Chapter 10 excerpt:

Keep It Clean - The Importance of Energetic Hygiene

"At the outset of one of my introductory classes for Pranic Healing, I asked the students, as I typically do, a little bit about their lives, the nature of their work and what brought them to this class. One young woman stated that she was a social worker for two adult substance-abuse programs, and that she had just been served with divorce papers that day. She looked tired and her posture was hunched over. I felt that "cutting her cords" - thin strands of prana that connect us energetically to anything in our lives that evokes a strong emotion in us - could help, so I asked her if she would be willing to try an experiment. She agreed, so I gathered and cut all the cords that had attached her to her work and personal issues. She began crying immediately and said she felt so much relief. She admitted that, in addition to the her work and personal stresses, she was also bulimic. We cut the cord to that issue. Several days later she came to class and told everyone that she had gone five days without a bulimic episode and that her life had already changed and work was less stressful."

- Sheevaun OâConnor, Huntington Beach, Calif.

It takes work to keep your energy body clean. Because you are part of a dynamic bio-energetic system, you encounter both the prana that sustains life and the contaminants that diminish that prana. Fresh prana is added to the system from the sun, the ultimate source, but as living things absorb and use this fresh prana - your energy body "breathes" just as your respiratory system does - they also discharge dirty prana back into the system. Some of this expelled dirty prana is broken down naturally, but a portion stays in the air and the ground as residual contamination. Thus, we are vulnerable to environmental contamination, or absorbing dirty prana from the air we breathe, the food and water we consume, and the places where we live and work.

Additionally, as we move through this bio-energetic system, we often find ourselves unavoidably in close proximity to other people who are not always positive, and in situations that evoke negative responses in us. We live and work with people who are angry, intentionally hurtful, or otherwise emotionally destructive. Many personal, societal, and familial influences cause us to have or hold onto stresses, worries, negative emotions, and limiting beliefs. Negativity of any kind - whether the source is work or home, general life circumstances, the actions or words of another person, or simply our own unresolved anxieties - diminishes and contaminates our personal energy supply and creates emotional contamination.

Although we live in an energetically dirty world and can't completely eliminate contamination, we can mitigate it through energetic hygiene, the practice of keeping your personal energy tank as clean and full as possible. Energetic hygiene is the fourth of the six steps to self-healing.

The Keys to Energetic Hygiene

When you practice energetic hygiene diligently, your energy body becomes more refined; the particles of prana that make up your energy aura become cleaner and smaller. They also vibrate at a higher frequency. A refined energy body is able to absorb more prana of all frequencies. This quality of refinement is compounded -- as you practice good energetic hygiene, you can absorb more prana, which in turn, makes your energy body even more refined, which then enables you to take in even more prana and so on. A refined energy body is also stronger energetically, which enables you to resist ailments more effectively and rebound more quickly if you do get sick.

There are five keys to energetic hygiene: emotional regulation, proper diet, physical exercise, clean environment, and a final special key, frequent use of salt in all its cleansing applications.