Household Cleansings: When Negativity Must Leave

It starts off as something small. You wake up with your love, and for some odd reason you both are just in crabby moods. You snap at each other, then say you're just tired, and then he leaves for work, and you leave for work, or stay home, and it just sets a bad tone for the rest of the day. Then that bad day turns into a bad week, and that bad week turns into a bad month, and before you know it, it seems like your life is just spiraling out of control! What's going on here? Have you been cursed? Is life turning against you? Chances are, the answer to the last two questions is ... NO.


This happens with me and Knight all the time, and I mean that almost literally. But why does it happen? Is it because we don't like each other, because we aren't meant to be together? Absolutely not. Knight and I love each other dearly, and truly want to be together. The real cause? Negativity kind of creeps into the house like a dark ninja and starts to mess with the mojo of things. Let me break this down, so it's more understandable and won't sound like the rantings of a psycho person confusing.

Negativity inside the home LOVES clutter. Now, Knight and I are no slouches (well sometimes Knight is as messy as a toddler) but we do live in a tiny house. Our house is probably about 400 sq. ft. or less. Some how, even though we rarely buy anything but groceries, this house can get super duper cluttered. Granted we are planning on moving to a house about 10 times the size of this some time soon, but in the mean time, here on the home front, things get cluttered and a little messy with day to day life. Messes and random clutter are breeding grounds for stale and negative energy.

A lot of times what happens with Knight and I is that we have certain areas of the home that are used for storage, and rarely ever seen, like the loft because you have to be like two feet tall to be able to stand up in there! So, because there are areas of the home that are used as storage, but rarely ever walked into, energy becomes stale. If left to it's own devices, sometimes it can turn slightly negative. I'm not talking about evil energy, just crabby energy, kinda like someone who is absolutely not a morning person, but is awake anyway. But, there are other causes too. Like when Knight has had a bad day, or been around a negative person. He'll walk in with metaphysical sludge all over him. That can accumulate over time and cause us to snap at each other, without even realizing we are.

But there is good news! You don't have to live like that! Here's what I do. I start with a good old fashioned house cleaning. I find all errant laundry and coral it in the laundry hampers, because Knight has this weird and slightly annoying endearing habit of hiding his clothes under the bed and then wondering where everything has got off to. I change the sheets on the bed, or if I've just recently changed the sheets, I'll neatly fix the bed. I make sure all the dishes are done, the bathroom is clean, and the living room is picked up and vacuumed. After that I take out the trusty old broom and sweep the house. While I'm doing all of the mundane cleaning chores I envision the negativity getting broken up and swept/vacuumed away. Once the house is good and sparkling, I walk through with my trusty sage bundle.

White Sage is an amazing herb. It's cleansing powers are second to none! Got a bad ghosty in your house? Light sage and tell it to scram (and leave no question that they are not welcome there). Had a family member that's been sick, and the illness just seems to be clinging in the air? Light some sage. Fighting with a family member and causing discord in the home? Light some sage. You get the idea. It's a universal, get rid of bad things, herb.

So, I'll light my sage bundle and begin with a prayer for whatever deity or Archangel we may need at the moment to enter into the home and protect it and help us create a harmonious home. Then I waft the smoke throughout each room, making sure absolutely no corner has been left out. Knight thinks I'm crazy because I start this journey up in the loft. "Why even start up there? The smoke goes up there anyway." But, by starting in the area that we go to the least, I'm dispelling the biggest part of the stale or negative energy. Each room is visited in turn, and all the while I watch the sage chase away the hurt feelings, the stale energy, the icky negative goo that someone tracked in from the outside world (as I like to call any area outside of my home!), and whatever other baddies that shouldn't be in our home. Sometimes the sage hangs a little heavy, and I can tell we've some how landed in the middle of something more negative than just being crabby, but it usually dispells quickly and there are no more problems afterward.

This is a great thing to do about once a month in a regular sized home. In a home that's a little more cluttered up you can do this once a week or once every two weeks. Really you can light sage any time you want to, you will not cause any harm to your home if you decide you want to burn sage 24/7, but you might cause harm to your wallet as that would be a bit expensive to keep that much sage around!

Now that your home feels better, and everyone is happier, you probably want to keep your home that way, right? Now would be a good time to implement a cleaning schedule. I know that sounds so mundane and so not witchy, but I promise you, the cleaner you keep your house, the happier things will be around there. Here at our little cabin, we've had rain for about a week straight. Things feel stuffy, and blah, because I can sweep 17 million times a day, and never be rid of the damn mud! I can run the vacuum that many times too, and just never find an end to it all. But I can tell the difference from last week when the floor was swept and stayed clean, and the living room was uncluttered and clean, and our bedroom had clothes put away, rather than piled in the bottom of my closet or just laying on the bed. I'm saying this just as much to you as I am to myself, don't slack off with your cleaning, because you will notice a big difference in how you feel, and how the people around you feel.

Once the cleaning, and cleansing, has been done, the next step is a blessing. We'll go over blessings in more detail later, but it's always a good idea to keep an altar around for a home deity. Ask someone you feel protected by and happy with to enter into your home, and live there with your family, to protect the home from negativity, and to help keep things harmonious. Light a nice, big, white candle on your altar and as long as that candle burns, you'll know that deity is there protecting the home. When the candle gets close to burning down, replace it with another, using the same flame from the original candle. Putting a salt circle around at least your home will help keep you from tracking in negativity, and placing a welcome mat with protective runes, or just the word protection, by whatever door you enter through the most and making a habit of wiping your feet on the mat as you come in will also help keep negativity at bay.

Interested in learning more? Check out Magical Housekeeping by Tess Whitehurst. It's a great book, with great blessings and cleansings, that will really make a difference in your home. Another wonderful book I suggest is Mrs. B's Guide to Household Witchery by Kris Bradley. Not only is Kris Bradley an awesome author, she's an amazing domestic witch who really knows her stuff, and she's a wonderful blogger too!