You Get Your Life Back When You Let Go Of Clutter

Hi,

It's Brooks and it's good to be here with you.

Today we're going to talk about clutter busting.

And for over a little over 20 years I've been helping people let go of clutter in their homes,

Their offices,

And their lives.

And my definition of clutter is anything in your life that's no longer serving you.

So that could be a tangible thing.

It could be an activity.

It could be any kind of relationship that you could have with a person.

It could be the way you look at the world.

Anything that no longer fits you,

That doesn't serve you,

That doesn't make your life a better place to be.

And what I do is I basically help people ask questions about the things in their life so they get an understanding of whether or not the support somewhere doesn't.

It's kind of like if I gave you a plate of food and I asked you to take a bite and then I asked you,

Do you want to continue eating this or not?

Does it taste good to you?

Does it feel nutritious?

Are you enjoying it or not?

And that's basically clutter busting.

It's looking at anything in your life and asking,

Do I like and use this or not?

Does this feel good or not?

Does this give me energy or does this deplete me?

And you get to do that.

You totally get to do that.

It's your life.

And you get to look around and ask about anything.

And the great thing is if you ask about something and you actually do like and use it,

Then it's part of your life.

It stays.

You get to keep it.

You get to continue enjoying it.

And you're reminded of,

Oh,

Here's something that I really like.

I'm lucky to have this.

And then you also notice the things that you don't feel that way about.

Oh,

You know,

I don't actually really like this or I used to like it,

But it doesn't really do it for me anymore.

When you recognize that,

You get to let it go.

Now we're all under the conditioning of a lifetime of being told that things are more important than us,

That we need things in our life to be of value for us to be of value.

We need to have certain things.

We need to have certain activities.

We need to have particular people in our lives.

And then that becomes who we are.

That's what we've been told.

You know,

We've been told our value comes from these things because that because as we are,

We're not valuable enough.

And so we believe that and we bring things into our lives and it becomes really hard to ever let anything go,

Even when it's no longer serving us.

What clutter busting says is that true?

And how does it feel actually living that way?

Are you enjoying living that way?

Or maybe not.

Maybe it doesn't feel good to put things first before yourself.

I believe that we're inherently,

Inherently valuable just by being alive,

Just by existing.

And that doesn't mean things are bad in any kind of way,

You know,

Or that you have to live with the least amount of things.

There's no prescription of how you should live.

Everybody has a different nature.

Some people need more stuff than others.

But looking at things from this perspective,

From putting yourself first perspective,

Then we can enjoy the things that are here in our life to make our life,

You know,

A better place to be in the moment.

But they never become more important than us.

We're always of the highest value.

And that makes it easy to look around and notice things like,

Oh,

This isn't serving me.

So I'm going to let it go.

Just like that plate of food,

You take that bite and you're eating it.

And maybe it's like,

Oh,

This doesn't taste very good.

It's too salty.

It's burned.

I don't like this particular food.

You know,

It's cold,

Whatever.

If you don't like it,

It doesn't have a place in your life.

And you get to say no to it.

You get to say no basically to anything that hurts you.

I had a client once.

She had quite a collection of shoes that she would that she wore to work.

And she had a management position and a big company.

And when we're going through the shoes in her closet,

My clutter read,

Our one off,

Which is this feeling of that person when they're around that particular thing,

They feel out of sorts.

I could sense that.

And I asked her about it.

I asked her about the shoes.

And she said that a lot of them hurt to wear,

But that she had to wear them when she went to work.

It's just that's how she saw it.

Like this was a necessary thing that she had to do.

So I said to her,

I said,

Our only job is to take care of ourselves.

And if something hurts us,

Then our job,

Our true job is to remove that thing that hurts us.

And we went deeper into it and she realized that she didn't want to continue living that old way,

You know,

Of putting other things first before ourselves,

Before herself.

So you get to look around at your life and you get to notice the things that fit and that don't fit and you get to remove them.

It's your it's your right.

And you can't lose.

