What is Space Clearing?

How I developed space clearing

One evening in 1978, I was driving over to visit a couple of friends, who had just moved into a new apartment, when an idea occurred to me which — did I but know it — was to change the course of my life.

I arrived on their doorstep and explained to them what I had in mind. Rather than have them show me around their new home, I asked them to allow me to explore it blindfolded.

For a few years I had been developing specific subtle body structures to be able to read energies with my hands in a similar way to how I read a book with my eyes. I had practised a lot in my own home and public buildings, but had never tried it in anyone else’s home before, and never blindfolded.

They were as interested as I was to try this little experiment, so they hunted out a thick black silk scarf and tied it tightly around my eyes. Then starting at the front door, we began our journey around the apartment, following the inside perimeter of the walls.

Hand sensing

I led the way, moving very slowly down the corridor and into the front room. With my hands acting as antennae, I followed the contours of the walls, furniture and other objects, never quite touching them, just sensing the energies lodged in them.

The first thing I discovered was that I could mostly tell which pieces of furniture belonged to my friends and which belonged to the landlord. The pieces belonging to my friends had a warm, familiar energy to them, whereas those belonging to their landlord had a much duller, more ponderous vibration.

We all started to get excited. ‘See if you can tell us what pictures we have on the wall’, my friends challenged me.

This took a while longer, but I discovered I could feel very precisely where there were pictures on the wall, and when I fine-tuned I was able to tell them what colour the pictures were and sometimes the content of the picture too. They had several framed photographs of famous people and mutual friends around the apartment and I was able to name who some of them were.

‘Let’s see what else you can do’, my friends encouraged me. They were totally fascinated now. They asked me to sense which decorative items were theirs, and we were all dismayed when my accuracy rating fell dramatically with this. At first we couldn’t figure it out. But then they realized that many of their belongings were antiques, so were imbued with the energy of the previous owners too. It was this that had confused me.

This gave me the idea to go around the space again, sensing in a completely different way. This time I focused on what had happened in the space before my friends had come to live there. Now we were really heading into the unknown because none of us knew anything about the history of the building. I felt I was guessing but I described some of the vibrations I was picking up as best I could. One very strong signal was what I could only describe at the time as “mental hardness”. I also registered painful aches in my bones, especially my finger joints.

I spent the whole evening sensing the different energies and didn’t take the blindfold off until I went out of the front door and said goodbye. A week later I got an excited phone call to tell me that they had checked with the landlord and discovered that the previous tenant had lived there for 20 years and had been a very stubborn old man with severe arthritis, especially in his hands!

Developing hand sensing

The experience of that evening really gave me the impetus to go on and develop my skills even more. I continued to deepen my ability to do hand sensing. These were the years of “you name it, I sensed it!” — the best of the best and the worst of the worst.

I sensed all kinds of people, animals and plants, in varying stages of health and sickness. I visited sacred sites and accident black spots, powerful temples and ghastly dungeons, beautiful mansions and derelict slums. I went to hospitals, palaces, junk shops, cemeteries, prisons and caves. The world was (and still is) a feast of etheric impressions and astral imprints, just waiting to be explored.

As my ability to read energies in buildings developed, I began to realize that much of it was unsavory and undesirable. In particular, I wanted my own home to be as free from other influences as possible. It was therefore a natural progression to learn ways to clear the energy of buildings, and I called these techniques “space clearing”, which seemed to describe the process very aptly. It became fundamental to my life to clear any space when I first moved in and to maintain the energy of the space at high level while I lived there.

Discovering feng shui

Around this time, I also discovered that when I arranged things in my home in a certain way in relation to each other and to the spatial dimensions around them, something amazing happened with the energy. I began to use it to create incredible results in my life.

Whenever something wasn’t going quite right, I would go home and rearrange or change my furniture and ornaments until suddenly I registered a “click” in the energy fields, as if everything had suddenly come into alignment. After that, everything worked better in my life. Later, as I developed this even more, I acquired a reputation amongst my friends for my ability to create seemingly impossible things in my life again and again.

All this was immense fun, a fantastic voyage of discovery. I played with the energies and tried out new ideas to see what worked and what didn’t. I learned how to change atmospheres, how to charge them up and quieten them down. People would come to visit me and would stop in their tracks and say, ‘Wow! What an amazing place!’ or ‘What a lovely feeling there is here!’, and they never wanted to leave when it was time to go. It happened so often that I knew for a fact that I was producing tangible results.

After I had been doing this for about ten years, a friend of mine showed me a huge illustrated volume containing a chapter on something I had never heard of called feng shui. He said to me, ‘Look at this! The Chinese were on to all this stuff about 3,000 years before you!’

Discovering Bali

In 1990 my studies took another leap forward when I discovered Bali, a tiny island in the Indonesian archipelago. This vibrant, spiritual culture is one of the best examples of a people living in perfect harmony with their natural surroundings and they have the most highly developed purification ceremonies I have encountered anywhere on earth. I fell totally in love with the place and lived there for 20 years, from 1990 to 2010.

I discovered a natural aptitude for the Indonesian language and also learned Balinese, a wonderfully descriptive and incredibly complex language with three levels and umpteen dialects, known to only a handful of westerners at that time. Bring able to speak this language started to really open doors for me, especially with the older priests and shamans who speak hardly a word of Indonesian, having left school long before the study of this language was introduced.

