Don't Step on the Bluebells
Join Transformation Catalyst, Amanda Parker, on a journey of transformation and personal growth as she has enlightening conversations with renowned healers and guides from across the world. Listen in as they share some of their wildest healing stories, their methods of helping people, like you, to change your life, and their own inspiring journeys of how they got into this work. Don’t Step on the Bluebells is a fortnightly podcast that explores unconventional and holistic transformative practices and provides practical strategies, tools, and resources for living a life you love.
Amanda's insights and the shared wisdom of her guests offer practical strategies for embracing courage, building confidence, and honing intuition. You will be guided on a journey of personal growth and awakening by learning out-of-the-box strategies and tools that actually work, demystifying alternative and spiritual healing practices, and getting started on your own path to a happier, more fulfilling life. Hit subscribe and start changing your life today.
Don't Step on the Bluebells
How to Protect Your Energy with Spiritual Hygiene (#032)
Discover the transformative power of spiritual hygiene and reclaim your personal energy with insights from my own journey. As your guide, I, Amanda Parker, promise to equip you with the knowledge to protect your energy from the draining exchanges of daily life. Learn how setting boundaries can shield you from emotions like anger, frustration, and stress that subtly deplete your vitality.
Through my personal experiences, I reveal how over-empathy can lead to feeling overwhelmed, and I share practical techniques to help you maintain a grounded, centered state. By understanding these interactions, you can release negativity, protect your energy, and step into a more empowered version of yourself.
Dive into a treasure trove of energy protection and cleansing methods tailored for those seeking balance and wholeness. We'll explore the use of crystals like hematite and powerful visualizations, from cutting energetic cords to imagining cleansing waterfalls. Embrace the art of refilling any energetic voids with love and positivity, enabling a rejuvenated sense of self.
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What are some of those cords or tethers that are holding me to people or situations or memories or circumstances. That is draining my energy and I will set a very clear intention within to let go of that, and I can almost feel a lifting. The stronger that I get with these kind of spiritual practices, the lighter that I feel and the more I'm able to move forward and make progress towards things that really matter to me. Welcome to Don't Step on the Blue Bells, the podcast where personal healing and transformation takes center stage. I'm your host, amanda Parker, and I'm a fellow seeker on the journey of personal growth. Join me as I delve into the stories of gifted healers, guides and everyday people who have experienced remarkable transformations. Listen in as they share their practical wisdom to enrich your everyday life, and don't forget to hit subscribe and never miss a new episode.
Speaker 1:Welcome to today's episode of Don't Step on the Blue Bells. I'm your host, amanda Parker, and today we're doing things a little bit differently than usual. So today is going to be a podcast recording with yours truly, all about the topic of spiritual hygiene. So we normally go into a bit of a conversation with our guests. In this case, I'm going to be sharing with you the importance of this topic and what it really means to me and how I use it in my life and have seen others using it in theirs. So what exactly is spiritual hygiene? Let's just start there.
Speaker 1:There are a number of different ways that we come into the world and interact with others and just go about our day-to-day lives. Where we're encountering other people, we're encountering different situations. They might cause us stress, they might create excitement, they might create some sort of attachment between us and others or different situations. So, for example, if you are going into work every day and you're getting really frustrated with this one project you're leading, or maybe your boss is treating you in a way that you really don't feel good about, and this is happening over consistent time, there's going to be an energetic exchange there. So, knowing it or not, you might be taking away things like anger or frustration. You might be feeling pissed off. You might be taking away things like anger or frustration. You might be feeling pissed off. You might be feeling depleted or exhausted.
Speaker 1:So we sort of take these different emotions and feelings and energies with us back into our life, while it might seem like it's something small when this happens consistently over time or we're not really clear about it or clear about our boundaries we can start to feel the effects of those different elements that we're bringing into our life. You know it's outside the work context. It can be in relationships that you have. It can be going on the tube or the subway and someone is in a really bad mood. So it's not to say that you're always in danger, but if you're not really aware of the different energetic fields and ways that you're engaging with people around you, you might actually be taking in some things that don't belong to you and are not serving you.
