People sometimes ask me, "What can I do with all the crayoned masterpieces made by my children when they were young? I want to let the pictures go but they have sentimental value."
Many parents have boxes full of their children's creations, which they never look at but somehow feel obliged to keep long after the child has grown up. Maybe these works of art were once proudly displayed on walls as examples of their children's creative abilities, but decades later they are just stacked somewhere collecting dust and stagnant energy around them. Their time and usefulness has passed.
The best solution I know for this problem is to take photos of the best pieces and then throw all the originals away. They are never going to come in useful some day. And if you ever feel a compelling urge to look through them again, digital images will do the job just as well and take up no physical storage space in your attic at all.
The same can be done with children's clothing and other childhood items being kept by parents (or the adult child themselves) for sentimental reasons. Just take a photo of each item and then let the original go.
Having said all this, I personally don't own a single piece of artwork, clothing or anything else from my childhood, and I don't feel my life lacks anything because of it. In fact, I'm sure that being unencumbered in this way has brought me greater freedom to change and grow. And moving house is certainly a whole lot easier, not having to drag mounds of memorabilia from one place to the next!
Annette Kurtz is currently conducting a 4-week series of Clear Your Clutter classes in Tokyo, and one of her students let her know about this Katazuke video made by IKEA in Japan. Katazuke means "to clean up". Take a look. It's... very Japanese!
The interesting thing is that the rhythm of the music they have chosen is absolutely perfect for working your way effortlessly through a home, tidying everything away as you do.
For anyone in Japan who is interested in attending Annette's next series of Clear Your Clutter classes, you can find information at www.spaceclearing.com/html/workshops/Japan/index.html. The classes will be taught in English and no dancing in the aisles at IKEA will be involved!
As the time draws near for me to leave Bali, I've been reflecting on the things I have loved about living here.
High on my list is that Bali is a country of early risers. In fact, according to an online survey of 14,100 people conducted by AC Nielsen in October 2004, Indonesians (which, of course, includes the Balinese) were found to be the earliest risers in the world.
72% of Indonesians are out of bed by 6.00am, 91% by 7.00am, and most shops and businesses are open by 8.00 am. In the 20 years I've been here, my personal experience is that just about every Balinese person I know is already up by about 6.00am, and it's considered absolutely fine to call anyone at that time of day (and I often do). It's not so OK to call after 8.00 pm at night, though, because they may well be in bed.
I wasn't an early riser when I first came to live here. But pretty soon I became acclimatized to the rhythm of life and now it feels perfectly natural to wake up at dawn and go to bed in the early hours of the evening. By far the healthiest and happiest westerners I know here are those who do likewise. Long term residents who stay up late and sleep in every morning are out of synch, and it generally shows in their health or some other way.
Bali is 8 degrees south of the Equator, so the day and night are roughly twelve hours each, with dawn and dusk varying by only about an hour during the course of a year. I'm sure this helps immensely to regulate sleep. At the moment, dawn is around 6.00am so I wake up quite naturally as the sun rises and get out of bed. But I much prefer to go to bed a bit earlier and wake up at 4.00am or 5.00am so that I get to meditate in pitch darkness and peace before the cockerels start crowing.
Of the top ten early riser countries in the world, five are in Asia (Indonesia, Vietnam, The Philippines, India and Japan) and five are in Europe (Denmark, Germany, Austria, Finland and Norway. Portugal turns out to be the top night owl country in the world, with 75% of the population never in bed before midnight, and seven of the remaining nine top night owl countries are Asian (Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand). Not suprisingly, these are the most westernized and urbanized countries in Asia.
Japan, by the way, is the most worrying in this survey, because the Japanese are ranked as the 8th earliest risers in the world and also the 6th latest to go to bed, with the result that 41% of them are thought to get only six hours sleep per night. Hence the Japanese karoshi epidemic (death from overwork), which is estimated to claim 10,000 lives per year, on a par with the annual number of road accidents in Japan. That's westernization gone very wrong.
