Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui (Revised and Updated)

by Karen Kingston

  “My husband died five years ago and I kept delaying clearing out his belongings. Your book finally gave me the courage to pack up all his clothes and take them to a charity shop, and it was as if a fresh breath of air came into my life. I know it’s hard to believe at my age (I’m 71) but I have now enrolled at college to learn about computers.”

  “While sorting through my attic, I came across letters from some dear old friends who had moved abroad, and found tears rolling down my cheeks as I realized how much I missed them and regretted losing touch with them. To cut a long story short, I polished off the attic and caught a plane to go and see them. We had the most wonderful reunion. I am now seriously thinking of moving out there myself.”

  “This clutter clearing thing seems to get into your blood. Not content with clearing out every cupboard in my entire house, I am now up at dawn every morning tidying up the garden. Where will this end?”

  HAVING CLUTTER CAN CAUSE DISHARMONY

  Clutter is a major cause of arguments in families and between housemates, business partners, and coworkers. If you live or work knee-deep in the stuff and those around you do not, their lifestyle will not impede your progress, but yours most certainly can impede theirs. These people attracted you into their life for a reason, and you attracted them into your life for a reason. But the clutter is a low-level reason. Clear up your clutter and then you will be able to get to the higher possibilities of what you can do together, which is much more interesting than arguing about mundane junk!

  HAVING CLUTTER CAN MAKE YOU FEEL ASHAMED

  Perhaps you have reached the stage where your home is so cluttered or such a mess that you are ashamed to invite people over, and you positively panic if anyone turns up unannounced. Which would you prefer: to live in lonely isolation with your junk, or to have a good clear-out, repair your self-esteem, and regenerate your social life with confidence?

  HAVING CLUTTER CAN PUT YOUR LIFE ON HOLD

  One lovely elderly couple I met were living in a beautiful fifteen-room mansion. Their children had all grown up and left home, and they enjoyed a happy, loving marriage. The living areas and bedrooms belonging to each of their children were tidy and well maintained but over a period of time, most of their own bedroom and three of their other rooms had completely vanished under a sea of clutter. One room looked like a junk shop, with ornaments and knickknacks of every description stacked up in piles; another room was heaped waist-high with mounds of clothes; and the third room had more of their own junk and boxes of things inherited from an aunt that “needed sorting.” When questioned, they admitted that they would love to travel and enjoy the last years of their lives together, but nagging away at the back of their minds all the time were these unsorted junk rooms. Whenever the question of taking a trip came up, they decided they couldn’t do it until the junk had been sorted first. In effect, their shame about their clutter had kept them at home for years!

  Don’t let your life slip away. Sit down right now and write a list of all the things you would love to do if only your clutter were sorted, and let this be the inspiration for you to get on with it.

  HAVING CLUTTER CAN DEPRESS YOU

  The stagnant energy of clutter pulls you down and can make you feel depressed. In fact, I have yet to meet a depressed person who doesn’t surround themselves with clutter. Feelings of hopelessness are compounded by clutter and can be relieved to some extent by clearing it, because you create space for something new to come into your life. The reason I think this works is that many types of depression are caused by a higher part of your consciousness stopping you doing what you have been doing because it is time for you to do something else.

  If you are so depressed that you can’t even begin to think about clearing out your clutter, at least get it off the ground (depressed people tend to stack their clutter at a low level), which will lift your energy and your spirits. It would also be a good idea to have your home checked for geopathic stress (harmful earth energies). Clutter often accumulates in geopathically stressed areas, and it may well be a causative factor in your depression. See the chapter about geopathic stress in my book, Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui, for more information about this.

  HAVING CLUTTER CAN CREATE EXCESS BAGGAGE

  If you have a lot of clutter at home, then you will certainly want to take a lot of it with you when you travel. Clutterholics often have to pay excess baggage charges for all the things they drag on vacation with them “just in case” they need them, not to mention all the souvenirs they buy to bring back home.

  They tend to create excess baggage of the emotional kind, too. Do you make mountains out of molehills, create unnecessary dramas, get upset at imagined slights? Learn to lighten up physically, and you’ll discover you can lighten up emotionally, too, and enjoy your life much more.

  HAVING CLUTTER CAN DULL YOUR SENSITIVITY AND ENJOYMENT OF LIFE

  Just as clutter mutes the sounds and dulls the atmosphere in your home, it also mutes your ability to live life to the full. You can become a creature of habit and feel like you are living in a rut, just doing the same thing day after day, year after year. You may even become a boring person to know. Clearing the clutter allows the fresh winds of inspiration to enter your home and your life. Even moving it around your home from time to time will help to refresh the energy.

