Clutter-Clearing For Health

With 2011 in full swing we find ourselves half-past our New Year’s resolutions. Many of us want to lose weight or have been advised to do so by our doctors and right about now are wondering how a fist full of fries can matter in the long run! Really. Since most of us haven’t mastered the art of living in the moment, we tend to rush past the “now” in favor of those long runs. Yet those here and now moments often resemble denial! In this moment the fries taste great. In this moment we can’t see the harm to our body that it may cause and we promise to do better the next time… whenever that is.  

So why am I surprised that weight loss seems to be the new spiritual practice du jour? Hay House Radio is running a free series called “What have you got to lose?” featuring Marianne Williamson and other “New Age” gurus talking about weight loss. Before that, Geneen Roth was on Oprah promoting her newest book “Women, Food and God” and Denise Linn (my personal favorite) is running a four week, on-line course, “Unlock the Secrets of Your Body” based on her book, combining her 28-week Soul Coaching® program with a body and health focus. Spiritual weight loss is the “in” thing apparently since we’re all tired of dieting.

But if we move beyond hype and the promise of these programs (one lecture and you’ll be on your way!) and consider what we need to do to shift our health, then we are likely to find ourselves looking straight in the eye of our core beliefs. We cannot change what we are not aware of, so facing our attitudes and beliefs is a powerful exercise. In Soul Coaching, we face the music of our mental attitudes in the first week of the four-week program. What makes it so effective is the clutter clearing that is done at the same time. I know I wrote about clutter clearing over a year ago, but this time it’s focused on our health.

In her book, “Unlock the Secret Messages of Your Body,” Denise Linn mentions a program she heard about in Scandinavia where volunteers went into the homes of cancer patients and helped them sort through and clear things out before they died. Surprisingly enough, many of those cancer patients’ health improved after clearing out unneeded clutter! There is an important connection between the state of our homes and our health.

Here are your simple instructions if you would like to make more space for yourself mentally, physically, or spiritually:

To help you decide what to keep and what to toss, you either must love it or use it or out it goes. (And by “use it” we mean more than once every ten years!) That’s it. Love it or use it or toss it! This practice in intimately connected with the Feng Shui that Linn is an expert in, but generally, different areas of one’s home or office are related to the different issues we might have in our lives and our bodies. When we physically clear out clutter, papers, toys, clothes we don’t wear, appliances we don’t use and so on, we are clearing out our stuck places and allowing energy back into our homes and our bodies. I’m not just recommending this from my ivory tower, I’m following these principals too.

Here’s a simple example to illustrate what I mean. When I looked at my own aversion to exercise, I uncovered an attitude that has been with me since my school days. Always the last to get picked for the team, I grew up thinking I was bad at sports, uncoordinated and hopeless, and an overall bad athlete. As an adult, I hate gyms and hate exercise. I’d rather read a book. In doing the Soul Coaching for my body, I realized that I grew to hate exercise and was able to connect the dots to my experiences in gym class. I then asked myself, “Is this really true?” When I realized that it’s not true — I was good at dance and not uncoordinated at all — I knew that I had discovered a belief that I adopted but was not my own, that should not dictate my lifestyle. I then wemt into the room with the treadmill, and cleared out all the clutter so I had room to move while affirming that, “I have space in my life for exercise.” It is an elegantly simple and extremely powerful practice. So I invite you to use clutter clearing as a spiritual practice, for your life and for your health. Being healthy is the next “in” thing, afterall.