KK's Blog

When you first start clutter clearing it can feel like a chore, but the more of it you do, the more you experience what I call the E-Factor. ‘E’ in this case stands for Exhilaration – the joyful feeling of accomplishment when you finish the job.

Actually you can experience the E-factor any time you decide to do something and do it. This morning, as an example, I set myself the goal of taking an early morning walk to a certain place, further than I usually go. I got tired before I got there and nearly convinced myself to leave it at that and go home. But instead I ignored the dialogue in my head and just kept walking until I got there. A small goal, you may say, and seemingly unimportant, but the level of exhilaration in my body as I walked back was completely out of proportion to the achievement. I felt fantastic, and the feeling has lasted throughout the day.

It’s exactly the same with clutter clearing. You decide to clear a small drawer, do it, and the feeling of exhilaration that follows is almost heady. All kinds of energy blockages are released in your body, all the failures of previous attempts at clutter clearing are overwritten, and you feel unstoppable. Enjoy!

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In Dancing Dragon Cottages (the hotel I built here in Bali), I created a small shop in the reception area to sell Space Clearing products to visitors. The prices are substantially cheaper than in the West, so many visitors to Bali come to Amed to buy them.

A few years ago, the economic situation on the island became so dire that children began to drop out of school in droves. The government pays for elementary education from age 7 to 13, but to continue beyond that until age 18, the parents have to pay for it themselves. It's a sad fact that there are now 105,000 school-age Balinese children whose parents cannot afford to send them to school, according to a recently published survey by the Bali Education Agency. You can see them everywhere, helping their parents in shops or building sites, or scavenging in trash bins for things they can sell to help buy food for their family.

The problem has grown to such proportions that a few years ago I decided to add a percentage to the sale price of all Space Clearing products sold in my shop and have been donating that extra money to sponsor children who would otherwise have had to leave school. It costs around US $270 per year per child, which is $170 for school uniform and books and $100 for bus fares to and from school.

I'm happy to announce that in addition to the 2 children I am personally sponsoring, the Dancing Dragon shop has sponsored another 10 Balinese children through school for the last two years. They have asked me to say a big 'thank you' to everyone who has contributed, and the photo of their happy, smiling faces says it all. And Space Clearing product prices are still substantially cheaper if you come to Bali to buy them. It's a win-win for everyone.

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Of all the aiports I've visited in my life (and there have been many), Sydney gets my all-time greatest accolade for its carpet. Cleverly designed using four shades of blue, it has the appearance and feel of walking on a gentle ocean and always looks fresh, clean and welcoming. The small flecks of yellow and red add just the right amount of warmth and interest without making it feel too busy. Arriving in Sydney and walking on this carpet always lifts my spirits and makes me feel glad to be in Australia.

I remember Bill Bryson observing in one of his books that a person's first impressions of a city are hugely influenced by the approach road taken to get there. In a similar vein, I've noticed that the design and ambience of an airport has a massive impact on how a person feels about a place when they first arrive, and the first steps taken on terra firma after flying are especially highlighted. Depending on how far you have flown and how well you handle being airborne, there is a whole energetic adjustment that takes place when you land, and airport carpet can either help or hinder that process.

Sadly, most airport designers have shocking taste in carpet. Heathrow's endless grey is one of the worst examples (so bad I couldn't bring myself to even take a photo of it when I was there recently).

Singapore is a wonderful airport, but sometime in the year since I was last there someone has ripped up the acres of soothing, unobtrusive carpet in Terminal 2 and replaced it with a design that can only have been created by a psychotic having a very bad day. It's not just depressing, it's downright disturbing. You look down and feel deranged. You look ahead (see image on right) and you feel so disoriented you hesitate to move. It's a carpet that inspires a plethora of adjectives beginning with 'D'. What can they have been thinking?

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I'm visiting Singapore for a week to do some film editing, and have also been spending time with the Space Clearing practitioners who live here. For those of you who haven't made this discovery, here's a great way of organizing things in a small space that one of them showed me in their kitchen. It's called a Lazy Susan. I have one in Bali at the centre of my dining table, and hear they are pretty easy to find these days to put in cupboards too. You may have seen them in Chinese restaurants. They rotate so you don't have to pull everything out to get to what's at the back.

If you're a handy kind of person, you can even build one yourself. 

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A number of people have written to ask me about a comment I made in my last blog about glass front doors being a Feng Shui no-no.

The reason why feng shui experts pay so much attention to the front entrance of a home is because it's not just  the main entry port for people, but also for energies. If you read up on this you'll find there's a whole list of feng shui do's and don'ts about front doors that vary from one feng shui school to another, but something they all seem to agree on is that a solid door is better than a glass one. The reason is that people feel more secure knowing there is a solid partition rather than just a piece of glass between them and the outside world. 

Space Clearing goes one level deeper in the understanding of why front doors are so important. The front door holds such a wealth of energies that each circuit of the Space Clearing ceremony begins and ends there. Many of the space clearers I've trained have developed their skills to such an advanced level that just by sensing the front door with their hand, they can discern the nature of the most prominent energies in a place and how they are affecting the occupants.

