How to Make a Smudge Stick

Things you need to make a smudge stick

• Cotton String (NOT synthetic string)
• Scissors
• Fresh or Dried Herbs (as below). Herbs that can be found very easily in tropical locations are in bold print.
• A heat resistant container (as pictured below) in which to burn the herbs

• Black Sage / Tropical Black Sage / Cordia Curassavica: For clearing negativity
• Cedar: For grounding and joy during personal transformation whether internal (new values, attitudes, beliefs) or external (new job, house, birth, death) and it allows you to ‘be’ in the present moment
• Cinnamon: For spiritual cleansing (due to its stinging, dynamic qualities and its ability to ward off any undesirable thoughts, feelings, or illnesses.)

• Echinacea: For healing, purification and protection
• Imphepho / “South African Sage” / Helichrysum odoratissimum: A powerful smudge for cleansing and protecting. Allows you to connect to your spirit guides and angels with ease. 
• Lavender: For emotional balance, peace & harmony. It attracts loving energy and angelic beings.
• Lemongrass: For psychic awareness and purification
• Lime: For protection, purification, physical energy
• Mugwort of the Artemisia genus (a close relative, wormwood /Artemisia absinthium): For psychic awareness, psychic dreams, astral project
• Musk: For protection, self-confidence
• Peppermint: For protection, renewal and healing
• Rosemary: For purification (it will help you to ’let go’ of negative thoughts and other negative vibrations), mental clarity, in rituals (for the mind, healing and love).  See how to propagate rosemary from cuttings in the tropical organic garden blog. -- --

• Sage, White (Salvia apiana): For purification
• Sweet grass: aka Holy grass (Hierochloe Oderata).
• Tobacco (kinikinik or a red willow): Cleansing, offerings, for communication with the Creator, for asking agricultural land for thanks and cooperation (do NOT use tobacco cigarettes for smudging since they have a lot of chemicals that are not conducive to cleansing)

• Combinations of these herbs are fine

Instructions: How to make a smudge stick

1. Line the herbs up so that the bottom stems are in the same place as a handler
2. Tie the based with a knot before wrapping the string up and back down again
3. If you use fresh herbs, wrap the string a little tighter since the herbs lose volume after being dried
4. If you used fresh herbs, allow to dry for one month inside of a paper bag
5. You may trim edges 
6. You may add some drops of an essential oil of an herb that you did not use
7. You may consecrate the smudge sticks before using them
8. Burn smudge sticks for roughly 30 seconds to a minute in order to keep them smoldering.

BTW, It is also possible to smudge with substances other than herbs. For instance, you may smolder chips of bark as you would an incense stick  

• bay leaf tree bark: purification, psychic dreams, to expel negativity

CONTENT RELATED TO MAKING SMUDGE STICKS

• How to perform a psychic cord cutting
• Banishing prayer: Abbe Male Spiritus
• Casting a magickal circle with the 4 elements

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