highly sensitive power

Have you ever had the experience of finally tackling a long-overdue clean-up project – like updating your filing system or giving the garage a thorough shakedown – and afterward noticing a greater measure of bounty coming into your life? Apparently, nature does abhor a vacuum, and creating orderly space, whether of the inner or outer kind, can trigger a greater measure of prosperity. I’ve experienced this personally many times, to the point where if my life feels unpleasantly stuck, I’ll pick a clean-up project to tackle. I’ve found that the project doesn’t even need to be related to the topic I feel stuck about. Merely cleaning up something seems to open doors.

“The word ‘clutter’ derives from the Middle English word ‘clotter,’ which means to coagulate – and that’s about as stuck as you can get.”

~ Karen Kingston

The best practical advice I’ve found about tackling messes and freeing up the energy they hold is Karen Kingston’s Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui. You don’t need to have any interest in Feng Shui to find this book useful. Karen is easy to like, and her great experience in the realm of cleaning up messes provides reassurance and motivation for the reluctant or overwhelmed.

“After 20 years of mentoring so many clients, I have noticed a significant correlation: Wealthy people tend to be orderly, while those who struggle have lots of messes. At first I thought that wealthy people just hire others to clean their messes. Upon closer scrutiny (and after looking into my own life), I realized that it is the ones who first clean their messes who then become wealthy.

“In fact, the deepest wisdom I have come to know concerns the close relationship between wealth and messes. It is encapsulated in this one brief sentence: Each mess is a lock on the gate that keeps abundance out.”

~ Raymond Aaron, Double Your Income Doing What You Love

Raymond Aaron’s book is bristling with forms and strategies (and a few too many distracting trademark symbols and cute acronyms for my taste, but the underlying system is worth the wade). He writes about streamlining the process of getting from here to doing what you love the most, providing lots of tools and including advice about how to clean up messes. The messes he refers to in the quoted passage above are not only of the physical variety. He includes relationship messes of any kind.

A silly but effective test to see if there are relationship messes that need to be cleaned up is what my friend Ed calls the Thriftway Test. Ed’s a therapist who lives on a small island, one with a population small enough that it’s tough to go anywhere without seeing someone you know. The island is big enough to have a big grocery, the Thriftway. After Ed told me about this test I used it all the time (I lived on the island, too), and was amazed at its blunt effectiveness. It’s simply this: If you find yourself going down a different aisle at the Thriftway in order to avoid running into someone, you’ve got a problem. Clean it up.