  A major clear-out is absolutely essential if you truly want to have passion, joy, and happiness in your life. These feelings are the experience of vital energies flowing through your body, which cannot happen if your channels are clogged.

  HAVING CLUTTER CAN CAUSE EXTRA CLEANING

  It takes at least twice as long to clean a place that is cluttered with objects, and not only that, the objects themselves need cleaning. The more clutter you have, the more dust accumulates, the more the energy stagnates, and the less inclined you are to clean at all. It’s a downward spiral.

  Just think of all the fun things you could do in your life if you let go of your clutter and cut your cleaning time in half. And if you pay someone to clean for you, think how much money you can save.

  HAVING CLUTTER CAN MAKE YOU DISORGANIZED

  How often do you lose your keys, your glasses, your wallet? How many times have you searched for something, finally given up, and eventually come across it weeks or months later? Or maybe it is usually easier to go out and buy another one rather than keep looking for the one you know you have—somewhere.

  Being disorganized wastes time, which is frustrating and makes you feel like a failure. Many people stay disorganized as a long-standing protest against parental discipline enforced when they were young, but to continue this all your life only sabotages you.

  It is very empowering to decide to take control of your home and do what you want to do, instead of allowing unresolved issues from your childhood to run your life.

  HAVING CLUTTER CAN BE A HEALTH OR FIRE HAZARD

  It can come to this. When clutter starts to smell bad, attract vermin, become damp or mildewed, or begin to disintegrate in some other way, it becomes unhygienic to keep it—for you and also for your neighbors. Some types of clutter can also be a fire risk.

  If you value your own health and safety, and would prefer to stay on good terms with your neighbors, clear out the clutter before it gets any worse. It certainly won’t get better by itself.

  HAVING CLUTTER CAN CREATE UNDESIRABLE SYMBOLOGY

  What message does your clutter send out symbolically? Feng shui teaches us to be very selective about the pictures, photographs, and decorative items we have around us, which all give out a message. It is amazing to me how often people cling to objects that they say have great sentimental value and yet symbolically represent exactly what they say they no longer want.

  Here are some simple examples. If you are single and looking for a new partner, dump your single items and solitary portraits, and replace them with paired objects and pictu
res of couples. If you are prone to arguments, don’t have too much red in your decor. If you have a tendency to feel depressed, get rid of all the downward-hanging things in your home and replace them with upward-pointing objects that lift your energy.

  After reading chapter 15 in this book about clutter and feng shui symbology, you may want to wipe out half your clutter in one go when you discover it is sending out the wrong frequencies for what you want in your life!

  HAVING CLUTTER CAN COST YOU FINANCIALLY

  What does it actually cost you to keep all your stuff? Sometimes, when all other reasoning has failed, it is the simple math that brings people to their senses about their clutter.

  Let’s do the figures. Go into each room of your home and estimate the percentage of space that is taken up by things you rarely or never use. Be very honest with yourself as you go through this process. If you want the blatant truth, include everything you don’t absolutely love or haven’t used in the last year; for a more gentle approach, extend the time period to two or three years.

  In an average-size home, you may end up with a list that looks something like this:

  1

  Entrance foyer

  5%

  2

  Living room

  10%

  3

  Dining room

  10%

  4

  Kitchen

  30%

  5

  Bedroom 1

  40%

  6

  Bedroom 2

  25%

  7

  Junk room

  100%

  8

  Bathroom

  15%

  9

  Basement

  90%

  10

  Attic

  100%

  11

  Garden shed

  60%

  12

  Garage

  80%

  TOTAL CLUTTER

  = 565%

  Now divide the total by the number of areas.

  565% ÷ 12 areas = average 47% junk per room!

  So in this example, the cost of storing clutter works out to a staggering 47 percent of the cost of the rent or mortgage for the home. I seriously suggest you do your own calculations right now.

  Perhaps you have even reached the stage where your stuff has overflowed from your home and you are paying premium rent for commercial storage space. Owners of self-storage units report booming business in recent years. In urban areas it is often necessary to book several months ahead if you want to rent secure storage space. Is this really a worthwhile use of your money? Isn’t there something else you would much rather spend it on?

