Spring Cleaning for Body and Soul or Declutter Your Closet, Declutter Your Mind

Fortified by one week of bliss in the Blue Zone of Costa Rica, I chose to go all out and do what I had resisted doing for so long … and cleaned my closet, one of my till-now unconquerable vestiges of attachment.

So, the other day, a friend helped me clean six bags of stuff out of my closet. The process was a little painful because my friend is ruthless. She would hold up each piece of clothing and ask, Do you love it? Well, I paid 80 bucks for it… Yes. Do you absolutely love it? No, but … No? … whoosh flies another shirt onto the togo pile. It only took a couple of hours and now my closet is so spacious that every time I pass by it I giggle.

Do you feel a bit like that closet, so overflowing with stuff that it’s hard to get anything in, or out? All these experiences with no place to go. All the unfinished tasks, complicated relationships, unanswered emails, along with the confusion, anxiety, and overwhelm from all directions that crowd the space inside and deaden us to the beauty and wonder of life.

What if you and I took some time every day (now) to breathe deeply and drop from our thinking head into the feeling body? We’d find a soulscape forever shifting, often unclear, exciting, terrifying, and sometimes infused with a sense of urgency; flashes of longing, deep unfamiliar pleasure, vague discomfort, unintelligible swirlings, oscillations, or openings.

The body is full of secret meaning, asking us to pause, release, and offer ourselves to this life we have been given, now. Our lovely head may not like this. There’s nothing more alarming to the brain than to be exposed to something it cannot predict, control, organize or problem solve.

Let’s do it anyway. Let’s do it for sanity, self-care, relational fluidity, fun. Let’s do it for our authenticity, openness, and love.

Let’s do it tomorrow again.

Let’s do it together in May.

Spring blessings will surely follow.