The Effects of Clutter in your life & home

Do you own your stuff or does it own you? Everything you own has a call on your attention and energy. Understanding how your clutter can affect you, helps you look at it in a new way and start to make new decisions about whether you want to keep it or not. Clutter can be very subjective, what one person sees as clutter, another can see as a ‘normal’ amount of ‘stuff.’

Clutter in a home represents the past and needs to be addressed before you can implement changes to your house. It represents holding onto your stuff and living your life looking in the revision mirror, which prevents new opportunities from coming in. You may have heard the quote, “a cluttered house reflects a cluttered mind.”

Clutter accumulates where energy is stagnate and likewise, where energy stagnates, clutter accumulates. So the clutter begins as a symptom of what is happening with you in your life and then becomes part of the problem itself as the more you have of it, the more stagnant the energy it attracts to itself. It is, anything that creates an obstacle to the smooth flow of energy around a space or room. This in turn creates stagnancy and confusion in the lives of the occupants. It has the potential to ‘trap’ and stagnate positive life force energy from entering your home and reduces good Feng Shui.

What is Clutter?

• Things you do not use, love or want
• Things which are untidy or disorganised
• Too many things in too small a space
• Anything unfinished
• Broken objects
• Mental and emotional clutter

How Clutter can make you feel

• Makes you feel tired, lethargic and/or powerlessness
• Can be supressing emotions (by covering up or avoiding feelings through clutter accumulation)
• Can depress you (pulls your energy down with feelings of hopelessness)
• Can keep you in the past (bogged down with problems which may have been around for a long time and not let you move forward in life)
• Can congest your body (leaves you physically congested, unmotivated and lacking vitality)
• Creates confusion (is an outward representation of a cluttered mind as when you are surrounded by clutter, its impossible to have clarity about what you are doing in your life, where you want to go and how to even begin getting there!)
• Can dull your enjoyment of life (just as it mutes the sound and atmosphere in the areas it exists, it mutes your ability to live life to the full)
• Can make you feel ashamed and embarrassed (and effect choices you make as a result like having friends over to see ‘the mess’)

Remove Clutter for positive improvements

In order for your life to run smoothly you need to ensure that energy flows easily and freely through (and around) your home. It is when energy gets blocked that events and circumstances in your life get blocked too.

Remove the physical obstacles that exist in your space, which will allow the harmonious flow of energy in your living environment. This will create more harmony in your life and space for wonderful new opportunities to come to you. The process of clearing clutter also has the effect of ‘clearing’ and freeing you internally.

It is important to realise how fundamentally intrinsic the clearing of clutter is to the whole practice of Feng Shui and the effectiveness of a Sacred Space Clearing. Clearing clutter is one of the most powerful, transformative aspects of Feng Shui! As every aspect of your life is anchored energetically in your living space, so clearing your clutter can completely transform your entire existence.

10x Steps to removing Clutter from your life & home

1. Walk through your house and write down which rooms and/or areas have clutter in them
2. Write a number of priority next to each item of clutter on your list and note which ones are the most draining when you look at them daily
3. Now write down next to each item how many times a day you think about clearing away each area of clutter (ie- how many times do you walk past/ see it a day and think ‘I must clear that up one day’).
4. Review your list and evaluate how much time your clutter actually takes of your daily energy and reflect on this. Is that time productive? Does it actually ever improve the situation of clutter? How does it make you feel each time you see that clutter too?
5. Decide that your energy and time is more important to you than the clutter and create an action list to get rid of the clutter.
6. Write a clean list and start at the top with which area would significantly make a difference to you if you cleaned it up once and for all
7. Continue your list with the rest of the items in priority from the most useful areas to clear away to the least.
8. Now consider what amount of time would be fair and reasonable to clear away this list without too much pressure creating more stress- 1 month, 3 months, 6 months? Don’t put an unrealistic timeline on this and also don’t make it so far away that it will not motivate you to focus on it.
9. Now plan to action the first item at the top of your list and work out how much time you’d need to actually sort through this area of clutter and designate a time through the next week that you will do this (and do it!).
10. Notice how each area of space feels once you clear it away and this will help to motivate you to keep on top of your list. Book in the next item to clear through and continue through your list until completed. Keep in mind how good the improved space feels and how this is benefiting you and creating new space for new opportunities in your life.