Early rising is now so much a part of my life that even when I visit other countries where the sun comes up much later in the day, I still wake up early. It's not just the pristine energies of dawn that I enjoy so much. It's also the lack of interruptions at that time of day because everyone else is still asleep. I find I can often do the equivalent of a full day's work before everyone else wakes up, leaving me free to do other things that most people don't have time for.
So how to become an early riser? Well, spending some time in a place where it's a natural way of life really helps. Interestingly, Balinese children are not sent to bed by their parents at a set time as they are in the West. They are allowed to stay up as long as they like, and soon discover for themselves that they feel too tired in the morning if they stay up too late. School here starts at 7.30am.
Ever wondered why it is that most people prefer new things to secondhand?
Apart from the fact that new things are generally in better condition than secondhand things, a large part of the joy of new ownership lies in the fact that they arrive in your life like a blank slate, ready for you to use and imprint with your own energy to make them feel yours.
You can save a lot of money buying things secondhand but the drawback is that they nearly always have some level of energetic imprinting from the previous owner. The more the item was used and the longer the person owned it, the more imprinting it will have.
Of course, if the previous owner was someone you love or respect, this can be a good thing. It's also the reason why so many people seek to own an item that once belonged to a celebrity, because some of that person's energy will be imprinted into it.
But most objects you acquire secondhand, including antiques, are unlikely to have such desirable histories. It's pot luck. You have no idea what embedded imprints you'll be taking home with you or how they will affect you. More often than not, they will have energies that hinder rather than help you in your life.
Most brand new items, by comparison, have no discernable imprinting. This is certainly the case with factory-made items where there has been no human handling at all. Man-made items may have slight imprinting, and hand-crafted items or pieces of art in which the creator had some emotional involvement will have considerably more imprinting. In my experience, just as much discernment is needed when acquiring these types of items as with secondhand objects.
So, can anything be done to clear out imprints? Well, yes. Space Clearing is designed to do just this. It can be used to clear imprints from objects as well as from buildings.
Knowing how to do Space Clearing means secondhand things become much more appealing, especially in the case of items such as furniture. Secondhand furniture is generally a much healthier option than new because by the time you get it, it is likely to have finished outgassing. Modern furniture made of materials such as wood laminates, particle board, plywood, upholstery fabrics and foam can take anything between two to ten years to finish outgassing toxins such as formaldehyde, during which time you will be breathing in the fumes to some degree or other, depending on how well ventilated your home is.
So while it's lovely to buy things new, when it comes to furniture or anything that outgases, it's a curious fact that these days secondhand is a much better option.
Laptops with LCD or TFT screens emit much lower electromagnetic fields (EMFs) than regular computers and are much easier on the eyes too (less flicker). However this is only the case while the laptop is running on battery. As soon as you plug it into the mains, the electric field of most laptops soars. I've taken readings as high as 800 volts per meter (V/m) on some laptops, and it's rare to get readings of less than a few hundred V/m.
So always check the EMFs of a new laptop before you buy one (see my recommendations about how to do this) and NEVER put a laptop on your lap while it’s running on mains power. If you're electrically sensitive, having one on your lap even when it's being run on batteries is not pleasant either, and some models can get hot enough to burn you (story about a Swedish scientist who burnt his genitals).
Laptop earthing leads Sometimes the problem is not the laptop itself but the wiring system it is plugged into. In one office I used to work in, the electric field of my laptop was 460 V/m. The same laptop, when plugged in at home, measured only 5 V/m. That's a huge difference! Working in such a high electric field day after day my hands, arms and neck got progressively stiffer, my vision fuzzier and my perception woozier. It was difficult to complete any task and by the end of each day I was exhausted. Something had to be done.
I got an electrician in to check the earthing of the building and he managed to get the electric field down to 330 V/m, but it was only when I attached an earthing lead to the back of my laptop and plugged it into a mains socket that the field reduced down to the tolerable level of 9 V/m. Not as good as the 5 V/m I get at home but infinitely preferable to the zapping I was enduring before. Now I always take an earthing lead with me wherever I go in the world. It's small, lightweight and because of the amount of time I spend using my laptop, absolutely essential.