And actually,

Whenever you find something that's cluttered and you remove it from your life,

You get a piece of your life back because clutter distracts us from our life.

It gets in the way of us enjoying the things that really do matter.

It disrupts our connection with ourself.

So when you get rid of a piece of clutter,

You reconnect with yourself.

And that's one of the best feelings in the world.

Plus the relief that comes from the clutter being gone.

Clutters very much like when you go into a room or you're in a room that has a fluorescent lights on and you've been there for a little while and someone turns off the fluorescent lights and all of a sudden it's very quiet.

You feel your whole body relax because that buzzing sound is gone.

You know,

The effect of those lights is gone.

I see this over and over again when someone lets go of a piece of clutter.

You can see the life come back into them and you can see the relief because that disparate effect that the negative effect from the clutter that stagnant effect from the clutter is gone.

So I encourage you to think about this.

To think about your value in relationship to everything in your life and what it would feel like to imagine,

Not to imagine,

To put yourself first.

You know,

What would my life be like to be able to do that?

You know,

Clutter busting has a life of its own.

There's something about it.

Once you start considering this,

There's your clutter radar,

This built in discriminating ability that's part of you that just needs to be woken up.

You know,

So you can consider your clutter radar as being woken up just by hearing about this.

And the clutter radar is that part of you that tells you,

Like when you're in your closet and you look at a shirt that you think you're going to wear and you have this feeling like you feel tired when you look at that shirt.

Maybe it's worn out or maybe it doesn't fit you emotionally anymore.

Or maybe you never did like it,

You bought it because it was in fashion,

You know,

And suddenly you realize like,

I don't really like this shirt.

Are you in the midst of doing some activity?

Maybe something you've done before a number of times and all of a sudden you're in the midst of it and you get this sense like,

I don't like doing this.

You may even surprise yourself by that recognition.

Or maybe you're talking with someone,

You know,

Someone that you know and afterwards you get this feeling like you're exhausted after speaking with them.

Maybe they're a very negative person.

Or maybe they're mean in certain ways.

There's something about it that just drains you and suddenly you recognize like,

Wow,

That didn't feel very good.

This is all from your clutter radar.

It's your best friend.

It's essentially your intuition.

You know,

Join with your intellect that helps you decipher and see and notice.

It illuminates things.

This doesn't feel good.

And when you notice that,

You get to remove it.

And a really interesting thing that happens,

I've seen this a lot with people,

Is that when they do let go of clutter,

Because sometimes there's the resistance like,

Oh,

You know,

If I let it go,

What's going to take its place?

Or there's like an uncertainty.

And it's like,

Yeah,

But how are you feeling right now with the clutter?

And it's like,

I don't feel that good.

So let's see what happens.

And when they let it go,

Not only do they feel that relief,

Not only do they feel that their life come back to them,

It really opens the door for new things to come in that are fresh and that fit.

And I've seen that over and over again with people.

And oftentimes it's things that people hadn't even considered.

Because we have a list of things that we think,

Oh,

Yeah,

This is this.

If I get this,

Then I'm going to be really happy.

You know,

Once this happens,

The boy,

That's it.

Things are really going to be wonderful.

But we don't always have the like the best understanding what's really going to be great for us.

So what I notice is when people let go of clutter,

Something new often comes in that they hadn't even considered or that's different than something they had considered in its own way.

And it's wonderful.

It really fits them.

It supports them.

Because I think life itself knows us really well.

And it knows what we need.

So you can't lose when you get rid of clutter.

And you win yourself.

You basically win yourself when you let go of the clutter.

And what's better than that?

To get yourself back.

So I wish you the best with with your looking at the clutter.

And I have a website,

Clutterbusting.

Com,

That has a lot of blog posts on there.

There's videos.

You can see the link to the YouTube videos.

So there's a lot of additional assistance there if you need it.

Or otherwise you can just keep looking on your own and see what you find.

And I guarantee it'll be really interesting for you.

And I wish you the best.

Take care.