However, this is only possible to this degree if the front door is made of wood. If it is made of metal, glass or some kind of synthetic material, it doesn't anchor energies anything like as well, and the house or apartment tends to feel considerably less homely as a result. Similarly, at the end of the Space Clearing ceremony, when the place is consecrated to new, higher frequencies, the results are not as strong or as long-lasting. 

So what can you do if you have a glass front door? Some Feng Shui consultants advise hanging a curtain up to cover it, and this does makes a home feel a bit less exposed and usually a bit less draughty, but it doesn't address the much deeper issue of not being able to truly land your energy in the space. So when conducting a Space Clearing ceremony the best advice I can offer is that instead of beginning each circuit by engaging the energy at the centre of the door as you normally would, start at the door frame instead. That's assuming the door frame is made of wood, of course. If it's made of metal or some other substance then the best I can suggest is to place a fairly large permanent wooden something close to the door (a wood carving, ornament, picture frame, or piece of furniture), and start from there.

If you don't have much experience of Space Clearing your home then you may wonder what all the fuss is about, but if you ask any professional space clearer, they will be able to give you numerous examples of what a difference it makes to have a solid wooden front door.

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Several people have written to me about bed thwacking, explaining that this is a traditional practice in their country. Here's one of the emails from Japan, which mentions something I forgot to include in my last blog, about how wonderful it is to air mattresses in the sun. This is also a practice in Bali, and something I do regularly in my own home.

The email said, "I found your bed thwacking article quite interesting. This is basically what happens traditionally in Japan on a daily basis. Futons are usually hung out on the balcony in full sun and at the end of the day are whacked with bamboo whackers, and the dust flies. My Japanese husband says that the sun gets rid of bacteria, germs, etc.

Next time you stay in a hotel, take a look around the restaurant when you go for breakfast in the morning. How many of the people would you actually want to share a bed with?

In most cases the answer will be "none", but in fact you just did. Not with the exact same people sitting around you, but with people very similar to them who slept in your bed before you and left their imprints in it.

Over the last 30 years I’ve developed special techniques for reading the energy imprints in objects in people’s homes. I can go around a house and read the entire history of what’s happened there with my hands. Beds are especially interesting because most people spend a third or more of their lives sleeping, so their mattress becomes very imprinted with their energies.

One of the vital skills I teach the professional space clearers I train is a sliding scale of perception relating to the imprintability of various materials. The least imprintable materials in their solid state are metal and glass, which incidentally is one of the main reasons why a front door made from either of these materials is a feng shui no-no – it is not able to anchor the energies that a front door is supposed to (wood is a much better choice). At the other end of the scale, porous materials such as soft furnishings are the most imprintable – mattresses, sofas, etc.

When it comes to beds in hotels, it’s grim news. It’s common to find layer upon layer of unsavoury energies embedded in hotel mattresses, sometimes dating back a decade or more, depending on how long the bed has been in use. It’s no wonder many people say they don’t sleep well in hotels, or wake up feeling out of sorts or not quite themselves. During sleep our energy opens and we absorb whatever is around us, including the frequencies that have been deposited in the mattress by people who slept there before us. It’s almost the same as sleeping with them in the same bed.

If you’re starting to feel nauseous, help is at hand. As well as being able to read these energies, I’ve developed efficient methods of clearing them that anyone can learn. It’s called ‘bed thwacking’ and it’s a modified Space Clearing technique, specially adapted for the modern traveller.

First, strip the bedding down to the bottom sheet and open a window. Then look around the hotel room for something you can use to do the thwacking. A wooden coat-hanger is a good choice, or a telescopic umbrella if you happen to have one with you. If you can’t find anything, then pummelling with your fists is good emergency measure, but not as effective as using a sturdy implement of some kind. Methodically thwack the whole mattress for a few minutes to dislodge the energy imprints from it (as well as quite a bit of dust, usually).

Here’s a very important tip: Don’t do this the first night you check in. When you do bed thwacking, all the energies go up in the air and take a few hours to come back down again. If you do this and then jump into bed, they will all land on you. Just put up with it all for the first night, do the thwacking in the morning, go out for the day, and by the time you get back housekeeping will have changed the bedding and vacuumed up all the energetic debris from the floor, leaving you with a sleeping space that is energetically much cleaner.

Before you all email me to ask what to do in a hotel room that has windows that don’t open, read my blog posting on the topic of Air conditioning. And to learn about thwacking beds in your own home, read the blog I posted recently about How to clear energy imprints from a mattress.

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I promised information about how to get the imprints out of a mattress, so here it is. It’s done using a technique called ‘bed thwacking’.

Everything that happens in a place is imprinted in the walls and furniture, and mattresses get more imprinting that just about everything else. Not only are they made of the most absorbent types of materials, but they also get the greatest degree of up-close-and–personal usage. Most people spend a third or more of their lives in bed, so they leave a deep imprint of themselves where they sleep.

