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Clear your clutter and make room for God
Have you ever entered a room and sensed a difference? Perhaps you walked into a tense situation or an argument. You may have described it as “being able to cut the air with a knife”. No one had to say anything: you just knew it was a tense situation.
Or perhaps you experienced a feeling of peace. Many people experience a sense of peace as they enter the Church----sometimes profoundly.
We are surrounded by energy----whether we notice it or not----and this energy can affect us in positive or negative ways.
Feng Shui, described as the art of placement, is all about optimizing the movement of energy for out benefit. Cleaning, space-clearing, rearranging furniture are all steps to achieving a sense of well-being in a room, a house, an office, and even a country. But the very first step to achieving a sense of balance and harmony is to “clear the clutter”!
A few years back I saw a book that I had to buy. “Clutter Control” Useful tips for getting rid of The Mess”. Its intended purpose was to give it to someone I knew as a joke. I decided to read it first knowing I could likewise benefit from it. In the very first chapter “How to Eliminate Clutter” you first had to understand why you had clutter in your life.
After the publication of Karen Kingston’s first book, Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui, the author received such an overwhelming response to her chapter on the importance of clearing clutter, that she devoted an entire second book to the topic: Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui. In this book, Kingston identifies various types of clutter, offers reasons we keep it, details its effects on our lives, and motivated the reader to want to clear it.
So, just what is clutter? In short, clutter is stuck energy. Clutter prevents the peaceful flow of energy. It’s easy to identify the obvious external clutter around us: cigarette butts and papers that liter our roadways, piles of junk mail that remains unsorted, garages and attics that become catchalls for items not ready to be discarded. But clutter isn’t just trash or messiness. Besides things that are untidy or disorganized, external clutter can also be:
1. Things you do not use. For instance: do you bypass certain clothing in your closet most of the time? Have you heard of the 80/20 rule? It is said that many people wear 20% of their clothing 80% of the time. Is this true of you?
2. Things you do not like. Canvass each room in your home. Are you holding on to any thing you really don’t like? If so, why? How would it feel to dispose of it?
3. Anything unfinished----those “loose ends” that never seem to get tied up: for instance, things that need repairing, buttons that need sewing on, phone calls and letters that need answering, relationships you need to move on from.
4. Sentimental stuff. Kingston’s advice here is to keep the best and fling the rest! Keep the ones you really love, which have wonderful, fond associations. Let go of any that you are keeping out of any sense of guilt or obligation, have any ambivalent feelings about, or just have too many of.
Recognizing clutter is a first step to being able to clear it out. Understanding why we keep it can also help us on our road to being clutter-free.
Kingston offers many reasons which include:
· Just in case we might need it later. Some things are prudent to save; others, just a lack of trust that Divine Providence will provide for us in the future. We need wisdom to know the difference!
· Scroogeness. This describes the inability to let go until “we’ve gotten our money’s worth out of it. My own example is the huge collection of miss-matched cotton socks that I have kept, even though the match had a hole in the toe and has been thrown away. I’ve just recently started using these as dusting cloths, and toss them in the trash never to be seen again.
· To suppress emotions. This would be similar to smoking, shopping, drinking or eating too much.
What happens when we start to clear our clutter?
· We feel more energized and empowered.
· We want to clear more clutter.
· We make room for the new to enter into our lives.
The process of clearing clutter is also about letting go. Not just letting go of our belongings, but learning to let go of the fear that keeps us holding on to them after it is time to move them on their way.
The theme of the June 2001 issue of O Magazine was “How to Let Go: The Sweetness of Surrender”. The calendar open-out page gives this food for thought: What pet attachments are you ready to release? Imagine how much lighter you’d feel if you could. A few suggestions that could be on a list of things that you could see the last of: any magazine dated before 2000, that enormous juicer never used because you are allergic to citrus, all the books collected as a member of book of the month club and never read (more than likely you never will), and what about the unnecessary tools in that tool box, or finding excuses not to meditate, exercise, and so on.
All of this speaks to me of the importance of de-cluttering the mind and heart, and making room for God.
What is the clutter that gets in the way of our relationship with God?
Some of our clutter we keep “just in case” we may need it in the future. Getting rid of some types of clutter can be an exercise in trust. Can I trust my future to God?
Some of our clutter is distracting. We may unconsciously be surrounding ourselves with things that block us from forming relationships with both people and God. We might ask ourselves:
What is cluttering my mind right now? Worries? Unforgiveness? Unfinished business?
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
I need to really work to de-clutter my life so I can have a more full-filling relationship with God. I know the effort will be well worth it.
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