A run of bad luck is the hardest kind to lift, and not because it is strong.
Because it has no single event in it. Nothing to point at, nothing that happened on a Tuesday, just a stretch of months where everything went slightly wrong.
My name is Ren Kagetsuki. For fifteen years this was the most common thing I was asked to arrange, because it is the one that does not look like anything.
There is an order to taking it off, and one step almost everybody does first that starts the run again.
The mistake that restarts the run
Drawing luck before the clearing is finished.
It is the first thing people reach for, and every list tells them to do it. Prosperity work, a money bowl, a charm for good fortune, a ritual to turn things around.
Drawing is an opening. It does not select.
You are asking for more to come towards you while a route is still open, and what is nearest that route is the thing that has been arriving all year.
People describe exactly this without knowing what they are describing. They did a luck ritual and the following fortnight was the worst of the whole run.
That is not the ritual failing. That is the ritual working.
Clear first. Close the route. Draw last, and not in the same week.
The order for removing a curse of bad luck
Four stages. The first three are the removal. The fourth is the part everybody wants to start with.
1. Empty the house first, not yourself
A run of this kind settles in the building before it settles in the person, because it arrives slowly.
Open every window for twenty minutes, starting in the room furthest from the door and working towards it. Doors open, in the same direction.
Then salt in the four corners of the worst room. Small cones on white dishes, left three days, then thrown outside.
2. Then the person
A handful of coarse sea salt in a hot bath, fifteen to twenty minutes, then rinse under the shower before getting out. Head downward, no going back up.
No bath is not a problem, and most of the world does not have one. Coarse salt in a bowl of hot water, poured over the shoulders and let run down, in the shower. Or salt held in wet palms and worked over the back of the neck, both wrists and both ankles, then rinsed off from the head down.
Three nights running. The same time each night.
The bath water goes straight down the drain and the room gets aired afterwards.
3. Hold the door
Small cones of coarse salt on two white dishes, either side of the door you actually use, changed every morning.
The old salt goes outside onto ground or into the street. Not the sink, not the bin, not back into the bag.
Keep this for two weeks after the baths finish, not three nights. This is the stage that decides whether it holds.
4. Only now, draw
Whatever your tradition uses for fortune, do it after the two weeks and not before.
Here that means a shrine visit rather than anything done at home, and the order is not negotiable in either country.
Four smaller things that restart it
- Used salt down the sink. You have taken what you collected and put it back into the house through the pipes.
- Telling the person you suspect. It reopens the contact and it tells them the work landed. Nothing else you can do is as costly as this.
- Selling or gifting the object. Passing it to somebody else binds you to where it goes. Out of the house, wrapped in white paper, not into circulation.
- Breaking the three nights. Two nights and a gap is a different working. Start again rather than carry on.
What to do on the days in between
Nothing spiritual. This surprises people and it is the advice I give most often.
Do not add a second method halfway through because you are impatient. Two workings running at once interfere, and you will not know which one did anything.
Keep the salt changed, sleep, and write down what happens each day in one line.
That last part is not busywork. A run of bad luck is judged by pattern rather than by feeling, and feelings after a clearing are unreliable in both directions.
The bath side of this, in more depth, is here: the uncrossing bath and how it is run.
When a run of bad luck is not a curse
It is worth knowing before you spend three nights on it.
A bad season is wide and shallow, it lands on ordinary days as readily as important ones, and it thins on its own.
Sent work is narrow and deep, it lands where it costs the most, and it does not thin because something is feeding it.
There is also a calendar here that decides a great deal of it, and your own age may answer the question before any of this does: the Japanese years of calamity.
If the run restarts anyway
Then the route was never closed, and the clearing was only ever going to buy you a fortnight.
The full sequence, including the stage that closes it, is here: the seven methods and where each one stops.
Or tell me what you ran and how long the quiet lasted. That number is the diagnosis, and you already have it.
