I ordered my meal and went to perch on the front steps of the restaurant to get the best view of the sunset while I waited.

A young boy came and sat beside me. He was a bright little thing, about six years old, with sparkling white teeth and a beautiful broad smile. His lithe little brown body looked like one of those rubbery toys you can bend into any position.

I was in my favourite restaurant in one of the most beautiful parts of Bali, and the young boy was the second child of the owner’s second wife’s brother, or something like that. We exchanged names and to pass the time I decided to ask him some questions. Besides, I wanted to practice my Balinese.

“What’s the Balinese name for that?” I asked, pointing to the strips of black and white chequered cloth that were wrapped around each of the four corner pillars of the restaurant.

“We call it poleng,” he told me.

I’d noticed it before in many restaurants, Balinese houses and temples. The Balinese even lovingly paint the concrete stones that line their roads in alternating black and white.

“What’s it for?” I continued, thinking to myself he surely wouldn’t know.

He gave me a delightful beam. “For protection,’ he said, unhesitatingly. “It’s to balance good and evil.”

I don’t know if I showed it on the outside, but inside my world started reeling. It had taken me over twelve years of dedicated research in the west to discover such facts as the esoteric significance of juxstapositioned black and white, and here was this six year old boy explaining it to me as if everybody knows that, don’t they? In Bali, I was discovering, such wisdoms are a part of daily existence. The whole of life is dedicated to maintaining the balance between good and evil so that peace and harmony prevail.

The Unseen Worlds

At the time of this conversation, I’d been in Bali for a few weeks. Sixteen years later I still continue to be amazed by the knowledge and practices of ordinary folk.

From an early age I was fascinated by the unseen worlds and have spent most of my life systematically developing my sensory abilities so that I can perceive and interpret them better. The more I have done this, the more I realize that the seen worlds are in fact only the tip of the iceberg. It’s in the unseen realms of energy that everything has its origin, long before it shows in the physical world.

Imagine my delight, therefore, to discover in Bali a whole nation of three million people who live with this awareness as a way of life. Not only that but they have created a unique spiritual culture around it that has lasted for thousands of years.

Balinese Offerings

One of the best ways to see this is in their practice of making offerings. Every village has three communal temples and each family compound has its own private temple. On an island that’s about three times the size of Sydney, there are over 20,000 public temples and hundreds of thousands of private ones. Offerings are made in every single temple on a daily basis, as well as in homes and businesses.

The simplest type of offering is a palm-sized coconut leaf basket filled with brightly coloured flower heads, topped with a lighted stick of incense and sprinkled with holy water. Millions of these are made each day, and many more when there are special ceremonies, as there frequently are. The range and breath-taking beauty of them all is a photographer’s delight.

The Balinese believe they are living in a paradise on earth, and it’s therefore each person’s duty to maintain harmony in their own life by the way they interact with the forces of the earth that support them from below and the Gods who bless them from on high.

This is where it gets really interesting. I once met a Balinese man who was well educated and stylishly dressed, but he had one feature that stuck out as odd – a single, wiry black hair, about 100cm long, growing from a mole on his upper arm. It made me ache to want to snip it, and one day I told him so. He smiled and explained to me kindly, as if to a child, that he would never allow this to happen as the whole balance of Nature would be cataclysmically disrupted!

The point is not whether he was right or wrong about this (and we’ll never know), but the unswerving personal responsibility he felt to maintain the balance of the world by his actions. It is this same belief that lies at the core of this practice of making offerings. Come rain, come shine, they never miss a day. It’s unthinkable that each person does not do their part in the cosmic scheme of things.

I’ve observed many Balinese people making offerings over the years. On the surface it appears that not much is happening. It looks like a charming traditional custom, the more so because it’s often done by beautiful young girls in ceremonial attire. But in the unseen worlds, the effect is remarkable. This is earth purification on a national scale, forming a grid of light across the island that holds the connection to the Gods and the sacredness of the land intact. There is much more going on here than meets the eye.

In the years before I visited Bali I had developed ceremonies of my own in the west that bore some resemblance to the Balinese style, but it was here that I learnt how to put depth and power into them. What finally emerged was the ceremony I call Space Clearing that can be used by people of any country, any culture and any religious background to cleanse and purify the energy of buildings.

How to Purify Your Own Home

Here’s a very simplified version of the Space Clearing ceremony that you can do in your own home to begin to create sacredness in your life. It can be done by anyone in good health, apart from pregnant or menstruating women. Don’t do it in someone else’s place without their permission.

