An Energetic Cord-Cutting Ritual to Let Go and Start Fresh
Rituals and Spiritual Practices
Energy healer George Lizos specializes in teaching energetically sensitive people to live freer, happier, and more fulfilling lives. His method involves aura work and chakra cleansing. But one of the most potent practices in his spiritual toolbox is also one of the easiest to wrap your head around: recognizing toxic attachments that might be tripping you up.
It starts with understanding what Lizos calls “cords”: attachments to people, places, objects, and beliefs that you chose to create at one point—and that have since become detrimental to your well-being. You might have cords with an ex-lover or ex-friend. Or with a story you tell yourself about your place in the world. Even though it’s not doing you any good, you’re still fixated on that thing.
Have something in mind? Here’s Lizos’s visualization practice for letting go, excerpted from his book Protect Your Light. If you’re indulging in the new-year ritual of clearing out the old to make way for the new, you may find it’s a powerful exercise.
Cutting Toxic Cords of Attachment
By George Lizos, from Protect Your Light
You can utilize numerous tools, methods, and spirit guides to cut toxic cords of attachment, just as you can use several ways to clear your etheric body, aura, and chakras. However, my preferred method of cutting attachment cords does not require any instruments or spiritual beings; instead it relies solely on our physical bodies, particularly our hands.
As I previously stated, the only tools you actually need for spiritual clearing and protection are your body and intention; all other instruments and spiritual beings are only there to help amplify and reinforce your own power. Despite the fact that we might readily cut cords of attachment with such tools and beings, I believe it is more effective to keep this a totally personal task, given the intimate character of these cords.
Toxic cords of attachment, unlike other types of energy attachments—such as collective thought forms, low-level spirits, and residual spatial energy, which you often pick up spontaneously and unconsciously as you go about your daily life and interact with people and spaces—are created deliberately over time. The majority of these ties are formed as a result of the time and energy you spend deliberately with others—moments shared and words exchanged. Although these cords may have been positive at the start of a relationship, they have since become negative as the relationship has deteriorated.
The same may be said for your toxic cords of attachment to places, objects, beliefs, deceased pets, past lifetimes, and so on. Even though these aren’t living beings, you can still interact with their energy and beingness. In the same way that you have relationships with people, you have relationships with these places, limiting beliefs, objects, and past lives.
Because of the intimacy of these relationships, I’ve discovered that properly releasing them requires an equally intimate process, and our physicality is the ideal tool for this.
The Cord-Cutting Process
Follow these steps to cut and release the toxic cords of attachment you have to the people, places, objects, beliefs, and past lives that you’ve identified in your scanning session:
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Close your eyes, get in a meditative state, and go through the first three steps of the energy protection process—grounding, centering, connecting.
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Scan your energy body and aura with your 360-degree vision turned on to identify the various toxic cords of attachment that are currently clouding your energy field.
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Spend some time carefully touching each cord and following it to discover where it leads. You’ll get a feel for the person, location, object, belief, or past life it’s linked to as you interact with it. During this process, be careful not to stir up any anger, hurt, or resentment, as this will only strengthen your attachment. Simply look at the cords and make mental notes of what they mean.
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Now that you’ve discovered all of the cords, it’s time to cut them and let go of these relationships. Come into your power to clear energy while sitting or standing, with your eyes open or closed. Feel the life-force energy flowing through you, linking you to the heavens above and the ground below, and know and affirm that you have all you need to let go of these toxic connections completely.
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Consider your dominant hand as a useful tool in this process. When you’re ready, spread your fingers so that your palm is wide and extended, and quickly run your hand through each cord, cutting each using your hand as an energetic knife. While you’re doing this, say silently or aloud, I entirely and completely release you from my life. Send love and thanks to the people, places, objects, beliefs, and past lives who have taught you so much. Negative, angry, or resentful energy will hinder the cord cutting, so avoid it. Between each cut, take a few deep breaths to refocus your energy.
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After you’ve severed all the cords, sit quietly for at least five minutes to allow your body to acclimate to the new changes while you send love and thanks to what you’ve released.
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When you feel like the process is finished, end the meditation and take a shower to clear and ground your energy.
[Editor’s note: Lizos created an expanded audio recording of this cord-cutting meditation to help you follow along and revisit it.]
Dealing with Sticky Cords
When it comes to cutting cords of attachment, it’s important to remember that the job isn’t finished once the cord is cut. When cutting the cord, you energetically release that person, place, object, belief, or past life, setting the intention that you no longer wish to be negatively affected by it. That being said, your physical bond with that entity may still exist. You might still see these people on a daily basis, have negative beliefs, or hang out in certain places. As a result, some of these cords may reappear, reestablishing your toxic attachments.
To avoid this, you must be prepared to do the real-life work that will emerge shortly after the cord-cutting session. After you’ve released these attachments spiritually, and so changed your own energy, you’ll attract situations, encounters, and circumstances that will allow you to release them physically as well.
For instance, you might have the opportunity to have a heart-to-heart with some of these people in which you calmly but assertively end or transition your relationship with them. You might get a job offer in a different city, or you might feel compelled to make a change in your life that includes letting go of an object or substance. You might feel inclined to read a book, attend a workshop, or enroll in an online course that contains all of the information you require to totally transcend a limiting belief or heal a past-life trauma.
It’s critical that you seize these opportunities when they present themselves. Your ego will almost certainly intervene, attempting to hinder the healing process by appeasing these people, by suppressing your pain, and by keeping you in denial about what you’ve gone through. This is the time to be aware of such sabotaging thoughts and to muster the courage to ignore them and complete the cord-cutting process.
Adapted and reprinted with permission from Hampton Roads Publishing. Protect Your Light by George Lizos is available wherever books and e-books are sold or directly from the publisher at redwheelweiser.com or 800.423.7087.
George Lizos is an intuitive healer and lightworker. He is the host of the Lit Up Lightworker podcast and the author of Protect Your Light, Be the Guru, and Lightworkers Gotta Work.
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