Spiritual hygiene is not incense and crystals. Though I have both and I recommend both. Spiritual hygiene is the maintenance of your inner world with the same seriousness and consistency that you maintain your outer one.
The word hygiene is doing the work in that sentence and it is there on purpose, because hygiene is unglamorous, daily, and nobody has ever once congratulated you for it.
You brush your teeth. You wash your face. You clean your house. These are non-negotiable. But most of us do absolutely nothing for the inner world on a daily basis and then wonder why we feel heavy, flat, reactive, or just generally off.
Notice that none of those outer things is a treatment. You do not brush your teeth because something has gone wrong. You brush them so that it does not. The inner equivalent has somehow ended up on the other list, the one you only reach for when you are already struggling.
The inner world accumulates. Other people's energy. Conversations that didn't resolve. Decisions that haven't been made. All of it sits there, taking up space, until you deliberately clear it.
Those 3 are worth taking one at a time, because from the inside they feel identical and they are not.
Other people's energy is the one most people only believe in once they have noticed it happening. You come out of a 20 minute conversation carrying something that is not yours, and you can usually name whose it is. You do not need a theory of why that happens in order to deal with it. You need to notice you are carrying it, because what you do not notice you keep.
An unresolved conversation is heavier than it ought to be because the body treats it as unfinished business, and unfinished business stays open. It is not the content that costs you. It is that some small part of you is still holding a position, ready, in case it starts up again.
A decision not made is the quietest of the 3 and much the most expensive. An undecided thing has to be carried in both versions at once, and carrying 2 futures is genuinely tiring in a way that choosing the worse one is not.
How that looks in an ordinary week is not drama. It is a low hum.
You are fine, and slightly irritable. You snap at the person who deserves it least. You cannot settle in the evening and you cannot say what the matter is, because nothing is the matter, which is precisely the problem. Nothing is the matter and everything is still in the room.
The other sign is that small things take a run up. An email you could answer in a line sits for 3 days. Not because it is hard. Because there is no space to put it.
What people try first is a big reset. A weekend. A retreat. A clear out of the whole lot in one go.
And a reset is a real thing and it does work, and it is still the wrong tool for this, for the same reason a deep clean is the wrong tool for a kitchen that gets used every day. It takes away the accumulation and does nothing at all about the accumulating.
The second thing people try is a practice designed for somebody with an empty morning. Forty minutes, in silence, before anybody else is awake. It survives about 4 days.
My morning practice takes 15 minutes and it changed my life. Not the Instagram version. The real one, with 3 children asking questions while I try to hold a crystal with intention and simultaneously find a PE kit.
The reason 15 minutes works and 40 does not is that 15 can survive a bad morning. A practice that only happens on good mornings is not a practice, it is a reward, and the mornings you actually need it are never the good ones.
It also does not have to be a sequence, and it does not have to be quiet. What it has to do is 3 things, in any order, by whatever method suits the room you are standing in.
Put something down. Whatever came in yesterday that is not yours, name it and leave it. Out loud if you are alone, silently if you are not.
Finish something. Not the conversation. Your end of it. Decide what your position actually is, so that the part of you holding it ready can stand down.
Choose one thing. The smallest undecided thing on the list. Choose it badly if you have to. A badly made decision costs less than an unmade one.
That is 15 minutes, and all 3 of them fit in a kitchen with other people in it.
The evening version is shorter and most people find it easier. One question on the way up the stairs. What of today is mine, and what belongs to somebody else. You do not have to do anything with the answer. Asking is most of it.
What to notice afterwards is not calm, which is a bad measure and an unreliable one. It is the gap between something happening and you reacting to it. When that gap widens by even a second, this is working.
And the other thing to notice is how quickly it comes back when you stop. A week off and the hum returns, which is annoying and also the clearest proof that it was doing something.
More like this.
What spiritual hygiene actually is, and why your inner world needs maintenance.
Building a daily practice that you'll actually do, including the times you won't.
Energy clearing for the sceptics, 3 things that work even if you don't believe they will.
If you want help building one that fits your actual mornings, the one to ones run on Tuesdays, 10am to 1.30pm. We start with whatever is going on for you. Write to me at anna@annalouoflondon.com.