Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui (Revised and Updated)

by Karen Kingston

  DUPLICATE CLUTTER

  I once did a consultation for a clutterholic spinster whose even-more-clutterholic parents had died and left her everything they had in their home. So she had two sets of kitchen equipment, two sets of bathroom equipment, two sets of living room furniture—two of everything, all crammed into her house. In fact, she had three of four of some things. And there just wasn’t room. However, she couldn’t bring herself to throw anything away because most of the items still had years of use in them. Her home became so energetically clogged that it was literally difficult to breathe in there, and her whole life ground to a standstill while she continued the arduous task of sorting through all the crates of inherited household items and personal belongings.

  Check through your belongings and count how many of each type of thing you own. If you have lots of space, it’s fine to keep some extras, but if not, it’s time to do some thinning out.

  INHERITED CLUTTER

  Many people feel obliged to keep items out of respect to the memory of someone who has passed on. But the thing to remember is that whoever gave it to you is now in Spirit, where there is no attachment to the material world. The person will totally understand your need to let it go if it’s holding you back. Give yourself permission to do so if you want to. If you don’t love it or it isn’t useful, let someone else inherit it from you right now.

  One reader wrote to me to say:

  “Your book has made such a difference in our lives! Thank you! We bought copies for all of our family members and just this morning I got a call from my mother saying how much she appreciated it. She now feels ready to move on after her husband’s death.”

  Then there is the other side of the coin. If you don’t clear your clutter before you die, what burden will you be leaving your family and friends when you go? Unless, of course, you are thinking of leaving the type of inheritance described in the next letter…

  “After having read your book I decided to clear out my grandmother’s house I was now living in. Trust me when I say that the family didn’t like my clearing and getting rid of all of their ‘mommy’s stuff.’ As I was going through old trunks, I found over $5,000 wrapped up in an old handkerchief. This got the family’s interest and they all descended. We cleared out everything and found nearly $8,000 in total that was hidden over the years.”

  For a deeper understanding of what happens after death, read Death, the Great Journey by Samuel Sagan, which is produced in the form of a Knowledge Track and can be ordered at the clairvision.org website (it comes in audiobook format, with an accompanying PDF that can be printed out, if preferred). I rate this as the most important book I’ve read this lifetime, and I highly recommend you get a copy. It’s totally inspiring, and will give you a profoundly insightful perspective, not just on death, but also on life. You will certainly reconsider any attachment you have to clutter after reading it!

  BOXES

  I’ll never forget the surprised look on the face of a furniture removal man as he bent to lift one of my large boxes that he expected to be as heavy as all the other ones he had been lifting all morning—and toppled over on his back. That was in the days when I was still a secret collector of empty boxes!

  Personally, I find boxes immensely satisfying and reassuring. Often I am more delighted by the box a present comes in than the present itself. But this can be a very space-consuming passion, and in terms of the feng shui bagua, it is not exactly energizing to have “empty box” energy concentrated in any part of the home. It brings a hollow feeling to whatever aspect of your life that part of the bagua represents. I now strictly limit the number of empty boxes I have and make sure that most of them are put to good use rather than idling empty about the place.

  When you purchase new equipment, keep the box it came in for the duration of the initial warranty period and then get rid of it. Don’t keep the box forever “just in case” you move and need the box to pack it in. It is perfectly easy to pack equipment in standard moving boxes when the time comes.

  Another useful tip if you do have to keep boxes for any reason is to open them out and store them flat. They take up far less space this way and don’t have that “empty” energy anymore.

  MYSTERY ITEMS

  Everyone has a few of these, especially in the junk drawer. They include unidentifiable spare parts you have kept for years, wall-mounting brackets for pieces of equipment you will never mount or no longer own, strange widgets and rubber thingamajigs that fell off something but you don’t know what, and the list goes on. All prime candidates for clutter clearing.

  While you are clutter clearing, don’t forget the BIG stuff. That horrible old piece of furniture you have always hated, the grand piano clogging the living room, the rolled-up rug you never use, the car rusting in your backyard, the ragged ten-year-old Swiss cheese plant gathering dust in the corner.

  Some of these things are so big and moving them such a challenge that you learn the art of seeing through them as if they no longer exist. You may be able to do this indefinitely but like it or not, the bigger they are, the more they clog your energy flow and the more important it is to get them off the premises. This is especially true if their symbolism is actively impeding your progress in life. A rusting car in the Prosperity area of your garden is sure to affect your finances; a battered-looking plant in your Career area will make you feel tired and lethargic about your work or your life; useless furniture in any area of your bagua will create obstacles in that area of your life; and so on.

