Inside Closets
Most people wear about 20 percent of their clothes 80 percent of the time. If you doubt me, do this test for a month: each time you wear something and launder it, hang it at one end of your closet. At the end of the month you will find (unless you have deliberately changed your habits to beat this exercise or have a job that requires you to vary your outfits often) that you are wearing these same clothes most of the time.
Actually it’s not just the clothes you wear that follow this 80/20 pattern. It can be applied to everything else you own and to most activities in life. We all get 80 percent of our results from 20 percent of our efforts (this is known in the business world as the Pareto principle, named after an Italian economist who first figured it out). Similarly, we get 80 percent usage from 20 percent of our belongings.
So when it comes to clearing out your wardrobe, first separate your clothes honestly into the 20 percent you love to wear and the 80 percent that are just taking up space. Then it becomes much easier to dump the excess.
When sorting through your 80 percent pile, it is wise to get clear on your criteria for whether something stays or goes. First check out the colors. A great investment is to have a professional color consultation and discover which colors uplift and enhance your energy and which ones do the opposite. You will walk away with a swatch of color samples that are sure to make you look and feel great, which does wonders for your self-esteem. This helps you to sift through and discard at least 50 percent of these clothes because it suddenly becomes abundantly obvious that they never did anything for you in the first place.
Next, try on each item in the remaining pile and see how you feel. If you don’t like the shape, texture, cut, material, or anything else about it, let it go. You owe it to yourself to create a collection of outfits you absolutely love, so that never again do you open a closet bulging with clothes and moan, “But I’ve got nothing to wear!”
Make a decision to never, ever buy anything again that isn’t quite what you want, because now you know it will just end up in the 80 percent pile, and you will have wasted your money. Resolve to buy only clothes that you love and that look great on you, and if this means that you buy three great outfits that cost a little more rather than ten cheaper ones you’ll never enjoy wearing, so be it. And yes, I recommend you do this even if you are short of money. In fact, making a point of always looking good and feeling good is one of the best ways to raise your energy and thereby attract prosperity.
Some people keep things they haven’t worn in over twenty years. They say that if they keep them long enough they will come back into fashion. My advice is: if you haven’t worn it in the last year, and especially if you haven’t worn it in the last two or three years, then fling it, sell it, exchange it, or give it away. In one year you will have cycled through all the seasons, and if you haven’t felt the urge to wear it in all that time, then that particular article of clothing has had its day. If two or three years have gone by without you wearing it, then it is definitely time to let it go.
It may be useful to understand why these clothes will never be appropriate again. In the same way that we decorate the walls of our homes, we choose clothes whose colors, textures, and designs reflect our own energy vibrations. As an example, people go through color phases. There was a time, years ago, when almost my entire wardrobe was purple. I had a few green, blue, and turquoise items, but it was purple I was really big on. Someone came to find me in Bali and knew which house was mine by the sheer quantity of purple laundry hanging out to dry! At that time, I was cultivating purple in my energy, which had to do with reclaiming my own power and developing prosperity. Now I have integrated the color, so I hardly ever wear it.
Most people have some items in their wardrobe that they bought, wore once, and never wore again. What happens is that you’re out shopping one day and your eye catches something—let’s say it’s orange with purple polka dots. You try it on and it looks fantastic (to you), so you buy it. Well, it so happened that on that particular day you were a bit off-balance emotionally, and the colors in your energy field had changed to orange with splotchy purple bits, or something complementary to those colors, so the new clothes looked great. But by the next day that particular emotional set has dissipated, your energy field is back to its usual colors, and the item doesn’t look so great to you anymore (it never did to anyone else). You wait for the cycle to come around again but usually (mercifully) it’s a one-time event with few or no repeats. The trick is: never go shopping when you feel emotionally out-of-sorts. Comfort shopping is one sure way to end up with a wardrobe of clothes you will never wear.
Some people hang on to clothes that are too small for them because they plan to lose weight so they can wear them again. It rarely happens this way. Throw all these clothes away, and go out and buy yourself something that makes you look and feel really good exactly as you are now. And guess what usually happens? You lose weight. And the reason is that you have stopped resisting being fat. You have decided to love yourself exactly as you are instead of waiting until you lose weight. What you resist persists, and when you stop resisting, it stops persisting!
BATHROOMS
Some bathrooms are stacked to the hilt with appliances and beauty and grooming products—on shelves and window sills, on top of the toilet tank, around the bathtub, next to the sink, on the floor, and anywhere else there is space. This makes it much more difficult to clean all the inevitable grungy deposits they leave, and creates a confused, chaotic theme in an area that ideally needs to be calm and peaceful. People with clutter-free bathrooms find that some of their best ideas (and also their best songs!) happen in the bathtub or shower. For best results, install some storage cabinets and keep them organized and clean, inside and out.
