Chapter 4: What is Clutter Exactly?

The Oxford dictionary defines clutter as ‘a crowded and untidy collection of things’. Yes, that’s a part of it but it’s only describing clutter at the purely physical level.

Things You Do Not Use Or Love

Things that are loved, used and appreciated have strong, vibrant, joyous energies around them, which allow the energy in the space to flow through and around them. If you have a clear focus in your life and you surround yourself with things that have this marvellous free-flowing energy, you will have a correspondingly happy, joyous, free-flowing life. Conversely, anything neglected, forgotten, unwanted, unloved or unused will cause the energy in your home to slow and stagnate, and then you will feel that your life is not moving.

You are connected to everything you own by fine strands of energy. When your home is filled with things which you love or use well it becomes an incredible source of support and nourishment for you. Clutter, on the other hand, drags your energy down and the longer you keep it, the more it will affect you. When you get rid of everything which has no real meaning or significance for you, you literally feel lighter in body, mind and spirit.

Things That Are Untidy Or Disorganized

This category is for the messies of the world and the hopelessly disorganized. Even if you keep your stuff honed down to just the things you use and love, your place will still be cluttered if they are scattered all over the place and it’s difficult to find items when you want them. Probably, like most messies, you maintain there is order in your chaos, and what’s more, you need to keep things in the open to remind you of important things you have to do. But if someone actually puts you to the test and asks you where something is, at best you only know the general direction and rarely the precise location. Everyone’s life works better when they know where things are. For example, think of your bed. The energy connection between you and it is direct and clear. Unless you are the nomadic type, you know exactly where it is and you can connect to it mentally in micro-seconds. Now think about your house keys. Do you know exactly where they are, or do you have to mentally hunt around for them? How about that letter you need to reply to? Where is it? When your things get jumbled up and confused, the strands between you and them become like entangled spaghetti. This creates stress and confusion in your life rather than the peace and clarity which comes from knowing where things are.

Clutter in this category consists of things that either don’t have a proper place of their own or do have one but have strayed from it and got all mixed up with everything else. Many of the items seem to just appear in your life rather than you making a conscious decision to acquire them. They include the mail which relentlessly pops through your letterbox and dauntingly distributes itself in far-flung corners of your home, and other bits of paper which appear from nowhere and build themselves into mountainous heaps, defiantly resisting all your attempts to categorize and sort them. Then there are those impulse buys. You bring them home and say to yourself, “I’ll just put it there for now,” and there it stays. Sometimes it can stay there for months, years or even decades, always looking slightly out of place and vaguely irking you at the back of your mind.

Now, I’m not advocating pristine neatness. A home which is too tidy, where everything is ‘just so’, is energetically sterile and can be as much of a problem as a place that is a complete tip. But your home is an outward representation of what is going on inside you, so if you are messy on the outside there is a corresponding mess of some kind on the inside too. By sorting out the outer, the inner starts slotting neatly into place.

Too Many Things In Too Small A Space

Sometimes the problem is simply one of space. Your life or your family has expanded but your home has stayed the same size, or it never was big enough in the first place. You can become creative with storage units but the more you cram in to your living space, the less room there is for energy to move and the more difficult it becomes to get anything done. With clutter of the just-too-much-for-the-amount-of-space variety, your home starts to

feel as if it cannot breathe, your own breathing will actually become tighter and shallower (when was the last time you took a really deep breath and filled your lungs?), and you will feel constricted in what you can do in your life.

The only solution is to move to a bigger place or shift some of your stuff off the premises. You will be amazed at how good it feels, either way.

Anything Unfinished

This form of clutter is harder to see and easier to ignore than the other types, but its effects are far-reaching. Anything unfinished in the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual realms clutters your psyche.

Things not dealt with in your home reflect issues not dealt with in your life, and they are a constant drain on your energy. There are the niggly repairs such as fixing the broken drawer or repairing the tap that keeps dripping, and the bigger jobs, such as redecorating the house, servicing the central heating or taming the jungle that your garden has become. The larger the scale, the more these

things impinge on your ability to get on with your life.

Buttons that need sewing on, phone calls you need to make, relationships you need to move on from, and many other different forms of loose ends in your life will hamper your progress if you do not deal with them. Your subconscious mind will suppress these things nicely for you if you ask it to but it takes a lot of your energy to do so. You will be amazed at how your vitality levels soar if you just complete all your unfinished business.

The next chapter explores how all these types of clutter actually affect you in your life in ways you may never have suspected...