Seven Pillars of Spiritual Hygiene for Healing: Clearing “Energetic Parasites” First

Kellee Ratzlaff lived for years with chronic pain and chronic Lyme disease (and co-infections). She went through “allopathic, traditional Western medicine” and felt she was getting “almost nowhere,” until one clear insight changed the order of everything: “in order to heal from physical parasites, like Lyme disease, I had to get rid of energetic parasites first.”

If you have ever stared at a diagnosis, a lab result, or a body that will not calm down, you can feel why this lands. It is not a debate about medicine. It is a question of where healing starts.

In Let’s Be Peace: 20 Unique Paths to Healing Yourself and Spreading Peace in the World, Karen Lee Cohen keeps returning to the same core message: peace begins inside, and when we find it, it spreads.

What Kellee means by “energetic parasites”

Kellee calls what she needed “spiritual hygiene practices” that “lay the foundation for healing my physical body.”

She is careful with her words here. She says spiritual hygiene is not “woo woo.” To her, it is “simply giving yourself the gifts that are your natural birthright.”

Those “gifts” become the seven pillars she names:

• owning your divinity
• owning your sovereignty
• owning your innate freedom
• owning your worthiness
• committing to harmlessness (living in unity consciousness with the law of one)
• committing to honesty
• committing to self-responsibility and self-accountability with absolute compassion

Kellee calls these “the antidote to all of the disease that I have experienced in my body.”

Why peace has to move from your head into your body

Kellee says “Let’s Be Peace” is an inside job, and she adds a detail many people miss: peace does not happen in the mind. “It happens in the body,” and it is “anchored and expressed from the heart, not from the mind.”

Brenda Michaels shares a moment that shows what this can look like when life is not calm. She describes being terrified at a diagnosis, then feeling “a kind of peace settle over me,” which helped “settle my mind and calm my fear enough to feel the difference.”

In that calmer state, she says she could receive guidance, and she learned something sobering: “A system of stress can create a suppressed immune system,” and the body needs a strong immune system to heal.

This is one reason the “inner work” in Let’s Be Peace: 20 Unique Paths to Healing Yourself and Spreading Peace in the World is not just about feeling better. It is about creating conditions where change can happen.

The savior trap (and the quiet way it steals your say)

Kellee respects doctors and healers. She also draws a bright line: “they can only do for you what you’re already doing for yourself.”

Then she names what happens when we hand our healing away. If you expect someone else to heal you, and you are not including yourself in the equation, “then you’re looking at them as a savior.” She says this can “disempower you” and keep you from your “potential health and well-being.”

Karen Lee Cohen holds the same balance in her own way. In Let’s Be Peace: 20 Unique Paths to Healing Yourself and Spreading Peace in the World, she says you can be “your own best doctor” (using your internal GPS, your intuition) and still seek care. She is clear: “We are not suggesting you forego seeking medical attention,” and she shares that she sees a holistic medical doctor for yearly physicals and blood tests as a trusted teammate.

The big shift is not “do it all alone.” The shift is, you stay in the room with your own life.

The seven pillars of spiritual hygiene (in Kellee’s words, made plain)

1) Owning your divinity

Kellee calls this part of your “natural birthright.” It is not something you earn.

2) Owning your sovereignty

This is the end of waiting for someone else to know you better than you know yourself.

3) Owning your innate freedom

A reminder that you can make new choices, even if you have been stuck for a long time.

4) Owning your worthiness

Kellee puts worthiness at the base, not as a reward at the end.

5) Committing to harmlessness (unity consciousness, the law of one)

A move from separation to oneness, where how you treat others is part of how you treat yourself.

6) Committing to honesty

Not “perfect behavior,” just honest seeing. Truth is often what lets the nervous system unclench.

7) Self-responsibility and self-accountability with absolute compassion

This is not blame. It is ownership, held with gentleness.

A simple way to start, here’s how you do it

Kellee says it starts with intention. “Start by setting the intention to be the expression of peace.”

She also says you need quiet space, even if you only have five minutes a day to unplug from outward distraction.

If sitting still is hard, she offers a very human permission slip: you might find that quiet while “pulling weeds in the garden, doing dishes, and loving on your pet.”

Karen Lee Cohen adds concrete steps in Let’s Be Peace: 20 Unique Paths to Healing Yourself and Spreading Peace in the World that fit right alongside Kellee’s pillars:

• Breathe and come back to you. “Go Inside, breathe deeply, still yourself.”
• Try a simple breath count if you want structure. She lists 4, 4, 4, 4 or 4, 7, 8 breathing. Breathe in for the count of 4, hold for 4, breathe out for 4, hold for 4 OR breathe in to the count of 4, hold for 7 and breathe out for 8. Whatever is most comfortable for you.
• Ask your gut, then listen. Breathe, ask yourself the question, and notice if you feel good, unsure, or off-balance.
• Name what you are grateful for. Karen says she does gratitudes before getting out of bed and again at night.
• Bring in teammates, but keep your seat at the table. “Assemble teammates,” then “You be the one to make the decision.”

And if you want one more grounded reason to take this seriously, Gudrun Brunier asks a question that sticks: if we take showers to clean our bodies, what about cleaning our thoughts? She notes that “science found out that we have around sixty thousand thoughts per day.”

With that much inner noise, spiritual hygiene is not extra. It is care.

Kellee ends her chapter cheering the reader on, because starting is often the hardest part: “Bravo for showing up.”

So here is a question worth sitting with, quietly, honestly, and with compassion: what might change in your body if you stopped waiting to be saved, and started treating your divinity, sovereignty, freedom, and worthiness as daily hygiene?