I had already been doing a very basic form of space clearing for twelve years before my first visit to Bali. I used the best bells I could find in England at that time, but their quality was terrible and I knew it. Discovering Balinese bells and adding flower offerings to the space clearing ceremony took it to a completely new level.

Space clearing is not a set of techniques

While living in Bali, I also came to understand that space clearing is not a series of techniques applied in a random order. Each step builds on the foundation put in place by the previous steps. The techniques are very specific and need to be done in a specific order to be effective.

What’s so different about the space clearing ceremony I have created is that it is not affiliated to any culture or religion. Nor is it watered down for the masses, as so many spiritual practices are. It is designed for our times and can be used by people of all religions, and all cultural and ethnic backgrounds.

I have received feedback over the last 20+ years attesting to this from Greenland to Africa, Alaska to Japan, Russia to Brazil, and dozens more countries around the globe. Providing you precisely follow the steps, observe the precautions, and do not take shortcuts or invent into it, the ceremony works.

Why space clearing is necessary

All traditional cultures have a form of space clearing. It’s essentially a higher level of house cleaning and is as essential to the energetic maintenance of a place as physical cleaning is to the physical maintenance.

Energetically, everything that ever happens in a building goes out in ripples like the effect of a stone being dropped in a pond. It is recorded in the walls, floor, ceiling, furniture, and other objects in the place. It gets astrally imprinted into the very fabric of the structure.

Repetitive actions and behaviors are deeply imprinted, and events accompanied by strong emotions or trauma are the most strongly imprinted of all. If you’ve ever had the experience of walking into a room after there has just been an argument, you know that you can literally feel it hanging in the air. People sometimes say, ‘You could have cut the air with a knife!’, meaning that the atmosphere was so dense it was as if the argument were physically tangible.

Everyone also creates a certain amount of etheric debris on a daily basis, which leaves a stagnant residue in their home in the same way as everyday living creates cleaning and tidying on a physical level. I have space cleared ancestral homes centuries old where the build-up of energy stood about 3 feet (1 metre) thick off the walls. I have also space cleared 10-year-old buildings that felt nearly as dense, simply due to the amount of mental and emotional traffic in the place in that time.

Who needs space clearing?

Just about everyone. Very few western buildings are so well designed that there are no areas where energy gets stuck. Most are conceived without any thought being given to the way energy can flow around them, and awkwardly positioned furniture can then add to the problems. As one journalist who interviewed me put it, ‘Most of us are probably living in the psychic equivalent of a rubbish dump’.

If you are reading this inside a building, stop for a minute, look up, and imagine what the place you are in would look like if it had never physically been cleaned since the time it was built. Imagine the build-up of dust, cobwebs, and so on. The worst areas would be in the corners and any nooks and crannies.

Well, of course no-one would ever want to live or work in such a space. But on an energetic level, that’s exactly how a building looks and feels if it has never been space cleared.

How much stuck energy builds up depends on the overall feng shui design of a place and the activities of the people who occupy it. If you are living or working in a building that has been occupied by other people before you, you will have not just your own stagnant energy to contend with but theirs too.

In some cases, predecessor imprints can be beneficial. Supposing you are newly married and you move into a home where the previous occupants were very happy together. This can enhance your relationship.

But supposing you are not so fortunate and the couple who lived there before you argued a lot or even got divorced. Time and time again, I’ve been called in to do a space clearing because a previously idyllic marriage has run into difficulties after moving to a new house and the cause is the energy left by the previous occupants. Or a business has moved to new premises and runs into financial trouble, just as the previous owner did. Or a whole family inexplicably starts to put on or lose weight, just like the family who lived there before them. The variations are endless.

Space clearing clears out these lower levels of stuck energy that hinder our progress, while leaving the beneficial higher levels intact.

The difference between space clearing & clutter clearing

Clutter clearing is one of the recommended steps to prepare for a space clearing ceremony. It can also be done by itself, with no intention of doing the ceremony or even knowledge that such a ceremony exists. It primarily involves clearing physical objects from a space, although there are also deeper levels that address mental, emotional and spiritual types of clutter. Most people start with physical level clutter clearing and then progress to the other less tangible but equally important types.

I usually recommend doing clutter clearing before space clearing. It makes the space clearing ceremony much easier to do and makes it more effective too. For most people, it would be too much to do both on the same day, so schedule space clearing for a separate day.

However, if you find it difficult to get going with clutter clearing or find yourself unable to complete it, then it is possible to do space clearing first. Space clearing is the most effective way I know of loosening the stuck energy that accumulates around clutter, so doing the ceremony first will enable you to re-engage clutter clearing afterwards with renewed enthusiasm and gusto.

The ceremony works best if it’s done with a specific focus in mind, so in this situation, make clutter clearing your main focus. You’ll probably find, as most people do, that after ousting your junk and reclaiming your space you will want to repeat the space clearing ceremony, with the focus second time around on yourself rather than your junk.

This is yet another example of how clutter makes everything harder work. You’ll be space clearing twice instead of once. But at least your life will be moving forward, and that’s what counts.

Copyright © Karen Kingston, 1996, updated 2019. All rights reserved.

Related articles:
The three most important times to do space clearing
What’s so special about Balinese bells