Clearing Your Energy: Why the Tools Aren’t the Problem
If you’ve spent any amount of time in spiritual spaces, you’ve probably accumulated quite a few different ideas about what you’re supposed to do when your energy feels a bit off.
Ground yourself. Clear your energy. Protect your field. Go outside barefoot. Have a salt bath. Burn sage. Hold a crystal. Imagine roots growing out of your feet. Wrap yourself in a bubble of white light. Ask Archangel Michael for protection.
And if you’re newer to all of this, you might be sitting there thinking: Cool. Which one am I actually supposed to do?
If you’ve been doing it for years, you may have the opposite problem. You know all of these things. You’ve probably tried quite a few of them. But when you walk into a crowded space feeling fine and leave completely wiped, or someone else’s mood somehow becomes yours, you’re still left wondering what you’re missing.
What eventually made all of these practices make considerably more sense to me wasn’t finding the perfect one.
It was realising they weren’t all doing the same job.
Particularly as I journeyed deeper into the world of energy work, I started treating energetic hygiene as three separate functions:
Stabilise → Clear → Contain.
Once I had that structure, a lot of the things I’d already learned suddenly had somewhere to go.
And that’s really what this framework is for. I’m not particularly interested in giving you another spiritual technique to add to the pile. You may already have most of the ingredients.
I want to give you a recipe.
[WATCH: How to Clear Your Energy: You Have the Ingredients. Here’s the Recipe
]
Grounding and clearing aren’t quite the same thing
This was probably the distinction that started the whole thing for me.
Grounding is often given as the answer when someone feels scattered, overwhelmed or affected by other people’s energy. And grounding can absolutely help.
But I think the word has become broad enough that we sometimes use it to describe several different things.
If I connect to the Earth, bring my awareness back into my body and become present again, I’ve changed my state. I’m more stable.
That doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve cleared everything I was carrying.
Equally, I can clear something without necessarily being particularly stable before it, or contained afterward.
None of those practices are wrong. They’re just doing different jobs.
The easiest way I’ve found to make sense of that is to separate the process into three functions.
1. Stabilise: come back to yourself
Before I start trying to move anything, I want to come back to centre. Bring my attention back into myself, reconnect with something stable and give myself a moment before deciding what needs to happen next.
Stabilising is the quieter part of the process. It’s anchoring, settling and coming back into the present rather than immediately trying to get rid of something.
You could put your bare feet on the Earth. Feel the chair underneath you. Pay attention to your breathing. Take a mindful walk. Use Havening or another gentle form of mindful movement. Hold something you associate with grounding. Hum, use a grounding sound, or work with a frequency you symbolically associate with Earth.
Or you can do the whole thing internally: imagine roots extending from your body into the Earth, visualise a grounding cord, draw your awareness back inside your body, or simply intend to become centred and present.
The particular tool matters less to me than the function:
Am I actually becoming more stable?
2. Clear: create movement
Once there is something stable to work from, clearing is where I introduce movement.
This is the more active part of the process: releasing, shifting or transforming energy I no longer want to carry.
That might involve smoke or sage. A salt bath. A shower. Sound bowls. Drumming. Movement or shaking. A crystal you associate with clearing. A mantra. Reiki or another form of energy work.
Or it might happen entirely through intention: visualising unwanted energy moving down through a grounding cord, sweeping through your field, using fire, wind, water or light imagery, consciously releasing what isn’t yours, working with cords where appropriate, invoking the Violet Flame, or asking an energy you trust — Archangel Michael, for example — to assist with clearing.
Again, I’m less interested in deciding which of these is the "Correct Spiritual Clearing Technique" than in understanding the job I’m asking it to do.
I want movement.
Something I was carrying before the clearing process is something I’m choosing not to continue carrying afterward.
3. Contain: choose what you want to hold
This is the part I think is easiest to reduce to simply “protect yourself.”
And protection absolutely belongs here.
You might imagine a bubble of white or golden light around yourself. Visualise a boundary around your energetic field. Work with a protective crystal or piece of jewellery. Use prayer, a symbol, a talisman or an invocation. Ask Archangel Michael, your guides, or whatever form of spiritual support belongs within your own framework for protection.
There’s nothing wrong with any of that.
But over time, my own understanding of containment has shifted slightly.
I became less interested in only asking:
How do I keep that energy out?
And more interested in asking:
What am I choosing to hold in my own field?
Once I’ve cleared what I don’t want to carry, I can deliberately establish what I do want.
Maybe that’s calm. Love. Joy. Presence. Whatever quality makes sense for me in that moment.
Within the way I understand energy, becoming more established in that state also changes what I’m available to resonate with.
So containment, for me, is still protective. But the emphasis shifts away from continually orienting toward whatever I need protection from, and toward becoming increasingly established in the energetic state I actually want to occupy.
Stabilise helps me come back to myself. Clearing creates movement. Containment helps me hold what I want to remain in.
The same tool can do different jobs
This is also why I don’t particularly want to give you a definitive chart saying sage goes here, amethyst goes there, Reiki belongs in this box.
I do organise tools this way in my own practice, but I’m organising them according to the function I’m asking them to perform.