Why laptops need earthing leads The reason why an earthing lead is needed at all is because most laptops have a 2-wire mains lead. Manufacturers say that this is to protect against electric shocks but when I talked to Alaisdair Philips at Powerwatch about this years ago he told me he believes it is mostly done this way because it's a cheaper option. If they choose to, all manufacturers could make a very simple modification to reduce the electric fields of the laptops they sell down to almost zero but if you get an electrical engineer who knows about this to do it for you, it makes the manufacturer’s warranty invalid.
Actually, a few years ago, after a purchaser threatened to take Dell to court over electrosensitivity damage to her daughter, the company started to supply their Inspiron range in the UK with a properly earthed power supply. But this only lasted for about two years and they now seem to have gone back to the two-wired non-earthed supply again. Once I bought a top end IBM laptop myself simply because it had this feature built in, but it was double the price and not really worth it. That was before I discovered earthing leads, which Alaisdair taught me how to make myself, and now sells ready-made at www.emfields.org/screening/overview.asp.
A lead currently costs £7.00 when fitted with a UK plug or £5.00 if you fit your own plug (European, US, etc). If you have a new kind of laptop that doesn’t have any exposed metal parts at the back to clip the earthing lead's crocodile clip to, then you will also need to buy a Belkin USB extension cable, price £4.40 (it must be Belkin because other types of extension leads are not suitable). Yes, there is postage to pay on top of these prices but even so, it’s a very cheap and viable solution. Leads can be ordered online if you live in the UK, or call +44 1353 778814 for overseas ordering. Those of you who live outside the UK may be able to find earthing leads from other sources, get a local electrics or electronics technician to make one up for you, or even make one yourself (but only if you understand electrical safety issues!).
Wired keyboards & mice A few years ago, when external keyboards and mice had the round PS2 connectors rather than USB and were a lot less sophisticated that the ones you can buy today, plugging them in to your laptop and using them rather than the laptop’s keyboard or mousepad would significantly reduce your electromagnetic field exposure. The new USB keyboards and mice still do this to some extent where the magnetic field is concerned, but I haven't found they do anything at all to reduce the electric field level. I don’t know why this has changed over the years, but it has. The only solution, therefore, is to fit an earthing lead to the entire laptop, which reduces the electric field of the keyboard and mouse too.
The best way to tell if you need a laptop earthing lead is to use an accurate EMF meter that can measure electric fields as well as magnetic fields. The EMFields Pro Meter and the much cheaper Gigahertz Solutions 3030B meter will both do this, and if you mention my name the retailer, Sensory Perspective, will give you a 10% discount.
Wireless keyboards and mice Wireless keyboards and mice do not expose you to electric fields but they operate on radiofrequency microwaves which pose health hazards of their own so are definitely not recommended. Infrared seems to be fine.
Alasdair Philips advises: "Almost all new laptops come with BOTH WiFi and Bluetooth built-in and set to "active" as the default. Both should be switched off and each needs to be done separately. There are many reports of adverse effects of WiFi on wellbeing and you should always use a plugged-in wired Ethernet connection. If you need to use the laptop in different rooms in your house, you can connect the signal from your router/modem using a pair (or more) of dLANS that send the signals along the mains wiring. They do use low-frequency RF but at very low power levels and virtually none radiates into the room. Even so, they should all be switched off at night when you go to bed."
Posture This has nothing to do with EMFs but if you habitually use a laptop, I recommend putting it on a stand so that you can look straight ahead at the screen when working at it instead of having to tilt your head down. If you don't have a custom-built stand, use an upturned box or a pile of large books.
Personally I also work at a low table sitting cross-legged rather than sitting in a chair. This makes for even better posture and much less back strain (the standard design of a western chair is one of the most stressful postures there is for a human back). An alternative to this is to get yourself a wide padded bench seat so that you can sit cross-legged at regular desk height and put your legs down any time they get tired. Whatever you do, make sure your posture is as vertical as possible when working at a laptop or computer.
