A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING AND EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE
I remember reading once about a very wealthy Arabian family who regularly traveled between four different cities in their country. The husband traveled to conduct his business, and his entire family accompanied him. Finding it very disorienting to be so much on the move, he used his wealth to build an identical mansion in each of the four locations, and had each home decorated and furnished exactly the same. Not only that, but when any member of the family went shopping for clothes, he or she purchased four of each item, one of which was sent to each of the different homes, to be hung in exactly the same place in each of the four identical closets. So no matter where they were, whenever anyone went to open their closet, it was the same.
As a frequent commuter between several destinations myself, I was fascinated by this description. An ordered home means an ordered mind. Whatever your personal situation, it is important to get organized so that the mundane level of your life works well and supports you.
GET ORGANIZED
One of the most amusing sights in the world is a myopic person hunting for lost glasses. After you have cleared your clutter from tabletops they will, of course, be much easier to spot, but make it really easy on yourself by allocating them a resting place all their own. Do the same with your keys, wallet, slippers, and any other items you find yourself continually searching for.
Here are some other organizing tips to simplify your life:
⬦ Store similar things together.
⬦ Keep things near where you are going to use them (for example, store your vases near where you arrange flowers).
⬦ Put the things you use most often in places where they are easy to get.
⬦ Make it easy for things to be put where they belong and then they won’t get disorganized or cluttered.
⬦ Label boxes so you know what is in them.
⬦ Arrange your clothes according to color (they look much more appealing this way, too).
BUY A FILING CABINET AND USE IT
We live in the information age. Unless you have converted to an entirely electronic filing system, you need a place for keeping paper records, whether relating to home or business. The best way to deal with this is to purchase a filing cabinet. Some modern cabinets are very nice looking. You can store bits of paper that belong together in files and find them far more easily than if you keep them stacked in a pile. Create different categories and give them names that appeal to you. For example, would you rather file a document in your (yawn) Personal Savings Account folder, or would you rather file it in your (woo-hoo!) Go Anywhere Travel Fund?
If you find yourself with a piece of paper you need to keep and you can’t figure out which file to put it in, don’t just leave it in the unsorted pile—create a new category and a new file for it. Files that become suspiciously fat need to be either broken down into separate, smaller files or weeded of outdated documents. Files that stay persistently thin are either redundant or need integrating into larger ones. At least once a year, go through your filing cabinet and throw out anything that is no longer relevant.
STORING THINGS
The purpose of storage space is to hold things that are currently not in use. A good example is Christmas decorations, which are used only once a year. Winter clothes can be stored during summer months and vice versa. Then there are things such as camping equipment that are perhaps used only every other year. Just don’t store too many things indefinitely without ever using them. That’s when the energy starts to stagnate.
Some things you are obliged by law to keep for a certain amount of time, such as tax records and supporting documents. Find out the statutory requirement in your country. If it’s, say, seven years, then file your papers in separate tax years so that as the new tax year dawns, you can easily locate your records from eight years ago and shred them. Most people find this tremendously satisfying.
STOPPING CLUTTER BEFORE IT STARTS
You can save yourself a lot of clutter clearing by adopting these new habits:
⬦ Think twice before you buy. Decide before you purchase anything where you are going to keep it and what you are going to use it for. If your answers to either of these questions are vague, then you are about to purchase clutter. Desist from buying.
⬦ Empty the wastebaskets in your home daily, either at the end of each day or first thing in the morning, whatever suits you best. Make sure you have one in each room that needs one so that when you want to throw something away you can, and they are big enough so they don’t fill up so quickly you hesitate to put anything in them.
⬦ Never put something somewhere “just for now.” This means you are planning to go back to it again later and put it in its proper place. Get into the habit of putting it in its place right away.
⬦ If you know you are prone to accumulating clutter, make a new rule for yourself: When something new comes in, something old goes out. At least your clutter will be changing, even if it’s not yet decreasing.
HIRE A PROFESSIONAL TO HELP YOU
I write my books to teach people how to help themselves, but maybe you have so much clutter that you really do need professional help to get you started and keep you going. In some countries (including the United States) you can hire people called professional organizers to help you tidy and organize your stuff.
The Level 1 clutter clearing practitioners I train are able to help you discover why you started accumulating clutter in the first place. Unless you understand this, you can tidy and organize things all you like, but the clutter will almost certainly build up again.
