I meet all kinds of people in the consultations I do.

This week, for example, I worked with someone who agonized about letting go of six boxes of handicraft materials she had hauled from home to home for two decades or more and never used. By contrast, another client had so little attachment to the things in her apartment that when asked what she would rescue in the event of a fire, she couldn’t think of anything she would want to save. Her possessions were nice, but to her they were only things and they didn’t have much importance.

So what is it that makes some people want to hold on to things, and other people not to care about them at all?

History abounds with tales of monks who renounced all worldly possessions in their quest to find enlightenment, but after much self-deprivation even the Buddha discovered that “The Middle Way” was a more wholesome approach – having enough to satisfy one’s needs but not so much as to be self-indulgent.

My own take on this is quite similar. I have observed that people fall out of integrity if they fail to provide for themselves the means to do the things they truly want to do, and they also fall out of integrity if they place so much emphasis on material possessions that it causes them to lose touch with the spiritual dimension of their life. It’s all about finding the right balance – not too little and not too much.

The inescapable fact of life is that no-one can take any of their things with them when they die. We are born with nothing and we die with nothing. The things we acquire while we’re alive can help or hinder us in our journey, but in the end they are all stripped away. Forming too much attachment to material things is ultimately futile.

So does that mean we should all be monks in loin cloths with begging bowls? Absolutely not. Life in our modern world works best if we have around us the things we need in our daily lives, and it’s also fine to have a few treasured possessions that bring joy to our hearts. It’s only over-attachment to material things that causes imbalance, and even then the cause is not the things themselves. Over-attachment to material things is one of the most common ways that people attempt to compensate for an emotional loss of some kind. If they get in touch with and work through the feelings of loss, the physical objects will no longer be needed.

In my experience, any method of helping people do clutter clearing that does not address this deeper level of sourcing emotions means it will only be a matter of time before new clutter appears to replace the old.

Copyright © Karen Kingston 2013

I remember the moment it dawned on me. It was in 1990. I was in a workshop, learning lots of useful information about how to improve certain aspects of my life, and I took a minute to look around the audience.

As I moved my gaze from person to person and tuned in to their energy, I could easily see who had clutter at home and who did not. And I realised that the people who were going back to a clutter-filled home really wouldn’t get much benefit from the course at all because there was no space in their life for anything new. They had come to the workshop hoping to change, but frankly, their time would have been better spent staying at home for the weekend and sorting through their stuff.

Or rather, their time would have been better spent the previous weekend (or week/month/year) sorting through their stuff so that they could then attend the workshop and then be ready to put into action whatever they learned.

There is much more to clutter than meets the eye. There are the physical items you can see, and there is also the energetic side of it – the stagnant energy that accumulates around clutter, that causes a corresponding stagnation and stuckness in a person’s life. Our homes are reflections of ourselves, and when the rooms we occupy are stuffed to the brim, our lives feel the same way too. Just as finding things when we want them becomes more difficult, so everything in life becomes harder, and just getting through the day feels like a struggle. No wonder people who have clutter say they don’t have the energy to clear it!

But here’s the thing. When you finally give clutter clearing the priority it warrants, with each area of your home you reclaim, fresh energy is released into your life. And when you work through the backlog of things you need to do and bring yourself up-to-date, you become genuinely ready for change.

With this in mind, I’ve created a new talk to help people who are engaged on a path of personal development work to see the importance of clearing clutter, and give them the motivation and techniques to get started and keep going until the job is done. It has the no-nonsense title:

Why there’s very little point doing any kind of personal development work if you haven’t cleared your clutter

Birmingham
Friday, 19 April 2013 (7.00pm – 9.00pm)
Tree of Life, St Columba Church, Chantry Rd, Moseley, Birmingham B13 8DJ, UK
Tickets £12 (£10 concessions)
More info & Booking

Isle of Man
Friday, 7 June 2013 (8.00pm – 10.00pm)
Brightlife, Ballalheaney, Andreas Road, Isle of Man, IM7 4EN, UK
£25, including supper
More info & booking

Copyright © Karen Kingston, 2013

Something I have noticed again and again is that it’s very rare to meet an overweight person who doesn’t have clutter. The connection between the two is that body fat and clutter both act as a protective layer to help people feel less emotionally vulnerable. However the stagnant energy that accumulates around both causes a feeling a stuckness that is very frustrating.