GARAGES AND CARPORTS
A clutterholic’s delight! A great place to store parts of cars you no longer own, bits of furniture you no longer use, boxes of stuff you never did like, and everything else you can’t squeeze into the house. The dedicated pack rat will gladly leave his or her expensive car parked outside in all weathers while worthless clutter is kept in the garage safe and dry. I even know families who have moved from a house with a single attached garage to one with a double attached garage, simply because they needed the extra clutter storage space!
Garages can be used to store things, but only items you use and like. A clean, well-organized garage space can be very satisfying.
Cars
The state of most people’s cars is a real giveaway as to their true state of clutterdom. If you have cleared the clutter in your home but are driving around knee-deep in rubble, there’s still work to do.
Your car is like a small world unto itself. Do you cringe and apologize for the state of it whenever you give someone a lift? How many times a week do you think to yourself, “This car really could do with a good clear-out.” Every time you think about it, your energy dips, until eventually it is costing you more energy not to clean it than to just roll up your sleeves and get on with it. You know how good it feels when the car has been freshly tidied and vacuumed. Treat yourself!
PORTABLE CLUTTER
I’m talking here about handbags, wallets, briefcases, trouser pockets, and so on. Now just in case you wonder if I walk my talk or just write books advising other people what to do, here’s a story about something that happened when I was writing the original text of this book. I went to visit some friends, and their two-year-old child decided it was guest-handbag inspection time. Out it all came, piece by piece, while her mother and father looked fondly on. Apparently this little girl ransacked handbags regularly, leaving a trail of embarrassed women in her wake.
I can assure you it is a wonderful feeling to sit back and watch with enjoyment rather than concern. Her parents had been prepared to apologize to me, but instead they awarded me the prize for the tidiest handbag they had ever seen.
Of course
, it’s not always so immaculate, but I really can’t see the point of carrying a bag of litter with me everywhere I go, so regular clear-outs are as fundamental to me as laundering my clothes.
ON AN INTERNATIONAL NOTE
I’ve noticed that clutter zones vary from country to country. In Australia, for example, people usually have garages or storage areas under the house, so this is where they tend to put their clutter. In England, attics and basements are a favorite. In Ireland, they love to fill sheds and outbuildings behind the house. And Americans just stash stuff EVERYWHERE!
Most people collect something. The less imaginative go for thimbles, teaspoons, matchboxes, business cards, coasters, and stamps, while the more eccentric gather deceased pop star memorabilia, antique exhaust pipes, sewing machine attachments, even cats’ whiskers (yes, I’ve actually met people who collect such things).
Another favorite is decorative objects in the form of animals. These have global popularity. Most sought after are cats, dogs, frogs, and ducks, with local variations such as kangaroos and koalas Down Under; elephants, tigers, and dragons for the more Orientally inclined; and so on.
Having a few cute kittens on the mantelpiece is one thing, but these collections get out of control. Soon there are cat decorations in every room, cat pictures on every wall, cats on your dish towels, place mats, teacups, and T-shirts. I was talking about this subject once at one of my workshops in Ireland. After a while, a woman sitting in the front row could no longer contain herself and burst out with the public confession that she had over two thousand frog decorations in her home. “Even my front door is made of a huge carved frog!” she exclaimed, with such pathos that she reduced the audience to hysterical laughter.
So why do people collect things? If they trace it back, some people find that their attraction to what they have chosen to collect began during childhood. For others, it was a gift they received that well-meaning friends and relatives then added to. Whatever the case, when we feel moved to collect a particular type of thing, or even when we “accidentally” end up with such a collection, what we are in fact doing is responding to an intuitive yearning to gather a particular type of essence that is important for our own personal growth. It’s a specific frequency that we need to bring into ourselves at that time, and this is entirely valid. But life is constantly changing and moving, and it’s actually only necessary to collect that essence for as long as it takes to spiritually integrate it into our life. Then we can move our focus to something new.
The Native Americans knew a great deal about animal essences. Each person was known to have an animal totem, which was both a protection and a source of power and wisdom. Members of the tribe would often take names such as “White Eagle,” “Dancing Bear,” and so on, and they would have an affinity to that essence throughout their lives.
But times have changed. In the olden days in England they would call a man “Jack the Smith” or “John the Fisher” after his trade (which became shortened to Jack Smith and John Fisher). The speed at which we live has now increased so much that the modern equivalent would be something like “Richard the Computer Programmer Turned Taxi Driver Turned Organic Farmer Turned Author.” Most people can expect to have several professions in their lifetime, and probably several marriages or primary relationships, too. It is as if we are now living many lifetimes in the space of one.
The reason for this lies in the unseen worlds of energy. We are living in a time when higher levels of human development are open to us than ever before. Therefore, the last thing we want to do is get stuck on collecting frogs when there is a whole world of exciting new possibilities out there just waiting to be tapped.