Laptop screens Laptops with non-reflective screens are best. Many are now coming with highly reflective screens that are difficult to use in daylight or in rooms with lights behind you. The reflections also cause near/far focussing problems for your eyes because the screen image and the reflections are located in different places. About ten years ago there were strong recommendations that screens should be non-reflective. It's not clear why this good advice is now being ignored. It feels to me like a fashion thing. The glossy screens look more glamorous, but at what cost to your eyesight?
Many thanks to Alasdair Philips who kindly checked the content of this article for accuracy and added some information of his own. Alasdair is qualified in both Electrical and Electronic Engineering and in Agricultural Engineering. Since 1986 he has built up a considerable knowledge of EMF bioeffects, and is one of the leading 'alternative' voices on the subject in the UK. He is also a member of SAGE (the UK Department of Health Stakeholder Group on ELF EMFs), a member of the UK Health Protection Agency's EMF Discussion Group, and one of the main contributors to the Powerwatch website, which I have found to be one of the most reputable and reliable sources of EMF information available today.
A question I'm asked from time to time by readers of my Clear Your Clutter book is, "Can the Feng Shui bagua be applied to cars?"
Some feng shui teachers say "yes". I don't agree.
The reason is that the bagua is designed to be used for buildings, which stay in one place, not for objects such as cars that move around. It can certainly be used for a residential caravan that is usually parked in one place because this is essentially a metal home (align the bagua to the front door of the caravan) but as soon as you start moving a vehicle around, its relationship to land energies changes to being more fluid and the bagua no longer applies.
However, depending on how much it is driven, an energy connection does develop between a car and its owner, and you can tell a lot about a person by looking at their car. I've noticed that when people embark on clutter clearing their homes, their car is often one of the last areas to get cleared out. I can't tell you how many times it has happened in England, for example, where I sometimes travel to consultations by train, that a client has booked me for a Space Clearing consultation, madly clutter cleared their home in preparation, and then realized as they drove their car to the station to pick me up that they hadn't even thought to clutter clear their car. The journey back to their home then becomes one long apology to me for the state of their vehicle.
In many ways, a person's car is a metaphor for who they are, so a car that's knee-deep in clutter speaks of a person whose emotions are stagnant and blocked, and whose self-esteem is low. But the metaphor can be extended well beyond the realms of clutter. If you have a problem with your car battery going flat, for example, it's likely that you've run yourself down to the point of exhaustion. If your car headlamps or windscreen wipers need repairing, you may need to get clearer vision about where you are going in your life. If your brakes become faulty, are you out of control? If your radiator overheats, are your emotions boiling over? If your petrol tank leaks, where in your life is your energy leaking away? And so on. If you repair your car without changing your life, the same thing will tend to break down again.
Where the feng shui bagua does come in useful is when you use it to see where in your home or on your plot of land your garage is located, and which aspect of your life is therefore connected to this.
If you don't have a garage then a good feng shui tip is to make sure you don't park your car so that it blocks the entrance to your home because this also blocks the flow of energy coming into your life.
And finally, there is the classic Chinese Feng Shui principle that cars represent predatory tigers so should always be parked facing away from a building, not towards it. I agree with this, but for entirely different reasons. Firstly, because parking this way symbolically represents being ready and willing to engage life rather than having your back turned to it; and secondly because it is much more welcoming to visitors to see the 'face' of a car than a view of its bum!
One of the tips I often give people to help them get going with clutter clearing is to wear something red.
In the new edition of my Clear Your Clutter book I explain, "Just as red dancing shoes make your feet feel like moving, so wearing red clothes make you feel like taking action. If you don't have anything red, then wear colours from the warm end of the spectrum (orange, yellow, etc) rather than cool colours such as blue. Many people keep clutter as a way of comforting themselves, so if you wear warm, comforting colours rather than cool ones while sorting through your stuff, you'll find it easier to let things go."
I've also noticed that wearing the colour red generally makes people feel more able to get a job done and keep at it until it's finished. The fiery quality of the colour has the effect of boosting confidence, self-esteem, stamina and staying power.