When conducting a clutter clearing consultation, the first thing I do is to go around the home, energy sensing the walls and objects with my hands. It’s very easy to discover through this method which items are loved and used, and which are clutter. Clutter always has dull, stagnant energy around it. Actually I can SMELL clutter even without energy sensing. Clutter has an unmistakable musty odour that hits me immediately when I walk into a home, even if it is all hidden away. I can also smell clutter in a person’s energy field when they are far away from their home – it permeates them and clings to them wherever they go.

If you are overweight and reading this, don’t be upset – be inspired. If there really is a correlation between stagnant energy in your home and stagnant energy in your body (and I’m sure there is), then this means that great progress can be made by purging your home of everything you no longer need, use or love.

Over the years I’ve had many emails from people telling me about how much weight they have lost after clearing their clutter, and how it stays off if they keep their home clear. Weight watching organizations have also told me that my book, Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui, is on their recommended reading list because they have found that clutter clearing helps people to address their emotional issues and lose weight more quickly.

If you have experienced this effect yourself, please email me to let me know. I am compiling material for new books and articles and would love to hear from you.

Readers’ letters

Copyright © Karen Kingston, 2013

Yak shaving refers to any series of tasks that have to be completed before you can do the job you first set out to do.

Said to have been coined by programmer, Carlin Vieri, yak shaving was made famous in one of Seth Godin’s blogs, where he described the process of wanting to wax his car, but to get to this he first had to buy a new hose, but to do this he first needed to borrow his neighbour’s EZpass to cross a toll bridge to get to Home Depot, but to do this he first needed to restuff the mooshi pillow his son borrowed from the neighbour. Hence ending up at the zoo shaving a yak!

I come across this in just about every clutter clearing consultation I do. Recently, for example, I worked with a woman to help her clear her cluttered hallway. She has chronic health problems and the hallway area of her home is located in the Health area of the bagua, so this was an obvious place to start.

At first it progressed very smoothly, picking up an item at a time and putting it where it belonged. Items that needed to be taken upstairs were temporarily placed in a Transit box, to be taken later to where they belonged. But after a while, we could go no further because the bulk of items remaining needed to go to the utility room, which was so cluttered that not another thing could be fitted in. Hence ending up clearing the utility room in order to clear the hallway. We were yak shaving.

And it didn’t end there. Part of clearing out the utility room involved moving some large items to an upstairs bedroom, which involved rearranging the bedroom in order to fit them in.

At that stage we could easily have given up, or become distracted and changed our focus to clutter clearing the bedroom instead, but this is where yak shaving strategy comes in. You do just enough to make it possible to do whatever you need to do to make whatever you originally wanted to make happen happen, and no more. In other words, you always keep the original goal in mind and do not allow yourself to go off at a tangent. So we made space for the stuff in the bedroom, then polished off the utility room, and finally cleared the hallway. Job done, for that day at least.

Many attempts at clutter clearing are foiled because people end up doing something they never planned to do, and end up feeling like they didn’t get a result. And when you don’t get a result, you don’t get that feel good release of endorphins that will inspire you to continue the process.

Perfectionists find this particularly difficult, because they want to do everything perfectly. But if we’d tackled the bedroom, we’d have run out of steam and ended up with the hallway, the utility room and the bedroom all in worse shape than when we started. By doing only the bare minimum in the bedroom, we were able to finish off the utility room and complete the original task. The bedroom was left for another day.

So next time you find yourself doing some obscure task you never planned to do, check to see if you are genuinely yak shaving with a firm goal in mind, or have you somehow lost the plot? Allow yourself a little chuckle at how complicated life can get, and then either carry on yak shaving with renewed gusto, or change direction if you discover you’ve gone off track.

Copyright © Karen Kingston 2013

Here’s a little something for those of you who have the German edition of Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui.

As essential part of the book is in Chapter 4, where I define the four categories of clutter:

• Things you do not use or love
• Things that are untidy or disorganized
• Too many things in too small a space
• Anything unfinished

The publishers of the German edition translated this as:

• Dinge, die man weder benutzt noch mag
• Dinge, die unordentlich oder schlecht organisiert sind
• Zu viele Dinge auf zu wenig Raum
• Alles Unfertige

I know enough German to realise that some aspects got lost in translation here, so here’s a much better translation for you, put together by two of the practitioners I have trained (a big thank you to Marion Degel and Annette Kurtz for your help):

Was ist Clutter?

• Was wir nicht mögen oder verwenden
• Was unordentlich oder unorganisiert ist
• Zu viel in begrenztem Raum
• Was unerledigt oder unfertig ist

I’ve asked for these improved definitions to be included in future German editions of the book, but authors can only request, not insist. So in case that doesn’t happen, at least the improved version is now here on my blog.

Copyright © Karen Kingston 2013