Take crystals.
I personally tend to associate black obsidian with clearing because of its connection with fire. Amethyst makes intuitive sense to me for containment because I associate purple with a very high frequency, so I can use it as a physical anchor for the state I want to hold.
Could somebody use black obsidian for protection?
Of course.
I’m not proposing a bill to regulate the use of crystal frequency signatures. The framework is there to help you organise your intentions, not memorise another 30 lists of which crystal does what.
The same thing happens with movement. A slow, mindful walk could help stabilise me. Dancing or shaking might be something I use to create movement and clear.
A grounding visualisation might simply connect me with something steady. Another version might deliberately move unwanted energy down into the Earth and therefore perform a clearing function too.
Reiki can participate in more than one part of the process depending on how I’m working with it.
So rather than asking only:
What technique is this?
try asking:
What job am I asking this technique to do?
That question is considerably more useful to me.
Physical rituals and the tools you always have with you
There is one distinction I wish I’d made more explicitly in the video. Please bear with me, I’m new to this YouTube thing 🥲.
Some practices use a physical anchor.
You light the sage. Hold the crystal. Get into the salt bath. Go outside and put your feet on the ground.
Others can be performed entirely through intention or visualisation.
I don’t consider one category inherently better than the other. In fact, I think there is value in having both.
There is something powerful about coming home after a chaotic day and consciously doing the thing: having the shower, lighting something, changing the environment, holding the object that means something to you.
But I also want a version of Stabilise → Clear → Contain that I can do sitting in my car.
Or in an airport.
Or at work.
Or immediately after leaving a conversation and realising my internal state has changed.
You are not always going to have your sage with you.
And while I’m absolutely not ruling out the possibility that someone, somewhere, travels with emergency sage, alas, the fire alarms of the world will still force your hand occasionally.
So if you’re building your own version of this practice, I’d actually build two.
One can be the fuller ritual that includes whatever physical practices genuinely resonate with you.
The other should be a simple intention-based version of each function that requires nothing except you.
Because that second one is what I want you to experiment with.
Try it three times a day for three weeks
For 21 days, try running yourself through:
Stabilise → Clear → Contain.
Three times a day. Thirty to sixty seconds is enough.
This is why I want you to have an intention-based version of each step. If your practice requires a bath, four crystals, a singing bowl and access to an ancient oak tree, three times a day is going to become logistically challenging.
The point is repetition, not complexity.
And I’m not asking you to spend your life anxiously clearing yourself of everyone else’s energy. Quite the opposite.
I want you to repeatedly experience what it feels like to deliberately return to your own energetic state.
Stabilise. Clear. Choose what you want to hold. Then get on with your day.
And notice.
What do you feel like immediately afterward? What has changed a few hours later? What happens after a particular environment or interaction?
Over time, you’re not only practising energetic hygiene.
You’re building a reference point.
What does your energy actually feel like?
If I don’t have a clear sense of my own baseline, it’s surprisingly difficult to recognise when I’ve moved away from it.
Repeatedly returning to myself gives me something to compare against. And eventually that opens a much bigger question:
What is actually mine?
I don’t think the answer is always as simple as “I feel bad, therefore I picked up somebody else’s energy.”
Sometimes it is your feeling. Sometimes your nervous system is activated because it's perceived something as a threat. Sometimes an environment is affecting you. Sometimes you may be responding to another person. Sometimes something has been triggered that needs your attention rather than clearing.
And sometimes you don’t know yet.
Learning your own energetic baseline doesn’t answer all of those questions. But it gives you a much better place from which to start asking them.
That’s a conversation I want to come back to separately, because discernment — particularly where energetic sensitivity, emotional attunement and nervous-system responses can overlap — deserves considerably more than a paragraph at the end of an article about clearing.
If you’re reading this as an energy practitioner...
If you already practise Reiki or another form of energy work, there’s another layer here worth playing with.
You probably don’t need three new techniques either.
What happens if you bring the same functional distinction into the practice you already have?
I can invite Reiki into stabilisation. I can work with it intentionally for clearing. I can use it while establishing the energetic state I want to hold.
As Reiki became increasingly integrated into different aspects of my life, these stopped feeling like three separate rituals requiring external tools and became different functions I could ask the energy itself to support.
Which raises a more interesting practitioner question:
What changes when you stop thinking only about the technique you’re using and start consciously considering the function you’re asking it to perform?
I want to come back to that too, particularly when we get into intention, frequency and the way I work with Reiki responsively.
But for now, the same principle applies whether you’ve practised energy work for years or found this article because someone told you to buy a crystal yesterday.
You don’t need another spiritual rulebook
If you’re new to this, pick one way to stabilise, one way to clear and one way to contain.
Make them simple enough that you’ll actually use them.
And if you’ve been doing this for years, you may not need anything new at all.
Take the practices you already have and ask:
What stabilises me?
What creates movement when I need to clear?
What helps me establish and remain in the state I want afterward?
Where am I expecting one practice to do all three jobs?
That’s really the point of the framework.
Your tools may not be the problem.
You may already have most of the ingredients.
Sometimes it just helps to understand what you’re trying to make with them.
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