First, prepare by cleaning and tidying the space. You may choose to do just one room or the whole home. Ideally also clear out any clutter you have on the premises. This ceremony is designed to clear out stagnant energy, and stagnant energy always collects around clutter. That’s why people who have a lot of clutter feel so tired and stuck all the time.

Next, take a full bath or shower, wash your hair and brush your teeth. Put on clean clothing and roll up your sleeves. Don’t wear shoes or metal jewellery. Open a window, so that there is a circulation of air in the space.

Starting at the entrance, go around the inside perimeter with your hand outstretched at heart level, sensing the energy of the walls and furniture from a few centimetres away. If you are right-handed, go anti-clockwise; if left-handed, clockwise. With practice it’s possible to ‘read’ with your hand everything that’s ever happened in the place, but to begin, just try to sense differences – warm or cool, nice or unpleasant, sticky energy or clear. Some areas may even feel disgusting! The corners, where stagnant energy collects the most, are usually markedly different to the walls in between, and it can feel like putting your hands into unseen cobwebs. Just make a mental note of whatever you feel. You may wash your hands when you’ve finished this circuit if you feel you need to.

Next, place a candle in the middle of the space with some picked flower heads around it of different shapes and colours. Place them so that they radiate out from the candle. Centre yourself and light the candle, dedicating it to the highest spiritual connection you have, as the Balinese do when they make their offerings.

Go to the corner nearest the main entrance, and clap loudly a few times into the corner. Start with your hands above your head and move them down to waist level as you clap. Intend as you do so that the vibration of your clapping extends right down to the floor and up to the ceiling. Smooth down the energy in the corner with your hand, hook into it at heart level, and then continue around the space to the next corner with your hand outstretched towards the wall, pulling the clear energy with you as you go. Repeat this in each corner, following the same path you took when energy sensing.

Clapping may sound pretty simple and straightforward but in fact there’s quite a bit to it. Done correctly, it’s a very powerful way of dispersing stuck energy in a room. Be sure to get right into the corner, and breathe deeply from your belly as you do it. In fact the whole clap is directed from your belly, done with authority and power. This is not a technique for wimps!

If you want to be really thorough, open up cupboards and clap them out too, as well as any soft furnishings in the room (beds, sofas, etc), which are very absorbent of stale energy.

At first the clapping will sound dull and then, as if by magic, the sound becomes crisper and clearer as you progress around the space. Finally, by the time you get back to where you started from, it should sound resonant and clear. If not - guess what? - you’ll need to go round again! Either you weren’t putting enough into it, or there was just a lot of stuck energy to clear. Clutter, by the way, makes it much harder work.

In case it happens to you, I will also mention that people sometimes have an emotional reaction when doing this. We are energetically to connected to our homes and in the process of clearing energy in the building we are also clearing a corresponding stuckness in ourselves. The tears are a way of letting go. Just let them happen, and keep moving.

Now – VERY IMPORTANT – wash your hands and arms up to the elbows under cold, running water, to rinse off any energetic debris that has stuck to you while you’ve been clapping.  Then go around the space, sensing the energy again. Most people are able to feel a significant difference.

You can blow out the candle when you’ve finished, or leave it burning for a while if you prefer. However do not leave it unattended. This is not just for reasons of fire safety but also for reasons of energetic safety.

Results

What can you expect after doing this? Well, possibly sore hands because I forgot to mention that it’s best to use hand cream if you are clapping out a large space! But apart from that, people report how much brighter and clearer the space feels and that they feel the same way too. It’s like clearing out all the cobwebs of the past.

In the lounge, visitors are likely to comment how different the space feels. In the kitchen, you’ll feel happier preparing and cooking meals, which puts better finer energy into the food you eat. In the bedroom, clearer energy can mean better quality sleep, not to mention an improvement in your relationship with your partner and your sex life! In a meditation room, it will clear the space in a way you’ll wish you’d have thought of before.

Done regularly, simple techniques such as this can add much to the overall quality of your life. As any six year old Balinese child can tell you, it’s just as important to take care of the unseen worlds as the seen ones!

 
For best results, learn to do the full Space Clearing ceremony rather than this simplified version. You can find full information in Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui.

ALL ARTICLES BY KAREN KINGSTON

What is Space Clearing?
Why It Feels So Good To Sleep In Your Own Bed
It's Spring Cleaning, but not as you know it...
Practitioner Level Space Clearing
What's Your Clutter Ratio?
Understanding The Unseen Worlds
A Feng Shui Hotel in Bali