Speaker 1:This can show up in so many different ways in your own life. You might be feeling depleted, you might be feeling tired, maybe there's headaches that are coming in that you don't even notice. If there's some long standing relationships that have been causing grief for one reason or another, you might also just be holding on to that tension or ruminating on it, or it keeps coming up in conversation, or you keep thinking about it deeper, and these are things that will take away your ability to be in your own power and to feel really grounded and centered within yourself. So the idea of spiritual hygiene is giving you tools that help you both protect your energy and, when you've come into contact with things that don't belong to you or are affecting you adversely, you have a way to release them. You also have ways to call your own power back into yourself. So there's a number of different techniques and different ways that you can do this. In this episode, we're going to talk about a few examples of when this comes up and different things that you can try out at home on your own to test out and try them out over time. I always recommend experimenting. Try something out for you know, two weeks or a month, and see how it resonates for you. It's just very important that you understand that we're in a constant dance with the world around us and if we're not protecting ourselves, our boundaries, our energy, then we might fall into a habit of just taking on what's coming in from the outside world.
Speaker 1:In my own life, I have found that I'm really empathic. My own life, I have found that I'm really empathic. I easily pick up the energy, the thoughts, the feelings, beliefs, different things that happen around me. There's so many reasons why that can be. You can look at my human design chart and it's going to be crystal clear for those of you who know about human design. For me, the way that it's shown up is, you know, it's almost like an over-empathy towards the people around me. I feel what they're feeling. If someone's sad, I'm sad. If someone's happy, I'm happy. If someone's in a bad mood, I pick up on it. If someone's not really being truthful or they're not aligned, I pick up on it. And all these little energies pile up over time.
Speaker 1:What can happen in my life is that I will start to feel depleted, I will feel overwhelmed, I'll feel burdened. This can show up that I like want to lock myself in a room for a week. I don't want to talk to anyone. I can feel really frustrated if someone asks a favor of me or comes in or somehow wants my support because I already feel so depleted. And if I'm not careful about releasing everything that doesn't belong to me, then I can carry that feeling for quite a while and you can imagine just being in that state of mind over a period of time is going to be something that really brings well, brings me down, could bring you down, if you're in a similar situation. This could be.
Speaker 1:For example, I was working in a company the last company that I worked for before I went solo and started my own business and moved into the healing realms, I had a boss who I really didn't get on with. She had expectations of me that I couldn't fulfill. I had expectations of her that she couldn't or was unwilling to fulfill, and we had a total mismatch of our energies, our desires, what we wanted from each other, what we needed from each other. And so for a year in that role I was constantly feeling overwhelmed, stressed out, anxious, burdened. I didn't know at the time that a lot of that was my feelings and a blend of what she was feeling. So there were pieces. If she was unhappy with me about something, I would take that on, I'd internalize it, I'd carry it. Now I know that if I was able to shield myself and protect myself a bit better from taking on that energy, then I wouldn't have had to carry it so viscerally and physically.
Speaker 1:Over the course of my healing work I've learned that setting clear boundaries first of all are very important, but that's a bit of a hot topic at the moment. I know we all have different definitions of what exactly that means and what that looks like. But knowing what's okay with you what's not understanding when you're willing to step in and help people, or not understanding what is within your limits or not. All of these are. If I have a house guest in my house, I have learned that I can feel overstimulated. So I need to rest and retreat. I need to find those pockets of solitude so that I can recharge and reground and show up and be happy to have people around me. If I don't do that, I end up feeling frustrated, I feel put out and I want to be left alone. So it does build up over time With the boundaries.
Speaker 1:In that setting, I would state very clearly I'm available on these days or at these times, or maybe schedule specific events or activities together that we can do together, and then outside that time everyone does their own thing. Or I can say I'm specifically not available on these days so that I'm setting myself up that I get what I need. I'm also setting the other person up that they know what they can expect from me. Clarity is kindness. Letting people know with clarity what's okay and what's not okay is a kindness. It means that they know how to act and operate within that system so that we can have a good time, they're welcome to set their own boundaries as well. If there's a conflict, well, that's a different podcast episode. So one of the first steps is understanding what are your boundaries, what are your limits.
