Ever since last November when a friend was looking for someone to help her organize her papers, I’ve been helping other friends get organized. I clear chaos (usually of the clutter and paper variety). Creating order and systems is a great way of managing anxiety. I’ve been using it as a strategy to manage my own anxiety for years but am discovering I can help other people with their anxiety as well.

Sometimes it’s hard to get any distance from our own stuff, whether that stuff be tangible objects or our thoughts or emotions. Tonight, I finished reading Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui. I particularly appreciated the final section of the book where she examines clutter most people wouldn’t think of: mental, emotional, and spiritual clutter as well as physical clutter in your body.

The physical clutter section is far out of my league: colonics, herbal cleanses, fasting, and the like. The other clutter clearing she was talking about are areas I’ve particularly been working on since my divorce. Throughout the process of healing from both my marriage and the end of my marriage, I’ve been committed to real time grief. There have been too many times in my life when I’ve soldiered on through a relationships’ ending, a death, huge life changes or trauma. They don’t go away. Those losses, that emotional and mental clutter just keep appearing until you clear them out. Clearing the clutter from my marriage has revealed all sorts of other messes that need cleaning.

Here are the areas that Karen Kingston outlines in the final part of her book.

Mental Clutter

• Worrying
• Criticizing and Judging
• Gossip
• Moaning and Complaining
• Mental Chatter
• Loose Ends
• Unresolved Communications/Relationships
• Unanswered/Intended Correspondence
• Time Commitments/Activities You Don’t Really Want
• Mind Clutter Interfering with Sleep
• Living Outside the Present Moment

Emotional Clutter

• Upsets –Let out the feelings
• Grievances Against Others
• Unwanted Friends/Relationships–Those people who just don’t fit your life anymore
• Emotional Armor

Karen Kingston concluded the book with the idea that if you clear your life of all of its clutter (that in your home, office, body, emotion, and mind), you free yourself to be and live the life you were meant to, to fulfill your life’s purpose and live in the present moment.

As I was pulling the dead and browning leaves off one of my Sandankwa Viburnum bushes today, I found myself wishing that cleaning our own hurts was so easy. If we could just prune away the bad memories, pinch off the emotional scars, and redistribute the energy going to all the broken places so that it would increase our vitality. While clearing any kind of clutter isn’t so easy as shaping a plant to grow in a more beautiful and healthy way, it does serve the same purpose. I’d definitely recommend reading Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui. Even more highly, I hope that you can clear your own clutter, in whatever form it takes.

Photo by UnosukeKawazu