Looking for some sweet harbingers of Spring? Why not take a personal Spring break and start cleaning and freshening yourself — from the inside out!

Here are three simple spiritual tips to cleanse and revitalize yourself this Spring while you give your health and well-being a boost.

1. Start with your breathing— It’s one of nature’s cleansers
Effective breathing can affect everything you do. It assists with reducing your stress levels, elevating your state of mind, improving the health of your body, and amplifying your spiritual attunement. Keep in mind this principle: it’s not what you are eating that’s hurting you; it’s what you’re not getting rid of that’s keeping you low, and one of the most effective elimination systems is exhalation.

When you think of breathing, you might say to yourself, “Take in a deep breath.” But perhaps you should say, “Exhale. Now receive IN a breath.” The exhalation is really the key to correct breathing technique as it opens the space for the oxygen to be received. These days, with less oxygen being available in the air (particularly in the city), it makes sense that if you have a more effective and efficient breathing mechanism you can get more oxygen into your lungs and can be healthier and more energetic.

2. Do a little mind cleaning with free-form writing
Free-form writing is an easy technique for vacuuming out those stubborn negative thoughts that lodge in your unconscious and subconscious. You can create these elements by repressing things, by obsessing, and by being “possessed” by such things as smoking, alcohol, and food. (Sound familiar?) Doing free form writing is especially helpful for clearing away these kinds of negative influences and it can bring in a boost of energy as you let them go.

Start slowly; you can begin doing just fifteen minutes, but work up to writing for at least an hour. Two hours per session of free-form writing is optimal; but don’t let the optimal get in your way of starting and try it out as best you can. Test it out and see what works for you.

However long you end up doing it, keep it confidential – this is a sacred cleansing process for you alone.

How do you do free-form writing?

• Find a quiet, private place
• Sit down with a ballpoint pen and paper (not a typewriter or computer or on a chalk board). Free-form writing is a kinesthetic activity. The neural impulses from the fingers are sent back to the brain so that the writing actually releases the patterns of the unconscious. (It’s good to light a candle too as this makes for a nice ambience and helps to keep the room cleared and free of any emotional negativity that can be released).
• Allow a thought into your mind and transfer it into the pen and onto the paper. You may not even finish a sentence before the next thought comes up and you start writing the new thought. Don’t worry about spelling or punctuation, but don’t write in shorthand because that was not the form through which the thoughts and images lodged in your subconscious or unconscious.
• Write continuously; there are always thoughts in your mind-and you are to write them down, even if they are, “I don’t know why I’m doing this. I’m blank. What should I write next? Hmmmm.” Don’t be concerned if only ‘junk’ is coming up when you do free-form writing; this means that the free-form writing is working. Sometimes you might write very fast and other times you may write very slowly.
• Important: When doing free-form writing, do not just let the pen write – that is automatic writing which is a very different process and not what you’re doing here. Free-form writing is stream-of-consciousness writing, where you just write whatever comes into your mind. You’re not going automatic and giving over to anything; you are in absolute control of what is happening.
• Write with the hand that you normally write with, not your other hand; free-form writing is different from the technique of writing with the subdominant hand.

When you’re finished…

• When you get through writing, do not read it over. Rip up what you have written and either burn it or flush it down the toilet. it is important that you stop the process when you stop writing. Have a set amount of time to write, and when it is over, get up right away (mid-word if necessary), drink some water, move around, burn or flush what you have written right afterwards, and go on with something else. Do not go back in your mind to what you wrote or anything you went through or felt when you wrote it. Let it all go.
• After you have burned or flushed it, fill the empty space where the images and words were with loving and God. You can do spiritual exercises, chanting a name of God and allow the healing and the peace of Spirit to fill you (for more on spiritual exercises, click here).
• If in the process you start to write inspirational beautiful prose, then you can put those papers aside, and when you finish your session, rewrite those sections you want to keep on separate paper. Then you can rip up and burn or flush all the original pages.
• While doing your free-form writing you may find that pressure leaves you as you write. Obsessive behavior or habitual patterns may suddenly disappear. You may feel a sense of relief, like somebody has taken a weight off you. Don’t even question what it was because you might find it and re-establish it inside, as the powerful creator you are. When something releases, immediately stand up, stretch, and move around physically to experience your new freedom.

3. Complete those old projects – it’s re-vitalizing!
Look around. Do you still have unfinished things to do, like that call to your grandmother, that book on your night table, returning that book to the library, or hanging up that picture you bought last July, etc? When we start to do and don’t finish, we feel bad about it. As you complete, the unconscious starts clearing, and your energy is returned to you. You begin to live in the present, making conscious decisions and completing them on the spot. No matter how beautiful something looks in the world, no matter how it glitters or how glamorous it is, it’s always going to corrupt and decay. You’re the one who is going to have to continue to maintain it, and that takes your energy. So make sure that it is important enough for you to put your energy into in a purposeful way, or drop it so you can go on to complete other things.

Even though some projects are more important than others, as long as they are incomplete, they lie in the unconscious, equally. All of the “I’m going to do’s” that are not finished are little hooks that hang out in our unconscious level wanting energy to feed them. The hooks then grab and pull on our energy level, and that’s why we can feel so tired as if we are dragging ourselves through life.

Remember that energy follows thought. Even if the thought isn’t complete, the energy keeps going and the energy doesn’t care about your good intentions. So when you say you are finished with a half-read book that’s been lying around for months, don’t feel cheated that you didn’t get out of it what you wanted. You weren’t getting anything out of it while it was lying around anyway. It was draining you of your energy.

With each action of completeness, a tiny leak has been sealed. Keep going, joyfully, as with each small step of completion you will be reclaiming your energy.

As you come into the renewal of spring, take care of the most important person in your life – YOU. Use these simple tips to help you refresh, re-energize and align your focus with what is truly important for you. You’ll feel like you’re a brand new you!

For more simple keys on cleaning your inner clutter and bringing greater vitality to your daily life, from the inside out, read John-Roger‘s latest book Living the Spiritual Principles of Health and Well-Being, (co-authored with Paul Kaye)

This article was recently printed in Natural Communities Magazine. View it online here.