Level 2 clutter clearing practitioners are also space clearers. Through energy sensing with their hands, they are able to read the imprints that are embedded in your clutter and work with you at an even deeper level. They can also conduct a space clearing ceremony to clear the old imprints and the stagnant energy that has collected around the clutter. After that, it is so obvious what clutter needs clearing and so much easier to do it that it feels like the stuff could just walk out of the door by itself. They will teach you the skills and help you develop a plan to make sure it does.
You can find an International Directory of Practitioners who have trained with me at www.karenkingston.com.
One of the greatest obstacles to clutter clearing is feeling too attached to items to let them go. But it’s all a matter of standpoint, as this chapter will show.
WHY CHANGING STANDPOINT IS SO IMPORTANT
A journalist once interviewed me and we got talking about all the TV shows this book has spawned around the world. A typical format is to find someone with an incredibly cluttered home, drag all their possessions out onto their front lawn, and then film them going into emotional meltdown as all their stuff is carted away, never to be seen again.
What they don’t show is what happens to these people after that. They don’t show how traumatized most of them are by this, or how most of them start hoarding again to fill the emotional void left by the anguish of having all their stuff so quickly and radically stripped away.
I really don’t believe this is the best way to help a hoarder, and when I published the first edition of this book in 1998, it was never my intention that this kind of televised spectacle would result.
The way to help people with clutter issues is to help them change their standpoint. They keep stuff because they believe they need it. Show them how to change their standpoint and their belief system about it can change, too.
A FRESH PERSPECTIVE
The things we keep around us reflect who we are.
One of the quickest ways to get a fresh perspective on your life is to take a good long look at everything in your home as if you didn’t know the person who lives there. Better still, take photos of each room and look at the photos instead, which will give you more objectivity.
What would you conclude about the person who lives in this home? Is he or she the kind of person you want to know? The kind of person you want to be like?
It then becomes much more obvious what you want to keep and what needs to go.
LOOKING THROUGH NEW EYES
Start in any room and look at everything in it with new eyes. Which objects no longer fit with your life or with the direction you want it to take?
Perhaps you have some pieces of furniture you no longer use or like. Maybe you have some decorative objects that fit perfectly with your life when you first brought them home, but you’ve moved on, and they have not. What about your clothes? Weed out the ones you realize you no longer like or wear. Look at your bookshelves. Take out the books that are no longer interesting to you. Go through everything you own, discarding the items that no longer fit.
ARRIVING HOME AFTER A TRIP
It’s even easier to get this fresh perspective in the first few days after you arrive home from a trip, especially if you’ve been away for at least a couple of weeks, and even more so if you’ve been abroad and spent time in a culture that is different from your own. You see your home in a fresh light. Things that have become clutter are so much more apparent than before, when you looked at them every day but didn’t really “see” them.
It’s a good idea to give yourself at least twenty-four hours at home after such a trip, rather than rushing back to work, or whatever your routine is, the next day. Give yourself the time to review your life and make the changes you want to make. This is when clutter clearing truly becomes a treat.
Arriving home from a trip is also a good time to sort through any photos you took while you were away. Look through them all, then keep the best and delete the rest right then and there before they even become clutter.
If you share your home with others who went away with you, they are likely to be able to see things more objectively, too, so invite them to be involved in the process. If they stayed at home while you went away, they may not see things the way you do, so in this case proceed gently, focusing on your own stuff and not even mentioning any of theirs. When you clear your own clutter simply because you want to, it has a delightful way of rubbing off on people close to you if you just get on with it and say nothing at all.
The important thing is to take the opportunity yourself before the fresh perspective of your trip wears off and you settle back into your old routines.
MOVING
Another good time to get a fresh perspective is when you move. Faced with the daunting task of packing everything to take it to a new location, it becomes easier to see what fits with your new life and what doesn’t, what’s worth taking with you and what isn’t. You look at each item from a very different standpoint.
Some people, it’s true, drag everything from one home to the next without sorting through or discarding anything. I remember one woman whose husband shipped all his clutter from the UK to their new home in Canada in a huge container, and there it sat in their garden, unpacked and unused for twenty years, until the time came to move back to the UK. When he announced he would be shipping the entire container back with them, she realized their relationship was over. From her standpoint, the twenty-year sojourn in Canada had more than proved the point that nothing in the container was of any use. From his standpoint, it was with him to stay, whatever the cost.
Even if you’re not planning to move at the moment, you can make a tremendous shift in your relationship to your clutter by imagining that you are. Let go of everything you wouldn’t consider worth paying a company to pack and transport for you.
IF YOUR HOME WERE ON FIRE
If your home were on fire and you had five minutes to rescue whatever you could, what would you take?
