Many cleansing traditions include something smoky: burning sage, rosemary or mugwort, for example.
If something in your home is feeling off, cleansers may be able to help.
Your dog won’t stop barking. Your cat refuses to go into the basement. You’re hearing odd noises. You toss and turn, restless, all night. Your things aren’t where you left them.
Or maybe you can’t even point to specific evidence, but something in your home just feels … off. Stuck. Heavy.
This is when a home cleanser steps in.
“I like to think of it as a spiritual spring cleaning,” says Ariel Willow, a spiritual practitioner in Upstate New York. “We all have times in our lives where you notice that there’s a lot of dust in your house or your family’s been sick and the air in the house just feels gross, you know? And that’s kind of how it feels energetically when you’re in a space that isn’t cleansed.”
The practice can sound a little, well, woo-woo to sceptics, and it often gets overly dramatised as a battle against evil spirits in Hollywood portrayals. But some versions of its tenets exist in many religions and spiritual practices. For cleansers, the relieved responses from their clients serve as affirmation that the process makes a difference.
“People share: ‘Oh, my friends come over, my family comes over, and they tell me how good energy I have in my space,’” says Etecia Burrell, founder of LetThemFlourish in Oakland, California, and a priest in the Lucumi spiritual tradition. “Hearing that feedback is affirming every time, even though I’ve been doing it for years.”
The conversation doesn’t always start that way. The demonic depictions in films such as Poltergeist are misleading and might even cause anxiety about connecting with spirits, Burrell says.
I like to think of it as a spiritual spring cleaning.
“Sometimes, people are in a panic when they call me, like it’s an emergency,” she says. “First I try to help them understand in my tradition how we see spirits, how we see the universe, and especially our connection with our ancestors. … Indigenous cultures really see the natural world and unseen world as being interconnected.”
Home cleansing isn’t about ridding the home of a spirit, but instead “making sure that a person has peace in their space and peace in your home. And sometimes, it’s about appeasing the spirit; sometimes, it is about requesting that the spirit make themselves be known,” Burrell says. “Sometimes, spirits will also help people to understand ‘I’m here intervening in your life to protect you, to support you, to make sure that you’re safe.’”
Or the problem may not even be a spirit. “A lot of the time, it’s the actual people that live there,” says Vida Valdes, a spiritual adviser based in New Jersey. She’ll tell them: “‘You keep fighting over the same scenario over and over and over again in this room,’ and they look at me like, ‘Oh.’ Like, what, you didn’t think I was going to pick that up?”
That most commonly happens when the people have lived in a home more than six months, she says, and they’ve had time to bring their own energy and patterns to the space. In a space with newer residents, it may be more likely that the home or land’s previous history is at play.
That’s why clients sometimes hire practitioners to go to a space before move-in day to cleanse it and maintain “good spiritual hygiene”, Burrell says. In some cases, they’re even hired by real estate agents to provide a needed jolt for a home on the market.
Occasionally, cleansers get called in for problems they can’t solve. “It’s not always spiritual,” says Michele Rios, a medium in Northern Virginia and a Santería priestess. “I’ll sometimes tell people, ‘Why don’t you go to the doctor?’”
But if it does fall in their wheelhouse, once cleansers figure out the source of the problem, it’s time to deal with the situation at hand. What that looks like varies depending on your cleanser and their spiritual background, as well as your space and preferences.
“You’re always going to start off with a technique that someone else uses and then just adapt it from there to be something that feels like it better fits with your practice,” Willow says. “There’s just something very powerful about it, intuitively following your gut.”
You can feel the sadness in a home. You can feel it.
There are some commonalities, though. For starters, the cleanser will walk through the space to get a sense of what might be causing the stagnant energy.
Rios’s intuition tends to kick in quickly. At a cleansing in Fredericksburg, Virginia, a few years ago, she turned to her client and asked if someone had died there. “And she said, ‘Oh, my God, I never told you. My husband shot himself,’” Rios recalls. “’Cause it’s from the moment I walked in, you can feel the sadness in a home. You can feel it.”
Many cleansing traditions include something smoky: Indigenous Americans smudging with sage, for example, or mugwort and other herbs burned at Celtic Samhain.
Willow warns that merely lighting sage, rosemary, Palo Santo or another plant in your home, without putting intention behind it, might not actually do much for you. “If you’re using techniques that feel right for you and feel comfortable and that you feel confident in, that’s gonna have such a more lasting and impactful effect,” she says.
I visited Rios earlier this month at Botanica Santa Barbara Chango in Alexandria, Virginia, for an incense and resin cleansing demonstration. She lit a puck of charcoal until it sparkled with heat, then placed it inside a small cauldron with wire handles. She added her incense mixture of myrrh, copal, sage and three kings - a mineral-filled potpourri with an earthy, floral aroma. The mix isn’t that different from what the Catholic Church uses, “but I give it a little more flavour here”, she says.
She swung the cauldron (not too hard, she cautioned, or the mixture would fall out) toward all four corners of each room, a trail of heady smoke following.
Not a fan of smoke? There are other things cleansers can use. Valdes varies the elements based on her clients’ preferences. “Some people don’t like smoke like sage or pine or juniper or cedar,” she says. In those instances, “I use the water element. I got holy water from the church. I got Florida water. I got different aromatic waters, like orange scented, like anything uplifting and bright, like lemon water, anything that can help clear the space. And I was throwing that around the room and I would say prayers.”
Some people don’t like smoke like sage or pine or juniper or cedar. [In those instances,] I use the water element.
Sound is another option. Peg Driscoll, an energy practitioner and Reiki master in Suwanee, Georgia, uses chants, mantras, sound bowls and chimes.
Actual cleaning is also part of cleansing. “If I’m already getting my hands dirty, I might as well get in there spiritually, too,” Willow says.
Burrell makes floor washes, counter wipes and other items, which she sells at the Sanctuary, a botanica, or religious supply store, in Oakland. (In addition to being easier to clean, hardwood and other floors that can be mopped are easier to cleanse. For people with carpet, Burrell has a special powder people can use and then vacuum up.)
And sometimes, Burrell finds that the best solution might involve changing the home’s decor or layout: “I’m looking at colours; I’m looking at plants, I’m looking at the placement of the furniture, looking at which rooms should be used for what purpose and function.”
For Driscoll, it’s intuitive that cleaning and cleansing go hand in hand. “When we do a deep cleaning and we remove clutter, oh God, it’s just like, we can breathe and we can just feel like there’s space, so that space can produce more beautiful energy,” she says. That’s why she recommends clients clean and declutter first, “even if it’s just one pile”, and remove any cobwebs, dust or broken items.
While Driscoll does this, she recites a cleansing prayer. The prayer is similar to the Catholic house blessing, the Jewish Birkat haBayit and others in the Abrahamic tradition: “My house is my temple of love and light. May God, source universe divine, bless this house, making it sacred and safe. May all who enter my house bring only joy, love, laughter and peace. And so it is.”