  Maybe it’s not that you have accumulated oversize junk so much as that your home is simply too small to accommodate it. This often happens if you move from a large home to a smaller one and try to bring all your furniture with you. Or maybe you have accepted gifts of furniture or collected things for when you move to a bigger place. In these cases you need to make a realistic assessment and a practical trim-down. When your home is so full of stuff that there is virtually no room for people, you will feel stifled in your choices. Clearing some space will allow new opportunities to blossom.

  Search the Internet and you’ll probably find someone who’ll be delighted to come and take away your outsize junk, and possibly even pay you for the privilege. Or join the Freecycle Network at www.freecycle.org, the largest recycling and reuse website in the world. It’s a grassroots nonprofit organization that invites you to “give or receive what you have and don’t need, or what you need and don’t have.” Its motto is “changing the world, one gift at a time”—big stuff, small stuff, any stuff. Freecycle has millions of members in branches all over the world.

  If the Internet doesn’t help you shift all your oversize junk, you may have to pay someone to take it away, or get your friends and family to help you dismantle it and take it off for recycling or to your local dump. After it’s gone, you’ll be delighted at the difference and wonder how you ever lived with it for all those years!

  You can take a lot of liberties with your family, friends, and colleagues, but just lay a finger on their clutter and you will soon see some sparks fly!

  One of the questions I am most frequently asked is what to do about other people’s clutter—especially the clutter of people you live with.

  CLUTTER ISSUES BETWEEN PARTNERS

  Merely discussing your partner’s clutter with them can quickly bring to the surface issues that have long been buried in a relationship. Nagging, arguing, threatening, and issuing ultimatums only makes clutterholics more entrenched, and NEVER, EVER, EVER clear their clutter for them unless they specifically ask you to do so. People have deep emotional attachments to their junk and can get very upset or even go berserk if it is tampered with.

  Understand that you can never change anyone else. The only person you can ever change is yourself. In all the years I have been teaching this material, there are only two remedies I have consistently found to be effective in dealing with other people’s clutter: ed
ucation and leading by example.

  Education

  People really need to understand the downside of clutter if they are to have any incentive to do something about it. This is why they often reappear at one of my workshops several months later with a partner in tow, specifically for that person to hear what I have to say. Part of my reason for writing this book is to reach more of these partners and avoid the need to drag them along to hear me speak.

  Leading by Example

  I have heard from a significant number of people that as soon as they start clearing their own clutter, members of their family and close friends, without any prompting, suddenly take it into their heads to do the same. In many instances there isn’t even any verbal communication between them. Somehow the message goes down the wire to the people they are on the closest frequency to, even if they live at a distance.

  One memorable story was told to me by a woman who had read my book and enthusiastically began clutter clearing her home. The process took her the better part of two weeks. During that time her grandfather, whom she hadn’t been in contact with for a while and who lived over two hundred miles away, stunned his entire family by unexpectedly clearing out forty years of junk from his garden shed.

  Another woman took a weekend workshop with me in London. While she was there getting this information about clearing clutter, her husband spontaneously decided to have a huge clear-out and spent the whole day carting six carloads of clutter to the dump!

  This has actually become a common occurrence at my “Clear Your Clutter” workshops—there are always some participants who report that, while they were sitting in class, someone at home or someone they know very well suddenly got inspired to clear some clutter.

  A woman I trained as a space clearing practitioner once gave me a wonderful insight into clutter issues between partners. She naturally lived a very tidy and clutter-free life, and her husband’s ever-messy desk really started to bug her. She knew that because the desk was in her life it must somehow be reflecting a part of herself, but try as she might, she couldn’t figure out how that could be. Then one day she suddenly got it. She realized that although her husband was messy on the outside, he was very ordered and organized on the inside; she, on the other hand, was ordered on the outside but not as organized on the inside. And then what happened? Soon after she had this realization, her husband spontaneously decided it was time to tidy up his desk and keep it that way!

  CHILDREN’S CLUTTER

  Where does it all come from? Children’s clutter seems to breed and take over space at an alarming rate if it is not checked and controlled.

  One of the most important things to instill in a child is confidence. When children feel loved, secure, and happy, they don’t have such a reliance on “things.” Empower them by instilling clutter-consciousness at an early age so they don’t become the clutterholics of the future.

  Start by teaching your children to pick up after themselves. When they get a new toy, decide together where its storage place will be so they know exactly where to put it away when they’re done playing.

  Periodically get them to make decisions about toys they have outgrown—which to keep and which to give away. Let them make the final decision, though. Something that may look to you as if it’s died and gone to heaven may still have huge importance and years of usefulness for your child.

  Childhood hoarding can stem from a number of factors. If your offspring seem untamable, realize that all children act out the subconscious minds of their parents, so if you find yourself repeatedly nagging them, you will get better results if you work on your own clutter issues first. In other cases, hoarding is a coping mechanism for some kind of trauma a child has experienced, and a cry for help that needs to be heard.

