Cleaning House

Clean House, Clean Spirit!

You know that feeling you get when you've taken the garbage out, done all your laundry, cleaned the entire house including the bathroom? And you're standing barefoot in your bedroom or living room, breathing in deeply the smell of clean. Looking around you, everything is in its lawful spot.

To add to your euphoria, you’ve combined all of the above with a serious purge of every clothes closet and kitchen cabinet: ridding them of everything hoary, timeworn and long forgotten. You’ve gotten rid of everything expired which you don't and can't and won't ever use again. You know the feeling?

Now imagine, doing the same thing with your life. Imagine how peaceful and unencumbered you would feel. How clean and orderly your mind and soul would be. Picture, what a sigh of relief your spirit would breathe, un-smothered by inessential baggage; how much lighter and livelier your body would feel. Imagine how much sunnier the Now would look, how much more golden and promising the future would seem. Imagine how much more clearly you could think. Imagine how much potential and talent you could unlock. Imagine how much more energy you would possess to operate day to day activities.

Baggage comprises: incorrect predictions about our future, self-destructive behavior, old hurts, out of use relationships, dog-tired archaic stories we retell in our minds over and over again. These stories, mostly falsehoods if we’re honest, block us from seeing reality as it is; block us from enjoying life to its fullest extent. Carrying around baggage means we are always viewing people and situations judgmentally, from a defective perspective. When engaged in baggage carrying, no thing we see or engage with, is in its purest form. No activity is being enjoyed and appreciated for what it genuinely is. We attach a narrative or a judgment based on what happened yesterday, or last week, or ten years ago.

Let in the Light!

The first thing we do when we decide to clean house is open our blinds. By the same token, when we clean up our inside, we should push aside our curtain of fibs, alibis and rationalizations. We should clean out our toxic, destructive secrets and distortions that cause us emotional baggage. Intriguingly, our spiritual garbage weakens our immune system and causes unnecessary illness.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman has written, "The main thing that is known about secrets is that keeping them is unhealthy for the brain." When we begin to weave webs of deception, we need to expend enormous mental energy to prevent them from tangling. There's less brain power left over for solving real problems, and we start to falter in other areas of our lives.

Create Room For More!

Cleaning house is about creating room. Sometimes we look around the house and can’t believe how much junk we’ve accumulated. You notice this more so when you’re moving. Self exploration helps us see how much spiritual debris is weighing down our spirit.

In the same way cleaning out our closets and cabinets creates room for new purchases, cleaning out our life and mind creates room for new positive events and people in our lives. Keeping custody of our old baggage leaves no room for anything beneficial, favorable or wholesome to happen to us. Our "space" is jam packed with ancient encumbrances and impediments. We lose sight of who we are and who we aspire to be. And we wonder why nothing good ever happens to us.

We need to clean house in order to generate room:

Room for love.

Room for growth.

Room to move on up.

Room for improvement.

Room for opportunities that are about to tire of knocking.

When we let go of needless and excessive attachments, we’ll recover and progress our trajectory toward our veritable goals.

If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears. ~Glenn Clark