  Your clutter habit costs you in other ways as well. There is the cost of your time to go shopping for more stuff you don’t really need and then finding a place to put it when you get home. There is often the expense of buying something to store it in. We’re talking here about things like storage boxes, shelving, cabinets, drawers, filing cabinets, trunks, or in more extreme cases, building a back extension to your home, erecting a garden shed, installing flooring in the attic, or constructing a second garage. Then there is the cost of cleaning it, maintaining it at the right temperature and humidity, protecting it from weather and pest damage, and transporting it when you move. You may also decide to insure your possessions and install a security system to guard them. Finally, consider the time, expense, and emotional energy it costs to get rid of your clutter when you eventually realize it’s not helping you at all. Is it really worth it?

  All these expenses frequently total more than the actual items themselves. Think about it. You are expending all that time, money, and effort to buy things you will never use and then paying to keep them indefinitely, for no reason!

  HAVING CLUTTER CAN DISTRACT YOU FROM IMPORTANT THINGS

  Do you own your stuff or does it own you? Everything you own has a call on your attention, and the more clutter you have, the more your energy is tied up in mundane matters. As the last section showed, it all needs taking care of in some way. When you clear out your clutter, you leave yourself free to put the important things in your life in perspective rather than being constantly embroiled in the details of day-to-day maintenance.

  Understanding how your clutter can affect you helps you to look at it in a new way and start to make new decisions about whether you want to keep it or not. A vital part of that decision-making process also involves understanding why you accumulated the clutter in the first place, which is what the next chapter is about.

  The answer to this question is complex, and as you read through the following pages you will find that different sections resonate with you to a greater or lesser degree.

  In all the many consultations I have done to help people clear their clutter, the junk itself is only the physical aspect of the problem. There are always deeper underlying reasons why clutter has accumulated. Excuses such as “I’m too busy/lazy/stressed” are all red herrings. If you make time to acquire clutter (and people easily do that), then you can also make the time to clear it. These defenses are attempts to evade the issue without looking at the psychological reasons for why it has accumulated.

  Before we go any further with this, let me say first that I firmly believe that everyone is always doing the best they know how. So let’s take judgment about clutter—your own and everyone else’s—and dump it right now. You can also unload any guilt you may feel. If you have clutter in your life, then for some reason you have needed to create it, but now that you know better you can start to let it go. The purpose of this chapter is to help you understand why you have needed clutter in the past, which will enable you to release it and cease to accumulate it in the future. These patterns are buried deep in your subconscious mind and without you realizing it, they are running your life. After you become aware of them, they gradually lose their power over you, and soon you will even be able to look back and laugh at your previous clutter-hoarding antics.

  So let’s have a look at some of the reasons why you may have felt the need to keep the stuff you have.

  KEEPING THINGS “JUST IN CASE”

  This is the number one reason that people give for keeping clutter. “I can’t throw it away,” they plead, “because it is sure to come in useful some day.”

  By all means keep reasonable stock of the things you use regularly, but do you really need all those (fill in the blank) items you have been keeping all these years?

  “Who knows?” you reply, remembering all the times you threw something out and then found you needed it after all. So let me explain why this happens and how to change it.

  Keeping things “just in case” indicates a lack of trust in the future. If you worry that you will need something after you have thrown it away, then sure enough, very soon afterward, your subconscious mind will helpfully create a situation where you need that very thing, however obscure it may be. “I knew it would come in useful sometime!” you exclaim, but in fact you could hav
e averted this need by thinking differently. You created the need yourself by believing that you would have it! If you have lots of clutter you are hanging on to because you think like this, you are sending out a frequency of not trusting, and you will always feel vulnerable and insecure about the future.

  Often it is not just your own future you are concerned about providing for. You may also sincerely want to be able to help others. So then you keep absolutely everything “just in case” someone else needs it. Now you are saving things on behalf of people you may not even know yet and situations that will probably never happen. This makes it virtually impossible to throw anything away!

  Some of the most poignant examples of the “this-may-come-in-useful-some-day” type of clutter I have come across are:

  ⬦ Five aquariums kept in an attic for fifteen years by a man who didn’t like fish.

  ⬦ A whole pantry stacked full to the ceiling with empty bottles, margarine cartons, egg boxes, and the like, none of which had ever been useful in over twenty years.

  ⬦ A large playroom full of children’s toys kept for the future offspring of the couple’s gay son, “just in case” he ever changed his mind and decided to marry a woman and have babies.