These days, anyone can buy a space clearing bell at the click of a button on the spaceclearing online store, but it wasn’t always so.
When I first began space clearing back in 1978, I lived in England. I amassed a large collection of bells from all over the world, and experimented with using them in a variety of situations. I would use perhaps four or five different bells in any building, using smaller and smaller bells with each circuit I did. I used the best equipment I could find at the time, and it did have some effect, but it was very far from what I now know to be possible.
I continued to develop space clearing for the next 12 years. Then in 1990, I travelled to Bali and discovered Balinese bells, which radically changed everything. It took me two years and several visits to Bali to acquire a bell for myself (I was the first non-Balinese person ever to do so), and when I went back to England in 1992 and started using it, I was astonished at the difference it made. It took space clearing to an entirely new level that I had not even thought was possible before, and now I never use anything except Balinese bells. I have found nothing anywhere in the world to compare with them.
In 1993, I started teaching space clearing workshops, and the level of interest turned out to be so great that I was inundated by requests for bells. The best I could suggest at that time was to search antique shops for some kind of bell or use Tibetan tingsha cymbals instead, neither of which did very much in terms of space clearing but were better than nothing at all.
On my next visit to Bali, I presented the problem to the family of bell-makers I had come to know, and asked them if it would be possible to create a more affordable bell specifically designed for space clearing, with a wooden handle instead of a the traditional hand-crafted brass one but the same glorious purity of sound Balinese bells are so famous for. After many months of deliberating, they finally agreed, and by the time my Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui book was published in 1996, I had some space clearing bells available to sell to people who wanted one.
In the 20 years I lived in Bali, I continued to seek out the the most skilled Balinese craftspeople on the island to create all the other types of equipment that are so easily available today on the spaceclearing.com online store, including bell stands, harmony balls, altar cloths & colourizers. Truth to tell, it has always been more a labour of love than a viable business, but I see it as an essential service for the people who read my books and attend my workshops. There really is no point in teaching such high level space clearing without being able to provide people with the tools to do it properly.
Since moving from Bali back to the UK in 2010, the online store is now based in England and run by my husband, Richard, who is also a professional space clearer. He rigorously checks the quality of each item sent out, with the result that in all the years we have been doing this, we can count the number of products returned for refund or exchange on the fingers of one hand, and most of those are from people who simply changed their mind.
Around 50% of our customers are based in the US, and the rest are in 30+ countries around the globe, particularly the UK, Germany, Canada, Australia and Japan. For my part, I continue to stay in touch with all the talented craftspeople in Bali, most of whom have now been with me for 15 years or more. They all work in their own homes, surrounded by their families, and with great camaraderie between them.
So that’s the story of how and why space clearing bells came into being, and why bells are so much a part of my life.
Copyright © Karen Kingston, 2013
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