Speaker 1:But even before I start my day, I will practice a number of different energy protection techniques. So this is the way that I sort of shield myself before engaging with the world at large, knowing that I tend to pick up these different energies and things from the people around me. So what I do for this is I will imagine almost a shield coming around my whole body. I see the shield actually more as a white blanket. Some people will describe it differently. I've also heard it described as a cloak and I'll just close my eyes and I'll imagine this almost white blanket coming down from the ceiling or the sky above me, wrapping itself around me. It's soft, it's comfortable, it feels safe, and this is the visual that I use when I know I'm going out in the world, I'll be in a busy place, I have a difficult meeting or any other kind of interaction or situation that I know I'm going to be facing in my day, and I want to make sure that I stay grounded and centered and within my own energy. So I'll imagine this coming down around me and know that I'm protected. That's an important piece here is just understanding that you're imagining this or you're seeing it, but you have to really trust that it's working, know that whatever the thing is, whatever the symbol is that you choose is doing the thing that you say it's doing within.
Speaker 1:Another way that I protect my energy will be sometimes through external means. So, for example, I'm always carrying around little crystals with me, so they have different meaning. So each crystal I mean there's a lot of science around this and a lot of different belief systems, but for me, each crystal that I have or item that I have signifies something. So something might be related to protection or strengthening or clearing. They tend to say that darker stones, like black stones or deep garnets or I'm blanking on the names now, I can link to it in the show notes but that they will actually give you protection and they'll clear away all those negative energies. I've got a hematite right here as well. This is a stone that's well known to cleanse energies. So you can find your own way, your own talisman of sorts that you know that when you have that on you, you're protected and you can feel free to find your own way of connecting into that either shield that comes and protects you or the white blanket. You're free to take the one that works best for me.
Speaker 1:Once you have protected yourself, you might still already have these connections to others, or maybe on a day you protect yourself and you don't really believe it, or you're not really sure that it's working. In this case you can actually go and break off those connections that you have to others. So there's a few different ways that you could do this as well. One might be that you just imagine all these cords and tethers tying you to all these different people and situations and you can just go with a pair of scissors and cut those cords and just watch them float away from you. If that doesn't work for you, you could imagine going and standing under a waterfall and allow the cleansing water of the waterfall to just surround your whole body and wash away any of those cords or connections that are not serving you. So there's many different ways that people do this. Often they'll go into nature, or they'll imagine just wrapping themselves in some piece of nature or holding onto a tree, and this also helps to cut all of those cords.
Speaker 1:So what I mean to say is that you can find the best way for you in the beginning. If you're totally brand new to this, just borrow some of the methods that I'm sharing. It'll make it much easier. Borrow them, practice them and then find your own way in the future. But you don't need to do that from today. These have been proven to work, not just for me. Do that from today. These have been proven to work, not just for me.
Speaker 1:So once you have cleared out those energetic cords and what happens is that sometimes we can feel a void. So let's say you've been really tethered into some relationship that's been really challenging and you really want to let go of all that energy that's being sapped from you you cut the cord, but it can feel almost like a void within and in that case you want to fill that void up. The way that I talk about this is you want to call your own power back into yourself. So every time that we're cutting something away or letting something go, we want to bring something that's really nourishing to us back in. That might be that you have a visualization, meaning you close your eyes and you just imagine all of your energy coming back home to you. Maybe you see this as light or as stars, maybe you see it as some kind of pink cloud that comes from all different directions and just flows right back into you and into your body. This is one way that you can fill yourself back up with your own power.
Speaker 1:If that feels a bit abstract, then I recommend just calling in love, whatever that looks like for you. Again, maybe it has a color, maybe there's. You feel these voids and you just call in the color yellow, which, for you, again, maybe it has a color, maybe there's. You feel these voids and you just call in the color yellow, which, for you, represents this love, and just see it starting to fill into your body. You can play a bit to see what feels right, but the most important thing here is that you're setting that intention and you're getting really clear on calling that energy back in, back home to you, so that you feel full, that you feel whole because you are whole and now you want to actually be able to feel and express that without having the sense that something's missing or that you've given parts of yourself away. This kind of cleansing is important to do in the spiritual realm, so in your mind, in your emotional state, but also like within your physical body, that could be something really visceral in your home, like cleansing your home, literally giving away or getting rid of things that don't belong. There is another way of cleansing cutting some energetic cords and ties to things that are just depleting your energy and not really giving you what you need. So for the moment we're talking from the spiritual perspective, so you're going to focus on these practices and see what they bring you and see what starts to shift in your life as you begin to practice this more.
Speaker 1:I would say there are some cases where it will feel like a really big challenge to be able to do this. First of all, if you're totally new to it, it might just sound weird, you might not really have any experience, and in that case I just invite you to be experimental, to try it out. Don't be attached to whether or not it works. Just see how it feels for you. Then you get your own opportunity to truly experience it and find out if that's the right thing and you want to try it again.