Over the last 30 years I’ve developed the art of being able to read these imprints with my hands and can tell just about everything about the person who sleeps there by doing so. Often I’m called in when someone has remarried and they are living in the same place their partner lived with his or her 'ex'. The focus of the consultation is always getting the old partner’s energies out so the new relationship can really begin. But the one area where more than Space Clearing is needed is when it comes to clearing out energies embedded in the mattress, simply because so much stuff accumulates there. My advice is to get yourself a new mattress every 10 years, and sooner if you start a new relationship that you are serious about and want to succeed. The basic rule is: New relationship, new mattress.

So what do you do if you can’t afford a new bed just yet or have a fairly new one but it’s imprinted with history you want to move on from? Well, you can practice a technique I’ve developed called ‘bed thwacking’. For this you’ll need an object such as a cricket bat, baseball bat, or even a rolled up umbrella will do. Drag the mattress outside the house if you can, but if this isn’t possible just open a window, peel back the bedcovers, and start thwacking it with the bat, or other hard object, vibrating the energies out. When you’ve done one side, flip the mattress and do the other side.

Now, be warned. Loads of stuff will come out. You’ll probably see dust flying around and there will also be energies you can’t see. So if you do this indoors, don’t stay in the room afterwards. Leave the window open so there is some circulation of air, and come back a few hours later after the dust and other energies have settled. Do a quick once-round with a vacuum cleaner and that’s it.

If you do this every few months it will keep your bed feeling fresh and clear. It’s obviously not as good as buying a completely new mattress but it’s the next best thing, and because it’s not a complete solution it means that some of your energies will still be embedded there, so it will still feel like ‘your bed’. But don’t forget that while bed thwacking will remove much of the energetic debris and some of the dust, it won’t remove the deep layers of bacteria, viruses, fungi, mould, perspiration and flakes of dry skin that physically accumulate. You will still need to buy a new mattress at least every 10 years to get rid of that.

Parts of this blog were copied from an article I wrote a while ago called Why It Feels So Good To Sleep In Your Own Bed. To read more, click here ...

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New Year is not the only time when it’s good to do Space Clearing or clutter clearing to make a fresh start. Another important time is when you start a new relationship.

I’m talking here about a relationship that has some mileage, that you want to give the best possible chance of success. Suppose you have been going out together for a while and you decide you want to start living together. I always recommend moving to a new home that neither person has ever lived in before. This is so that each partner has the same degree of ownership of the space. But practically speaking, this is not always possible, and this is where Space Clearing and clutter clearing can really help.

A common request received by Space Clearing practitioners is to clear out the energy of a partner’s ‘ex’, meaning an ex-wife, ex-husband or ex-lover who lived in the place before they moved in. Energy sensing the walls and furniture, it is usually very easy to tell which rooms the ‘ex’ spent the most time in, which chairs they sat in, which objects they used the most, and so on. Mattresses are generally the most heavily imprinted. To the new person moving it, it can feel like there is no room for them until the energy of the previous partner has been cleared out.

Physically cleaning and clutter clearing the place from top to bottom can certainly help, and a fresh coat of paint will do wonders. But to remove the imprints, short of demolishing the place and rebuilding, the only technique I know that really does the job thoroughly is Space Clearing, using the specific ceremony I describe in detail in ‘Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui’.

Every step of the ceremony plays its part but for this type of situation, the most important circuits are the clapping and belling ones. Clapping breaks up the lumps of energy that accumulate in all the corners and belling penetrates deep into the walls, furniture and other objects in the place, shattering imprints. Of course the preparatory steps to the ceremony have to be performed first for this to work properly, and I’m not talking about just any kind of clapping and belling. The techniques are very specific – a sharp, crisp circuit of clapping, beginning and ending at the front door, followed by a circuit using a high quality Balinese bell (they are the only bells I know of that shatter imprints so effectively when directed with intention).

Ideally the Space Clearing is best done by the new partner moving in, not the one who has lived there for a while, because their energy is already anchored in the place. Or better still, hire a professional space clearer who will be impartial, and can set the space equally for both partners. I’m not claiming that this will magically make it the ideal place to live in forever (nothing beats a completely new place), but it will certainly balance the situation out much more. Space Clearing can remove the energetic imprints; it can’t change the visual and territorial associations of the partner who lives there first.

Coming soon... an article about how to get the imprints out of a mattress that has been slept on by other people (including a partner’s ex-lover!).

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I'm very happy to announce that the dates and venue for my first ever workshops in Japan have now been finalized. There is full information on the Japan workshops page of my website.

The workshops will be taught in English and translated into Japanese. 

Venue: Hotel Okada in Hakone Yumoto Hot Springs Resort

MAY / JUNE EVENTS

• CLEAR YOUR CLUTTER: May 31 - 1 June 2008
• SPACE CLEARING: 7-8 June 2008

Early bird discounts are available for all tickets paid in full by 30 April 2008

OCTOBER / NOVEMBER EVENTS

• CLEAR YOUR CLUTTER: 25-26 October 2008
• SPACE CLEARING: 1-2 November 2008
• ADVANCED SPACE CLEARING: 3 November 2008
  Early Bird discounts are available for all tickets paid in full by 25 September 2008
  

To book, contact:
Kobayasi Masaaki
Step Works Inc.
Tel: +81 (0)3-5437-2780、
email: kobayashi@jma-inc.jp

Booking has already started!

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