and eating utensils, not ones encrusted with previous customer’s meals.
You move in to a new home. You expect a clean space to give you a fresh start. But if anyone has lived there before you, this is usually not what you get. You get the equivalent of a dirty table or plate, imprinted with the energetic residues of the previous occupants to some degree or another.
In feng shui, this is called ‘predecessor energy’, and clearing it is one of the principle uses of space clearing.
If the building is a fairly new one and the previous occupants were healthy and happy there, then the imprinting is probably lightweight and not such a problem (continuing the restaurant analogy, the equivalent of a few crumbs that can be easily brushed aside with a simple space clearing ceremony).
But supposing you move into a place where the lives of the previous occupants did not go so well (think terrible food with cockroaches crawling all over the restaurant – sorry to be so graphic). Failed relationships, financial difficulties, chronic health problems and many other human woes may be imprinted in the walls, and after you’ve lived there for a while and got soaked in the imprints you’ll very probably start to experience similar issues yourself. The history of predecessor energy tends to repeat itself.
People in this situation often lament, ‘It all started going wrong when we moved here’. Yet unless they know about feng shui, they rarely put 2 + 2 together and realize the problem may be the house, not the time period they’ve been living in it.
Moving to a new home is one solution, although an expensive and time consuming one. If there are serious feng shui design flaws, or if the building has geopathic stress or strong electromagnetic fields creating health hazards, then this may be necessary. But if it’s just a matter of clearing out predecessor imprints, a deep and thorough space clearing ceremony will do the job.
If you’re fit and in good health, you can do the ceremony yourself, following the 21 steps in my book, Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui. Otherwise call in the services of one of the professional space clearers I’ve trained, especially if the place is very deeply imprinted.
To give you an example from my own life, Richard (my husband) and I once visited Sydney in Australia for a couple of months and rented four different self-catering apartments during that time to experience living in different parts of the city. Each had substantial predecessor energy of one kind or another when we arrived, which initially made us feel like we didn’t want to stay there. But space clearing cleaned them up immediately. Even I was surprised at the difference the ceremony made in the last place we stayed in, which had seen quite a bit of usage and initially looked to be beyond redemption.
These were not cheap rentals, by the way. We paid a good rate for them and they were generally well furnished and fitted out. But rented places have imprints of hundreds of previous occupants and these were as saturated as they come.
The beautiful thing about space clearing is that it allows you to clean up the energies of any place you live in so that you can truly have a fresh start there and make it your own. There’s no need to live with anyone else’s leftovers ever again!
Copyright © Karen Kingston, 2010-2013