Your surroundings and belongings say a lot about you. They even tell stories about you. We’ve all heard the saying,”You are what you eat.” The same is true about your environment. You are your environment. Your environment speaks volumes about you; tells the truth about you. Look around your office space and note what you see. Is your desk a disaster, so full of paper and other things that you can’t see the surface or find anything? Perhaps you have more things than you have space for. Your environment is directly connected to what’s going on with you physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. It’s your reflection. If your environment is cluttered, you have to look at what’s going on beneath the surface and address it to get rid of your clutter once and for all.
On the surface, spaces get cluttered because things aren’t assigned a home; because people shop without a list or without thinking before they buy; can’t decide whether or not to keep something; keeping things because they have a monetary or sentimental value attached to them. In working with people, I have found that those dealing with clutter have had something happen that starts the process of things accumulating and when they get to the point of being serious about getting rid of it, they are ready to get to the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual things that are present and cluttering their lives. When the internal connections are addressed in the process of getting rid of the clutter, it’s possible to get rid of the clutter and keep it away for good.
As I mentioned, there are physical, emotional, mental and spiritual connections between you and your environment. Here, I’m going to address the physical connections. When we look beyond the physical clutter we can begin to see the body and mind connection. Let’s look at how clutter relates to the physical body. Often when you have clutter you’re also dealing with health concerns or excess body weight, which has you feel the same way the clutter does—drained, no balance, heavy and wanting to get out of your body. In a cluttered space there is no real life present, there is limited movement or it can be difficult to move about the space, there is no balance, and walking into the space can make you feel uncomfortable or wanting to leave the space. For some, the clutter is a way of protecting themselves, just as excess body weight can be a form of protection. Getting to the root cause of the physical body issues is key in being able to get rid of the clutter in your environment. Weight loss or addressing health concerns opens the door and motivates you to get rid of clutter permanently and decluttering an environment clears the way to weight loss or resolving health issues. Additionally, getting rid of the physical clutter can cause lifestyle changes.
In my next post, I’ll share the mental connections to clutter.