Keeping it Clean in your practice with Energy Hygiene

Is Energy Hygiene a bad word?

Several years ago, I attended a wonderful conference about publishing.  I was contemplating some next steps for my business, and writing a book was on the table for consideration.

While at the conference, the participants were given the opportunity to ‘pitch’ their book idea to the conference professionals and to fellow participants.  Pitchers were offered feedback about the book idea, the presentation, the language, etc.

So pitch I did.  I talked about healers and hygiene (not just energy healers, but professionals in service to people seeking healing).  These healers can be doctors, nurses, therapists, yoga instructors, social workers, energy healers, Reiki Masters – whatever.  And I talked about writing a book about the importance of energy hygiene for healing professionals.

The idea was roundly validated, much to my delight.  The term ‘hygiene’ was trounced.

One of the professionals, a book editor for more than 30 years made a statement about how creepy it is to think about a doctor not washing his hands between patient examinations.  That simply wouldn’t happen in this day and age, would it?  And yet, hygiene is still a word I find myself using, over and over again.  Not because of hand washing issues, but because of the potentiality for ‘infection’ – healers taking on the pain, illness or thought processes of the patient/client.

In fact, EHI’s online practitioner programs are attended by  healing professionals who are there to learn about hygiene – not the soap and water kind, but about energy hygiene.  They show up because they understand that there are ways in which their ability to work cleanly and clearly in their practice is undermined by the energetics that pass between the healing professional and his/her patients.

Avoid Energetic Countertransference with Energy Hygiene

Energy countertransference is a real phenomenon. Speaking about it at the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology in Coronado Beach, California, the group discussed  psychological countertransference — enmeshment with the patient’s pain, suffering, behavioral issues. Countertransference is an energy problem as much as it’s also a psychological construct. In fact, the Law of Attraction pretty much guarantees energetic countertransference. We attract those who resonate with us, our stories, beliefs, behaviors, emotions — our energetic makeup is a powerful lightning rod that brings practitioners clients who are dealing with similar issues.

I taught the participants at the conference five or six different skills for managing the patient/client relationship using hygienic and energetically clean practices.  Simple skills and practices that keep the work clean.  And trust me, the crowd went wild!  They got the message and they found the skills useful, practical and easy to apply.

Practitioners need to pay attention to energy hygiene.  There are so many ways in which the practitioners energy can enroll in the patient’s story, experience or illness – the practitioner is then at risk of losing neutrality, and  compromising the healing process through the ‘infected’ energy that now lives between them.

There are lots of ways to clear energy, and many of them actually work!  What’s tricky is understanding the intention behind a lot of the clearing approaches that exist so that clearing takes place effectively.

Highest Possible Good is a Fallacy

I might piss you off here, so hang on to your bootstraps.  I’m going to say something terrible about ‘the highest possible good’ approach to healing.  So many healers use this term as their catch-all for doing work that they believe is hygienic.

The concept is that they’ll ask for the highest possible good to take place in the session – for both the client and the practitioner.  That’s all well and good, but can someone please tell me what highest possible good actually means? Because really, it’s a phrase, it carries energy, but it’s not a defined, measurable frequency. Someone who works with minimal knowledge and expertise, but a good heart may not be able to hold a high enough vibration to support actual evolution. Conversely, a jaded or burned out professional may not be able to bring the ‘highest possible good’ to their patients either.

The problem with these new-age type phrases is that people are not able to hold the vibration of ‘the highest possible good.’  They can only hold the vibration of what they IMAGINE is the highest possible good.  And what they can imagine may not be high enough or good enough to keep a session clean and clear for both the healer and his/her patient.

And what I’m really saying here is: healers have problems, too.  They’re simply people.  Like the rest of us.  And they have days of incredible insight and spiritual acuity and they have days of incredible lowness and mundane, trivial stuckness.  They’re simply people.  And they see clients on both the up and the down days.

Energy Hygiene is achieved with simple tools

So rather than relying on catch-all phrases, I would rather see healing professionals trained with proactive, skill-based approaches to energetic self-care and hygiene.

So, while the word hygiene created seen and unseen paroxysms of heebie-jeebies amongst the talented editors and book marketing professionals, I’m sticking with the idea of energy hygiene for the foreseeable future.

Because in reality, it wasn’t all that long ago that doctors saw no need to sterilize surgical equipment between operations.  And it didn’t make them right!  It just made them unwitting saboteurs of a patient’s ability to heal.

So yes, I make this point: healers without energy hygiene are unwitting saboteurs of their patient’s organic ability to heal.

If you’re a healing professional and have not studied and applied practices for energetic hygiene and appropriate self-care, consider what I’ve said here.  Consider the impact on you, and on your patient/clients. Get some tools. Use them. Because like anyone in the healing arts, you want to do good work. And for most in the healing arts, ‘highest possible good’ is a phrase and concept, not a measurable frequency that fosters clarity, clean work and patient evolution.