My parents don’t talk much about ghosts. They will talk about their paranormal experiences if you ask them, but they like to keep their experiences hidden in the shadows. My father didn’t believe in ghosts when he met my mother. He thought of himself as a man of logic. He still does. He is an engineer and he believes in what he can touch and see, but even he can’t explain many of the things that have happened at their current home. In fact, it got so bad that at some point they brought the priest in for a cleansing ritual. The priest blessed all the rooms in the house and put stickers on the door frames to act as barriers to prevent bad spirits from entering the rooms. My old room was one of the most haunted rooms and the sticker from the priest’s blessing still remains in the door frame today. Having a priest come and bless your home or a pastor is one of the oldest Christian cleansing rituals and is common in Western culture. The image of a priest exorcising the demons a house has also come to be one of the most iconic images in paranormal popular culture. Most parish priests will bless the homes of their parishioners and my parents only had to submit a small request for this to be done. My parents report that it helped reduced the activity in their home, although it did not stop it altogether.
Another fairly popular mechanism for cleansing bad spirits and negative energy from your home
comes from Native American tradition and consists of a ritual smudging. The use of dried white sage is a 2000 year old tradition. Shamans used dried sage in their fires to call on ancestral spirits to take negative energy from a home or a person. Smudging kits today are fairly popular and can be bought at any new age store or on amazon.com. I can’t testify to how helpful these rituals are in the face of an actual haunting, but I have heard others say that they can be helpful.
Salt is also a common ingredient in cleansing rituals. The use of salt to ward off evil spirits has been popular in many cultures and dates back to the old testament. Salt is said to protect any home or person from any bad spirit or entity. It should be sprinkled liberally on door frames and windows and throughout the house to drive away negative spirits.
My sister uses techniques she learned in Reiki and doing energy work to cleanse cursed objects and objects with negative spiritual energy attached to them. As a licensed therapist, I have had several clients come to me who believe they are being tormented by ghosts and poltergeists. After screening for more serious mental illness and ruling it out, I have helped them drive their negative spirits away using a principle that unites almost all of these techniques. All spirits require energy to grow strong and if you take that energy from them, they will fade and dissipate. Replace the negativity in you and your life with positive energy and let go of your fear. Spirits feed on fear. The most effective cleansing exercise I have ever done is to simply stand with someone in strength without fear and have them tell the spirit to go away. All cleansing exercises share one thing, they take the fear away, thus diminishing the manifestation. When faced with any spirit, the first step is to find your strength and diminish your fear. A guide who is experienced in this can help. If you can not find one, you can always email me for help.