  Here’s an inspiring letter I published in the Readers’ Letters section at spaceclearing.com from someone who describes herself as a clutter-hoarding pack-rat princess:

  “I’m nine years old and I used to be a total pack rat! I used to fit in three-fourths of the clutter-hogging reasons—the ‘just in case’ items, identity, territorialism and ‘scroogeness.’ I used to keep every letter, receipt, movie stub and clothes that didn’t fit me. I was mad when my old clothes got passed down and sad when I threw stuff away. I’d just like to thank you for writing your book so that I and many others could be free!”

  TEENAGERS AND CLUTTER

  With all that hormonal stuff rocketing around in their bodies, it’s understandable that keeping their rooms tidy or clutter-free isn’t exactly high on the list of adolescent priorities. Unless they got in the habit of living clutter-free when they were younger, they probably feel they have quite enough to cope with, thank you very much. Teenage clutter and chaos is usually their inner turmoil showing up on the outside.

  I once appeared on a phone-in for a music show on MTV, answering questions from young people about how to use feng shui in their lives. The three main topics they wanted help with turned out to be passing exams, making friends, and getting their parents off their case. Most teenagers feel the need for emotional and physical privacy to a greater or lesser degree, and parents need to respect this, just as teenagers also need to respect their parents’ space. However, it is reasonable to ask teenagers to agree at least to confine their clutter and chaos to specific rooms and then straighten them up regularly.

  CLUTTER BELONGING TO FRIENDS, NEIGHBORS, AND RELATIVES

  Sometimes people don’t have much clutter of their own but they agree to keep things for other people. “Please look after this ugly sofa for me while I visit New Zealand.” Two years later you are still waiting for your friend to come back and the sofa has started to grow roots!

  Think carefully before you agree to clutter your own space with someone else’s stuff, and if you do decide to do it, at least set a time limit: “Okay, I’ll look after your ugly sofa, but if you’re not back for it within X months, it’s firewood/will be used to stuff a thousand cushions for charity/or whatever.” Make a clear agreement about what will happen to the sofa and when, and that way your friendship won’t deteriorate if things don’t go according to plan.

  An Australian friend once told me how she stored her belongings for years while living abroad, paid $700 to move them during that time, and eventually made $60 from selling the whole lot. Realizing that most of the things people ask you to look after aren’t worth the boxes they’re stored in makes it a whole lot easier to feel okay about turning down their pleas for dumping space.

  One of the greatest incentives for getting rid of clutter is understanding that keeping the stuff is doing you no good at all.

  There are two ways that the symbology of the things in your home can affect you. The first stems from negative associations you have with something, and the second has to do with the frequency emitted by the object itself.

  NEGATIVE ASSOCIATIONS

  Personal Associations

  If you have things in your home that have unfortunate personal associations, it doesn’t matter if they still have years of serviceable life in them—they are cluttering your space and also your psyche.

  Many years ago, I had a boyfriend who would kick things when he got moody, and one day my portable sound system got the boot. The relationship didn’t last long, but I kept the sound system. Every time I used it, I saw the damaged bit on top and remembered the incident that had caused it, but I kept it because it was still perfectly good otherwise. This went on for about a year until one day I looked at it, remembered the incident, and decided I didn’t want to be reminded of it ever again. I realized that it had become symbolically associated in my mind with being disappointed by men.

  I went straight out, bought a new sound system, and gave the old one to a girlfriend who needed one. She was very happy. She had no idea why there was a bit of plastic missing off the top and didn’t care because a slightly imperfect-looking sound system
was a whole lot better than no sound system at all. For me, however, the negative association I had with it caused my energy to sink every time I saw it, and it felt wonderful to be rid of it. I started attracting a much better quality of men into my life, too!

  Outdated Associations

  Sometimes personal associations are not negative, just outdated. For example, when I am called in to do a consultation for someone who wants to create a new relationship, I go around the home and often discover many things that belonged to, were gifts from, or still remind the person of a previous partner they haven’t quite let go of. Whether they are conscious of the association or not, their energy is constantly being tugged back to the past, and it makes it very difficult to create anything new.

  If, say, 50 percent of your furniture and belongings are associated with a time in your life you want to move on from, then 50 percent of your energy is tied to the past rather than available in the present. Try as you might, progress will be slow. Similarly, if your home is full of furniture, ornaments, or other items that constantly remind you of relatives or friends you’ve had difficult or uneasy relationships with, these associations will have an equally draining effect on you.

  This also explains why you owe it to yourself to start any important new relationship in a place where neither of you has lived before. The odds are stacked against you if either of you has old associations with your home.