Make Room in Your Life - From Clutter Overwhelm to Clarity

 

Do you ever feel like abundance comes into your life and brings you joy but later rears its ugly side? It happens in nature too - the crops ripen in the field, but left unused they rot and (eventually) return to the soil. We are in the midst of this energy right now, as we move through late autumn. This is, indeed, what clutter is to us.

 

My inspiration tonight comes from making sense of the tangle of kids' clothes. Due to doting and sales-savvy relatives, the kids' drawers are bulging and we were overdue for doing something about it. The straw broke tonight finally (thus my gritty pictures - sorry).

Feeling Too Full... And What is Enough?


This afternoon I was preparing for having some people over, so I was tidying up. There were some purchases from the store to put away, so I carried them to the bathroom and put them right where they belong (happy organization systems!).

... But they wouldn't fit.

Not because they didn't have a home, but because their home was already full -- aside from the toiletries in use, I already had extra in the cabinet. Lo and behold, I had just purchased more of the very thing that I already had more than enough of.

Learning About Your Clutter Through Your Body

You can use your emotions to sense how clutter is different from other things in your house. Try this technique.

Clutter's Underbelly: Clutter as Attachment

Oh, to be free and bend with the wind...



My "Spring Cleaning" experiment is about clearing my clutter - in a real and thorough way. As I've been working through this for many months, I can speak to the slippery slope of cleaning up in the physical realm but not really looking under the rocks at the true story of my clutter. It is a circular journey, often frustratingly with small gains at a time. So I'm ready to approach this differently.

Clear Clutter with Conscious Purpose

The clutter lies in piles, in clumps, in unassuming containers, in dust bunnies of drawers. By the bagua, it tells the Forces That Be that for [this area of your life] that you have something to heal, and the chi languishes there instead of its usual flow to bring blessings and good things to you.



It's time.

 



You know, it's been said that the universe has the same answer to every request: YES.

Tools for the Journey: When the Walls Are Closing In

Feeling closed-in today... edgy, feeling compelled to address one thing after another, worried about my time constraints...

Ugh. It's that old feeling back again.

Admittedly, I am running on less sleep again. But it causes me to reflect if my home is at fault for my feelings? Today I have a harder time puzzling though the question. Just as our homes impact us, they also reflect us.

6 Months In: Cleaner Inside and Out and... Happy??!

As I got the kids off to bed, I discovered... oh my!... I'm happy!

While it's true that we're past the Autumnal Equinox so the sun in traversing Libra right now (which makes my natal Libra Moon and Pluto very comfortable), this feeling has progressively been building in me, which speaks to deeper, more gradual change.

After 6 months of clearing clutter, creating organizational systems, and cleaning dirt and dust,

Organization for Kids: Trading Toys Out

Oh, toy clutter! Too many toys can make it hard for kids to have room to play (as well as hard for adults to walk through!). Some parents rotate out the toys monthly - it can seem like "new toys" have arrived. I've found that this doesn't work well for my kids - they have the toys they love and they want to play with them over and over again. When the month was up, they'd pick the same toys they'd been playing with.

Clearing Space: The Dramatic and Unexpected

Sometimes a circle is exactly the right path to get your sense of direction (Courtesy of Bean)

 

Friends,

It has been a long hiatus since I posted in earnest. In that time I've reflected on the whys and whats of blogging, organization, change, and even writing itself. But in truth the reason I've been away is because life swept me away for a while - because doing all this work WORKS.

Feng Shui to Help Kids Sleep

[Backdated to May 15, 2013]

Ever since Bean got her new big girl bed 3 months ago, she's been having trouble with sleeping solidly - first it seemed to be more related to her naps, then it progressed into waking up several times in the night. Of course, on top of the bed changes and the feng shui issues I'll detail below, she's been getting her back molars (ouch!) and going through the that-thing-is-scary stage of being 3.

Poor Bean.

As I mentioned previously, when she first got her new mattress, it was placed right in the flow of chi

Too Much Chi for a Knee

[Back dated to May 10, 2013]

The family has been having sleep issues. Sleep is critical in a family of young kids (especially for parents!!!) I've been looking closely at each room to determine how to best handle remedying our sleep challenges (as well as looking at other factors).

Unexpected Gifts

On Monday we received several unexpected gifts - two neighbors independently decided to give us some bags of clothes that their kids had outgrown. I am always appreciative of these gifts since it's really tough to shop with two little ones in tow.

I was struck that both neighbors decided to bring them on the same day, but it took me several days to figure it out.

Clutter: Saving for "Someday"

After working on this clutter cleaning project for a month now, I'm developing some habits about looking critically at the objects I come across, particularly if I find myself opening some cabinet I haven't looked at in a while.

Last Thursday I realized that my habit is not fully formed - while I'm looking and deciding if I need to keep things, it would better serve my purpose to stop and consider the Why of why it is still there, rather than happily marking as another piece of clutter I've removed.