I sometimes pose this question toward the end of a clutter-clearing consultation after listening for hours to all the reasons why a client can’t possibly get rid of this or that. They’re so loaded with stuff they can hardly move in their home, but when asked what they’d rescue if the place were on fire, do you know what they say? Mostly that they’d save—the cat!
If they have a spouse or children, they sometimes (not always) say they’d save them first (maybe they figure humans can find their own way out of an inferno). Travel-oriented people often say they’d grab their passport. Some people have one or two prized possessions that immediately spring to mind. Other people want to rescue their photos. And after that, most really have to think about what else is worth saving. I call this the “moment of truth”—when they realize they don’t really care that much about all their stuff after all. It all fades into insignificance. What’s important is to get out of the fire alive.
People’s relationship with their possessions really can be likened to a never-ending soap opera, with themselves as the star and all their stuff as the characters. When the scene changes from “normal” to “emergency,” they suddenly see it all from a completely new standpoint, like awakening from sleep.
LETTING GO OF ATTACHMENT
A similar process happens as people approach death in old age. There is a gradual letting go of attachment to things as the realization dawns that you can’t take any of it with you. Even the wealthiest, most powerful of people are subject to this. Death makes no exceptions.
Many people start to give away their things as the time of their death draws near. Some do this even if they have no way of consciously knowing it is imminent. Death creates an energetic opening that can clearly be felt, even if the person doesn’t consciously understand it.
One of the most memorable examples of this was told to me by a friend some years ago. Her grandfather was attacked in his own home by a burglar and died as a result of his injuries, which saddened her greatly. But she drew great comfort from the fact that the previous week he had suddenly started giving all his most treasured possessions to his dearest friends and relatives. “It was as if he knew what was about to happen,” she marveled.
Letting go of attachment to material things is a very important part of the death process. It’s a time when we can see much more clearly that the world was here before we got here and will still be here after we leave. Material things have a degree of permanency. We are the transient ones. We’re just passing through.
GET THE CLUTTER CLEARING KNACK
One of the main intentions of this book is to introduce you to a new standpoint about clutter. Before reading it you may have truly believed that all the things you were keeping were an asset in your life, but as you’ve turned these pages, you’ve learned about all the ways holding on to things can actually hold you back.
Having clutter tends to cause people to have small lives. There’s no space for big ideas, inspired vision, or making a difference. They become stuck in their own world.
So what do you do if you’ve read everything in this book so far and still find it hard to let go of certain things? I’m a great believer in learning from others who’ve mastered a skill, so here’s my best advice about this.
Find someone you like and admire who is not attached to their stuff. Talk to them. Find out how they think and feel about their possessions. Ask them to describe how they make their decisions about what they keep and what they let go of. Spend time with them as they go about their life.
See their viewpoint. Step into their mind-set. Adopt their strategies. Learn their knack.
Free yourself from the limitations of your own standpoint. You’ll save yourself years of experimenting on your own.
A natural progression of clearing clutter in your home is to clear the clutter inside the temple of your own physical body. People who collect clutter on the outside tend to collect it on the inside, too, but whereas clutter on the outside can hamper your progress in life, clutter on the inside can have more serious health-threatening or even life-threatening consequences.
The human body is a highly sophistica
ted processing machine. It takes stuff in, assimilates what it needs, and churns out the rest through five main eliminatory systems—the colon, kidneys, skin, lungs, and lymphatic system—and also several subsidiary systems such as the eyes, ears, navel, nails, hair, and in women, the vagina. All these channels are designed to efficiently remove the clutter of undesirable toxins from the body.
COLON CLEANSING
At the end of the “Clearing Clutter” chapter of my first book, I included a section entitled “Clear Out Your Colon.” In just two concise paragraphs I outlined the principles of herbal colon cleansing and recommended a UK supplier of the herbal formulas I have used myself for many years with great results. I didn’t contact the supplier to let him know I would be including his details and was amazed to hear a year later that he had been deluged with inquiries ever since from readers of my book. I am therefore including here a much longer and more complete section on this and related topics since there is obviously a lot more interest than I first thought.
Why You Need to Clear Your Colon
Most Western people don’t even know that they need to clear their colon. They believe that the way they feel and the level of health they tolerate is the way things are, but in fact they no longer know what “normal” feels like. Years of eating unnaturally processed, cooked, frozen, canned, irradiated, and preserved food have contributed to this state. Undertakers report that corpses rarely need to be embalmed these days—we unwittingly eat so many preservatives that our bodies take much longer to decompose after death.
Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui (Revised and Updated) Page 12