THE MAN WHO MADE PIGS
One man I knew got into making pigs. It all began when his mother bought a plaster pig in a junk shop, and he liked it so much he made a mold and copied it. Soon he progressed from plaster pigs to painted porcelain pigs. Then someone suggested he put wings on them to make them look more interesting, and thus the flying pig was born. He opened a kitsch market stall in London’s fashionable Covent Garden and sold flying pigs by the thousand. He made them in different sizes, and people bought them in sets to hang on their walls. At Christmas he made special heaps of sleeping pigs.
Looking back, he says he had always felt from the start that there was a purpose, some reason why he felt compelled to make them, but it took sixteen years for him to discover what that was and for his passion for pigs to be played out. He found out that his mother’s father and both his mother’s grandfathers had all been—pork butchers! He estimates that his final total of over thirty-two thousand pigs roughly equaled the number of pigs his ancestors may have slaughtered in their lifetimes. The karmic debt rebalanced, he closed his stall and moved on to a new life as a shiatsu massage therapist!
THE DUCK WOMAN
In the house of one woman for whom I did a feng shui consultation, I counted over a hundred ducks as she showed me around. “What’s with the ducks?” I asked her, only to be met with a blank stare. “What ducks?” she asked. We went around again and when I pointed them all out to her, she was astonished. They were in her wallpaper, embroidered on her cushions, decorating her bathroom, on the front of her nightgown, on her tableware. It was total duckdom, but she was completely unaware there were so many. What was even more revealing was that every duck was a solitary one, and the big issue in her life was that she had never married.
To cut a long story short, she took my advice, dumped her ducks, and found her man!
DON’T BE A “HECTOR THE COLLECTOR”
The art of understanding collections is to find out why you are collecting, learn from it, and then move on. Don’t limit yourself. Make space for something new to come into your life. Don’t be a “Hector the Collector” all your life without ever realizing why.
If it’s decorative objects of the animal kind you find yourself collecting, a good way to discover why you are so attracted to your chosen beast is to research it. Find out all about its characteristics, behavioral peculiarities, special talents, and so on. This will give you insights into the qualities you are unconsciously wanting to draw to yourself.
It may take awhile for you to integrate this information to the point where you feel ready to let go of your collection and move on, and even then, dumping all your ducks may seem too much to handle in one go. It is very important to let this process happen naturally rather than forcing it, so just gradually trim your flock as you feel able.
What is it about paper that is so attractive? It was predicted that the electronic age would reduce the amount of paper produced, but we use more of it now than ever. This, of course, is because attached to every computer is…you guessed it…a printer!
Here’s how to deal with some of the most challenging types of paper clutter.
BOOKS
Holding on to old books is a very common problem, especially for people with inquiring minds. To many, their books are like faithful companions. They are always there to keep you company, to impart knowledge, inspire, entertain, and stimulate in a myriad of different ways.
But the problem with holding on to old books is that it doesn’t allow you to create space for new ideas and ways of thinking to come into your life. Your books symbolically represent your ideas and beliefs, and when you have too many of them filling bookshelves in your home, you become set in your ways and develop fusty energy like the fusty old books you surround yourself with.
Often when I am called in to do a consultation for an educated person who is having difficulty finding a love partner, I find that in the Relationships corner of the house, or the Relationships corner of a much-used room, there is a large bookcase stuffed full of books. They place it there without knowing anything about feng shui because it “feels right” there—because in fact their primary relationship is with their books! These are the type of people who also have a pile of books by the bed for nighttime rea
ding—again, a relationship substitute. By moving the bookcase or at least clearing some space in the bookshelves, they create room for new interests and relationships in their life.
Maybe you have so many books that they have long outgrown your bookshelves and taken up residence in other locations. Are they stacked high on your desk, on the coffee table, next to your favorite armchair, or in the bathroom? (See chapter 20 for the deeper implications of this habit.)
Learn to let your books go when it’s time. Begin with cookbooks you’ve never used (no, don’t open them to check for recipes!). Move on to textbooks and reference books you haven’t touched in years, children’s books you or your children have outgrown, novels you weren’t interested enough to begin or finish, books with theories you don’t agree with. Progress to volumes that are in such inaccessible places you haven’t touched them in decades or are so old they have disintegrated with age. Then there are books that inspired you deeply years ago but whose concepts are now so much a part of you, you no longer need to read them.
Aim to end up with a collection of books that represent you as you are today and the intended “you” of tomorrow. If you’re a person with serious intellectual pursuits, this may amount to a substantial library that a part of your consciousness rests on and engages with. For most people it will just be a bookcase or two. Keep some reference books that you commonly use, allow yourself the luxury of a few other books simply because you love them or love your associations with them, and let the rest go.
Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui (Revised and Updated) Page 6