Clutter not understood is clutter that will appear again.

Ok, time to get real with my stuff/Stuff again.

Cleaning the Kitchen (Marriage bagua)

Just did some very overdue clean up in the kitchen tonight, while chatting with my hubby over topics that we both needed to air. Good conversation and positive things for our future. It felt so effective to wipe down all the counters, wash the dishes, scrub the pesky stains from around the burners while we talked - simple stuff, but how clear and shiny everything looked and felt after we were done.

Cleaning the kitchen has been on my mind because our kitchen falls into the feng shui Marriage bagua of our house, and we just celebrated our anniversary last week.

Looking for a Deeper Feng Shui Experience: Astrology and Feng Shui

 

I have been reading books about feng shui for some time, but I didn't grasp how broad and deep the subject is until this past year when I picked up a book by author Master Lam Kam Chuen which put feng shui in the greater context of many other facets of life than just the arrangement of one's home.

As he explains, in China feng shui masters train for decades in the breadth of the system and then specialize in a specific area. Feng shui can be understood to encompass health in many aspects - from diet, exercise, energy balance, meditation, and the home. In the West we tend to separate these into their own fields without training on the interactions between these aspects of life; thus while you may likely have heard of Tai Chi, Chi Kung, Acupuncture, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Chinese Astrology as well as Feng Shui, within the Chinese culture they are interconnected and all spring from the same worldview. It is all about coming into harmony with the universe.

Spring Cleaning Week 4: Make Your List of Annoyances, Nagging Items, and Fix-Its

I've been looking into how things change from items that pile because they are "active" or require action and when they start stagnating into clutter. I've also been on the lookout for explanations to why I feel stiff and uncomfortable in some parts of my house since I started my spring cleaning clutter challenge. Among those are my collections of things that relate to fix-its or annoyances, but I also have brain clutter around those same things that may not have solutions yet.

Chi Moves, We Breathe

Today was a good day. YAY!! I'm so glad to be able to say it, particularly the way things have been going.

Big Week for the Family - the Kids Move Rooms

The time has come for our infant to get his own room, so my older child has to vacate the nursery... The big selling point for her is her Big Girl Bed, though the move has brought more fears of the dark to the fore again. I have "mom emotions" over the change since she'll be farther from our room, but there is added nervous energy in me because... my stuff suddenly has no home!

Clutter's Sticky Energy (and related Emotional Tension)

Sorry folks. I had to warn you from the get-go on this one. But working very consciously on the state of my house is really shaking things up for me, and since this is an experiment in what clutter and decluttering does to us and means to us, I feel I have to lay some of this out there too.

Spring Cleaning Week 3: Using To-Do Lists to Create Order

In a previous post I talked about the importance of starting your clutter cleaning by dealing with "active" items and seeing results. I admit that I was so excited to get started with my spring cleaning, I didn't stop to consider how much time would be needed and never made it to my To-Do List task! Setting time estimates aside, let's look at making to-do lists.

Clutter, Love, and Giving Gifts

The kids and I went to the zoo today, and my daughter glommed on to an umbrella on a souvenir stand as we were leaving. She liked the frog one, and with some minor negotiating, she proudly headed home with her first umbrella, which she was so excited to show to her daddy when he arrived home from work.

Let me just say that my husband's face was not as excited as hers. And I could see the subtext... "Yet another toy for her? Don't we have enough stuff?"

It was a good moment to cause me to reflect on how things arrive in our house.

Strong Emotions and Mood Swings: Cleaning/Decluttering is a Cleanse

Have you ever done a cleanse? It's a rollercoaster ride which you exit feeling like a different person. The first time I tried a cleanse I actually quit halfway through because no one mentioned that I'd actually feel terrible for the first part as my body worked all yucky stuff out. I figured my body would just do its thing and didn't realize that the chemical reaction of my body cleaning stuff up would wreak havoc with my emotions.

Well, proof that sometimes you have learn a lesson over and over again... This cleaning project is running me through the emotional wringer.

Spring Cleaning Week 1 (Part 1): Deal With Your Most Active Items First

So start with a small win, right? Something to build confidence? This week, I'm going through 2 big bins of stuff and working on keeping a functioning to-do list.

Let's talk bins.

My Commitment to Cleaning House (Inside and Out)

Welcome to Spring Cleaning - where I will undertake "cleaning house" (inside and out) over the course of 52 weeks (spring to spring).

• Clutter: I'll be taking a hard look at the clutter in my home, why I collect it, and what I should do with it.
• Live for my life today, not yesterday or tomorrow: I intend to let go of what I don't need and to make sure what stays has a consciously considered, honored place.
• Be open: In the course of this journey emotions will arise and (I hope) positive changes will appear - and I'll be honest about that too.

 

What, you think I'm about 4 months too late for a New Year's Resolution? Well, spring brings up new things out of the ground as well as each of us, and the universe is calling me to start taking my "stuff" seriously.