Overview: Smoke cleansing with herbs and resins can be a welcome addition to your busy life. Pagan Portals - Sage Advice: A Practical Guide to Energetic Smoke Cleansing and House Blessing by author Dawn Leith Dougherty makes it easy and fun!

Verdict: Simply put, Sage Advice is a fun and practical approach to energetic smoke cleansing for your home and sacred space! Many plants and tree resins have properties that you can use and blend with others to create a beautiful smoke bath, potpourri, or for use in your spiritual observances.

Here you can learn how you can incorporate loose herbs and resins into your daily life to create beautiful and healing incense to enhance your energetic hygiene for your body, mind, and home. Sage Advice offers simple, everyday practices which people of all ages, cultures, and spiritual paths can adopt.

You can also learn the reasons for energetic smudging and have a greater understanding of how this practice can affect your home and personal space, and how to make it an easy, but important part of your journey on this beautiful planet we call home.

As all this was relatively new to me, I quickly discovered that Energetic Smoke Cleansing is more than just a practice of burning herbs to clear negative energy from a person, space, or object and promote balance. It also involves lighting a smudge stick (like sage or palo santo) or an herb bundle, then wafting the smoke around to purify the area and inviting positive energy with a clear intention.

Indeed, to further the experience, to perform the ritual, open windows, light the smudge stick, allow it to smolder, and move through the space, focusing on corners and areas that feel heavy.

As for the House Blessing side of things, well, that was a little easier to grasp as a friend of mine had also pretty much done this a few years back (and in front of a few of us, weirdly). So, to perform a House Blessing with sage, you light a bundle of sage until it smolders, then walk through your home, wafting the smoke into corners, doorways, and from room to room, while holding an intention for cleansing and peace.

You can use a prayer, mantra, or a personal intention while you do this to focus the spiritual or energetic purpose of the ritual, but as you may well have already spied, both rituals are very similar in their DNA.

But pay no heed to that as author Dawn Leith Dougherty of Tree of Life Incenses, along with her smudge blends is one of the most soothing of narrators within a book of this ilk you could ever hope to guide you, of that you have my word.

Her overall extensive knowledge of herbs along with her beyond intuitive abilities to blend to perfection only enhances the individuals experiences within their own living confines. Her extreme smoke cleansing knowledge is formidable, and her layout of each of each herb and how they interact with each other is second to none.

About the Author - Dawn Leith Dougherty lives in the rolling hills of rural North Carolina, USA in the northern Piedmont region with her husband Ed “Greybeard”, and Spooky, a tiny fuzzy black cat who somehow lost her tail. Together with her husband Ed, a woodworker and gifted flute maker, they are owners of Tree Of Life Designs, a true backyard enterprise and labor of love.

They sell their wares on the internet, as well as occasional music and craft festivals hither and yon, and generally making happy mischief! Dawn is a Reiki Master-Teacher in the Usui System Of Natural Healing, an Ordained Priest in The Order Of Melchizidek, an Animist and Pagan, an early modern traditional Witch, a writer, a vocalist, musician, and performer in rock bands and stage productions!

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