For the best healing results, start with a clean, clear, and safe healing space. This is true no matter the type of healer or healing service provided.

Many healers and clients alike don’t recognize the importance of the space surrounding the healing process. Find out why you should care.

The Session Settings Can Support or Impede Healing

As a human being, parts of you (both conscious and subconscious) are always observing and monitoring your surroundings. This includes your energy field (aura) and that area within the treatment room.

Your environment and how you perceive and relate to it influences your moment-to-moment health and wellness status. This includes both that which is physical and energetic.

For example, when you sense or perceive potential threats or nuisances you become vigilant and on edge. In contrast, pleasant surroundings promote calm and relaxation. The second example supports restoration, healing, and transformation. The first does not.

This seems obvious. Nonetheless, the principle is often ignored or overlooked.

Typical Treatment Spaces

Conventional Medical Offices

Conventional medical offices have a high standard of cleanliness and good health practices. Healthcare standards are paramount. Significantly less attention is given to client (patient) comfort and engagement. You’ve probably had an opportunity to observe this one more than once.

Alternative Healing Spaces

You might be surprised to hear that the same is not true for alternative healers, particularly sole practitioners. The ambiance of their healing rooms varies greatly.

This diversity is largely due to a gap in training, limited regulatory oversight, and a lack of common sense.

While the concept and practice of energy clearing are fairly standard components in energy healing classes, typical curriculums don’t include a lesson specifically on setting a clear, clean, and protected space.

Moreover, many instructors fail to orient their students on best practices regarding working with the public and making clients feel safe.

Creating a Clean, Clear, and Safe Space For Healing

As a Master instructor, practitioner, and client, I’ve had many opportunities to observe numerous practitioners from various vantage points.

Some maintain an austere medical tone. Many create an attractive spa-like, sensuous, and salubrious space. Some crowd their spaces with curative aids and esoteric objects. Still, other practitioners appear overly reliant on themselves and their healing skills, neglecting ordinary standards of neatness and hygiene in their treatment rooms.

Clutter Dampens Energetic Flow

A healing space that is clean and uncluttered is important for those healers who work with subtle energy.

When a place is messy, dirty, cluttered, or disorganized, the energy in the room can become entangled or blocked, preventing the preferred unimpeded flow of energy that restores balance, encourages greater coherence, and improves health and well-being.

The same can be said for energetic clutter and negative or toxic energy. Freely flowing clear energy is the best for healing. A conscientious practitioner energetically clears the space before each healing session.

Feeling Safe In a Self-Healing Space

Some healers fail to orient their clients on what to expect during their sessions. Many fail to debrief clients after their sessions to receive and offer feedback. The silence and lack of information add an air of mystery and mysticism to their services, but also uncertainty, awkwardness, tension, and discomfort.

Creating a safe space means treating clients with respect, keeping them informed of what will happen, allowing them to ask questions, listening to their needs and preferences, and honoring their personal boundaries.

Because all healing is ultimately self-healing, practitioners need to cede significant control to the clients and encourage them to take responsibility for their healing journey.

Client’s Resistance to Unpleasant Surroundings

Clients may become adversely affected by the environment – the healing space’s look, smell, or feel. Preoccupied with unpleasant surroundings, clients can develop a lack of trust in the practitioner, be less engaged in their healing process, and withdraw. This withdrawal can be conscious or subconscious.

Visible Signs of Client Resistance

Some common observable physical signs of withdrawal are hands firmly pressed onto the table or in the form of a fist, arms pulled close to the body, or tight concave shoulders. The inability to relax and fidgetiness can also be noted.

Of course, these signs can allude to other factors. Some relevant to the client’s current condition or complaint. Still, taking that first step of setting a physical and energetically healing space helps illuminate and address these underlying factors.

Subtle Signs of Client Resistance

The expression of the client’s aura is typically unobservable to the physical eye, but certainly perceptible to a descent energy worker. This is because a client’s subtle life-force energy, especially their more dynamic auric energy, will constrict and expand signally weakness or withdrawal and vitality and openness, respectively. A narrow or tight energy field means the client is less open and responsive.

Constricted energy is less vital, less hesitant to release and change, and less inclined to shift and rebalance. In short, subtle energy is more difficult to work with and will yield limited healing results.

In these ways, discomfort and resultant client withdrawal create resistance and impede the energy flow surrounding and within the physical body, affecting the speed and extent of healing.

Most Energy healers don’t deliberately create unpleasant spaces. Rather, those who do either downplay its importance or are ignorant. Either way, they don’t appreciate what makes a space suitable for healing and the contribution it can make to the healing process.

Whether you work with clients as an energy practitioner, use your healing skills for self-care, or are seeking the services of a healer, you’ll want to ensure that the healing space you choose creates a foundation for a successful session. Make sure that it’s clean, clear, and feels safe.

How to Clear the Healing Space

Many energy healing modalities include energy clearing techniques (e.g., Reiki symbols, and Shamanic extraction techniques).

Originating with traditional Shamans, but commonly used by energy practitioners in general, is smudging. The space is cleansed with smoldering herbs of specific medicine plants to create a space with clear energy conducive to healing. White Sage (Salvia apiana) is arguably the most commonly used in North America. Palo Santo (Bursera graveolens) is more popular in South America.

Smoke-free smudging options are also available such as essential oil diffusions and liquid smudge. These products are extracted from specific plant species, including those used in traditional smudging.

Selecting the right herbs and crystals can reinforce the sense of safety. For example, Juniper Berty (Juniperus communis) clears negative energy while drawing in positive and protective energies. Certain crystals (e.g. selenite), and sounds and tones from singing bowls, rattles, and drums can be used. for clearing energy and pulling in positive protective frequencies.

Now that you know why creating a healing space is the first step in the healing process. You’ve also learned how to create a healing space. Now you need to put your new logic into practice because the quality of the healing space matters whether you work with clients, limit your skills to self-care, or you’re a client yourself.

For More On Healing Spaces and Clearing Energy, See:

• The Starchaser Mind, Body, Spirit Blog
• Read about  symptoms of negative energy in a space
• Buy the Starchaser ebook on smudging to set a clear and protected space