Today I was thinking about the concept of ‘spiritual hygiene.’ How many of you remember Pig-Pen from Charlie Brown? When we were growing up, and I know I’m dating myself, Pig-Pen was this character in the Peanuts gang that always had a cloud of smoke around him. Wherever he went, there was a cloud of dirt. He was part of the Peanuts gang, he was in the crew, but he was also looked at very disdainfully. As kids, we thought that was funny. As adults, It’s not so funny.
Now I’m thinking about Pig-Pen as a metaphor for somebody that’s in need of spiritual hygiene. I’m sure younger generations have something that they call that, right? It’s usually the person who trauma dumps on everyone, like in the group chat in the middle of the night. Usually that person who has weird energy, and when they walk in the room, people are thinking, “Oh, here they go again!” Or the person that you know is going to say something negative about the situation instead of thinking positively. It’s okay to talk about what’s going on, but that person constantly has to be negative. There’s no way that they can look at things in a positive light. Maybe young people just call that person “draining.”
Are you a spiritual Pig-Pen? Not in your hygiene but in your energy, your spirit, in the invisible weight you carry into every room, every relationship. Every attempt at rest, the unresolved grief never spoken aloud, the inherited anger, the shame woven into the family. I remember when movies like Rosewood came out, and people would say, “Oh, I don’t want to watch that, because it’s so negative. Even though it’s about our history.” As you know, African people living in America need to address what happened; some people just want to forget it, it’s in the past and they don’t want to address it. They say, “I don’t want to see any more of those “slave movies”. Well, the history has not been fully processed, and we may still be carrying it in our current time period. Believe it or not, we are still dealing with the emotional, physical, economic, and political ramifications of that period of enslavement. This spiritual dirt, it’s things that we have not processed; sometimes also things that we have not processed in our family, in our community, in the world. We move through the world dragging the spiritual dirt behind us. Most of us have no idea it’s there, but our bodies do. And the science now confirms what our ancestors always knew. You carry things spiritually and physically, and it can make you sick, and it could even make your children sick. If we do not address it, it can make their children sick.
Spiritual dirt has a clinical name. Scientists call it allostatic load, the cumulative wear and tear on the body produced by chronic stress that never gets processed or released. Think of it as a physical price your body pays for everything you refuse to put down or let go. Every unprocessed loss, every relationship that kept your nervous system on high alert. Every grief you swallow adds weight to the load.
Research found that unresolved grief alone can dysregulate the body’s stress response systems, producing elevated cortisol and inflammatory markers that persist for months or even years, increasing risk for autoimmune disorders, cardiovascular disease, and depression. Studies show that up to 80% of patients with autoimmune disorders experience significant emotional stress before their diagnosis. This is not a metaphor. This is real. This is measurable in blood and tissue as an accelerating biological agent. The cloud is not invisible in the body. The body sees it clearly and pays the price.
For young people, the stakes are especially high. Research shows that chronic stress during adolescence, when the brain and nervous system are still developing, produces lasting physiological changes. The youth mental health crisis we are living through is not simply a social media problem or a pandemic hangover. It is a significant problem, a spiritual dirt problem, a generation of young people carrying inherited pain with no tools to process.
Long before Western medicine had the language of allostatic load, previous generations had the wisdom to address what we are now measuring in labs. When I study the African and African diaspora, I see spiritual cleansing is not superstition. It was preventative healthcare. Ritual baths with herbs, practiced in the Afro-Caribbean, Brazil and West African traditions, were prescribed for physical, spiritual, and emotional ailments because African traditions didn’t make the mistake of treating them as separate. Healing circles bring community together around those who are suffering, recognizing that you cannot heal alone. Smudging and burning of sacred herbs were used, not just sage, to clear the energy of our spaces. Not as ceremony, just for the sake of ceremony, but a deliberate intervention with the body and spirit.
These practices were not primitive. They were sophisticated ancestral technologies operating on the same principle that modern science is now confirming: how the mind, body, and spirit are not separate systems. They are one system, and you cannot treat one while ignoring the others. The ancestral healers who practice these rituals understood that you had to address what you were carrying before you could heal what it had damaged. You had to give voice to it first.
The dirt you don’t see is still dirty. That’s what makes spiritual Pig-Pen so common and dangerous. Most people don’t know they are even spiritual Pig-Pen. We have normalized the dust and the dirt. We call it a personality. Oh, I’m just an anxious person. I’ve always had a short fuse. I’m entitled to do what I want even if it hurts other people. I don’t really process things. I just push through. We mistake the cloud for character, and our children inherit both the cloud and the mistaken belief that it belongs to them.
The grief you didn’t grieve doesn’t disappear. It goes somewhere. It becomes inflammation, insomnia, and autoimmune conditions that appear out of nowhere. The depression you can’t explain because your life looks fine from the outside. It becomes the 2 a.m. group chat message your teenager sends because they have nowhere else to put what they’re feeling. It becomes a pattern in your family that everyone notices, and no one is able to voice. To be sure, spiritual cleansing is not a substitute for clinical care. If you or your child are living with depression, anxiety, trauma, or chronic illness, ancestral healing practices are not a replacement for therapy or medicine. They are a powerful, evidence informed addition to it. The World Health Organization has recognized traditional and indigenous healing systems as legitimate components of comprehensive healthcare. In fact, over 80% of the world’s population uses traditional and natural medicine.
The science of psychoneuroimmunology is confirming and addressing the emotional and spiritual dimensions of health. It produces measurable physiological results. The ritual bath and therapy session are not in competition. They are colleagues. And it’s time to clean up. Pig-Pen was beloved; he was cheerful, genuine, goodhearted, but nobody wanted to stand too close. The longer he went without addressing his cloud, the more it became his identity. Growing up, we just thought it was his identity until the dirt and the person were indistinguishable. You are not your unresolved grief. Your child is not their anxiety. Neither of you is the cloud you’ve been carrying since before you were born. Since before you knew you were carrying it, but you will keep. But you will keep being mistaken for it, and so will they, until someone in the family decides to set it down, until someone makes a choice.
Our ancestors built the tools, the herbs, the water, the fire, the circle, the song, the conversation across dinner about what this family carries and what we are choosing to release. These are technologies of spiritual hygiene designed to do what no prescription alone can accomplish. Clear what the body is holding, so the healing can begin. The cloud is real; the cost is miserable. It takes time to clean it up. Not only cleaning your house, but your spirit, your energy. Not for your sake alone, but for the young people watching you carrying the dirt and for every generation that comes after.