Speaker 1:Some people might have the sense that even if they're cutting the cords, they still feel that attachment, and that might be the case. Maybe that specific style of cutting cords doesn't work for you. That has happened to me so many times. I have a visual, I have a way of working that you know I go to by default, but it's not always the right thing. You know I go to by default, but it's not always the right thing. So you can find other ways. That could be like even taking a bath and putting some Epsom salts into the bath and trusting that that is also helping to cleanse and to cut and to pull away anything that doesn't belong to you.
Speaker 1:If you're really struggling, you can also call for help. So there's plenty of practitioners and healers who know how to do this on a different level. What I'm teaching you are basics. They're super powerful, but they're also, you know, the foundational level of how to protect and cleanse. And there will be spiritual practitioners and healers that have a deeper practice and they will know how to support you through that process. This might be through visualization, it might be through Reiki, it might be through many different types of practices that you wouldn't even expect to be able to get that benefit. I would say that if you're struggling, ask for help. Try out a different method if it's not working for you. I recommend journaling about the experience so that you can really record the things that are working and what the impact is. And, of course, I would say, find a community, find others who are interested in doing this as well, so that you can share as you're moving along and don't feel like you're alone.
Speaker 1:I have noticed in my own life that the stronger that I get with these kind of spiritual practices, the lighter that I feel and the more I'm able to move forward and make progress towards things that really matter to me. So I've definitely gotten into phases where I'm stuck on a problem or I believe something's not working in my life because of X, y, z, and it's just like this thought pattern that keeps repeating, keeps repeating, keeps repeating. And once I'm able to recognize that, or someone else points it out to me maybe a healer or my coach then I can say, okay, that's not actually supporting me in any way. I'm ready to let that go, and then I can step into thinking about what are some of those cords or tethers that are holding me to people or situations or memories or circumstances that all it's doing is draining my energy, and I will set a very clear intention within to let go of that and I can almost feel a lifting, like a lightness, of that thing being removed. And it is a practice it's not one and done Like for me, I'll cut the cords and then I might still feel that connection. I have to do it again, and then again, and then again, so it becomes a practice of continually letting go and calling my own power back into myself and then I feel really grounded in who I am and I don't feel the effects of jealousy or anger or things that might be coming at me from the outside.
Speaker 1:So for anyone who is listening to this and might be wondering what the best path forward is, I want you to know that there's no specific right or wrong answer, that all of these different practices exist because everyone has different ways of doing things that work for them and it's up to you to try and find what works best for you. So I can give you suggestions and tell you what I think helps and also what has worked in my own life, and now you can take that and go as an explorer and find what's going to be the best way forward in your life and then note the progress and decide if that's the way that you want to continue. So the very first step is decide on a method that you want to try out Maybe that is the cord cutting, maybe that's standing under a waterfall. Decide on the way you want to call your power back to you if that's seeing that pink cloud or seeing stars coming back home and then think of the way that you want to maintain this. So is there a specific ritual that you want to create at the end of the day? At the beginning of the day, and give yourself the opportunity to practice it? Small, small steps. Baby step is just go under the shower and clear the energy and then, when you're ready for it, you can find your way to a more developed ritual that really helps you to protect your energy and your boundaries and make sure that you're not carrying anything with you that doesn't belong, doesn't support and doesn't nourish you.
Speaker 1:This was the first of a series of mini episodes that will be coming in the future, so interspersed with our regular conversations with incredible healers sharing some of those spiritual and energetic tools and wisdom that I've picked up along the way in my own journey, and also what I use with different clients that I work with that have been the most impactful.
Speaker 1:So if there's any specific types of tools or questions that you might have and that you've been dying to get the answer to, please do reach out. You can reach out to me on Instagram at amandaparkerco. You can send a message through the Don't Step on the Blue Bells website. I'd be happy to hear from you and share the wisdom and expertise that I have, or that my guests have, on the topic. That is burning for you. So thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode of Don't Step on the Blue Bells. I can't wait to see you next time. Thanks for tuning in to today's episode of Don't Step on the Blue Bells. If you enjoyed this conversation, please give the podcast a five-star rating wherever you listen, and don't forget to hit subscribe and follow along so you never miss a new episode.