I arrived at this conclusion after many years of working with clients and now researchers are starting to gather evidence that wearing red in certain situations does give people a leading edge to success. For example, a study led by Martin Attrill at the University of Plymouth in the UK has found that English soccer teams Liverpool, Manchester United and Arsenal between them won 38 out of 63 league titles during the 56-year period from 1947 to 2003, and were ranked in first, second and fourth places respectively in home wins. What do they all have in common? They all wear red.
Another study (by Hill and Barton) showed that teams wearing red in the Euro 2004 soccer finals in Portugal won more games and scored more goals than teams wearing other colours. I don't have the faintest interest in football myself but find these studies very interesting and not at all surprising.
For clutter clearing you don't have to dress from head to foot in red but it really does work well to wear a red top of some kind. I think this is because the process predominantly involves handling things with the upper part of the body. So if you're having difficulty getting started or keeping at clutter clearing, feel free to give this a go.
And if you're experimentally inclined, here's something else you can try. Since the hands are the most involved in clutter clearing, I have a hunch that wearing red gloves could help even more. There are no shops here in tropical Bali where I can buy a pair of gloves to test this out but I bet it would add extra oomph. At the very least, it would make clutter clearing more fun!
Clutter clearing some books recently in preparation for leaving Bali, I came across a passage I had marked in one written by an Australian news & current affairs journalist who happened to be on vacation in Bali in 2002 when the night club bomb blast happened. As he witnessed first-hand the aftermath of the bombing in Bali's hopelessly inadequate hospitals, he took some time out to write about the effect the carnage was having on him personally.
"I've noticed some changes in my behavior in the past week. I've become quite obsessive about tidiness. Back in Adelaide I'm normally pretty organized at work, due to the pressure of deadlines, but less so at home. I've noticed that for the past few nights, while flicking between the ABC Pacific news service, BBC World and CNN... I've got into tidying my room. I don't like food left on the room service dinner plate after I've eaten. I go and wash it. I can't bear for my clothes to be in a mess. I tidy up my notebooks and pens... I realize my newfound tidiness is probably a direct result of all the chaos I've seen" (from Tragedy in Bali by Alan Atkinson, published by The Works, Indonesia, 2003)
Something I have often observed is that what's inside a person is not always on the outside, but what's on the outside is always on the inside. Usually I relate this insight to the clutter a person has around themselves, to point out that the mess around them is indicative of something on the inside. It's not so often I come across examples the other way round, of a person deliberately creating order around themselves to still the chaos on the inside, but this is one of them and it certainly seems to have worked for him.
If you ever find your life in chaos, this is a very useful tip to remember.
The new updated and revised edition of my Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui book has just been published in German by Rororo under the title Feng Shui gegen das Gerümpel des Alltags.
It's available at www.amazon.de, and from bookstores in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. I'm hoping the translation of this new edition is as good as the translation of the original edition. If you happen to read it, please feel free to post here to let me know what you think :-)
In case you haven't guessed from my last two postings, I'm in Singapore for a few days.
Singapore has the same tropical climate as Bali but when packing to come here I always bring warm clothes. Unlike Bali, where the majority of people still spend a great deal of time outdoors and hardly any Balinese like to use air-conditioning at night when they sleep, Singapore has evolved into a culture where many people spend the majority of their time indoors and air-conditioning is perceived as highly desirable 24 hours a day. It's the same in many other modern cities located in hot, humid climates.
I therefore always bring warm clothing with me - not to wear outside but to put on when I'm inside, especially in taxis and restaurants, where the temperature is invariably set to incredibly cold.
The photo here shows an amazing array of air conditioning units lining a tiny back street I have nameed Air Conditioner Alley, located between two rows of classy restaurants in the heart of Singapore. The buildings all look glossy and beautiful at the front but it's a very different story when you take a peek behind.
In colonial times, buildings in Singapore were designed with efficient natural airflows, and you can still visit places like this here today where simply opening the windows is enough to keep the rooms cooled to a very tolerable level. But now they build buildings with so little ventilation that they can only be cooled by air-conditioning. And many buildings don't even have windows you can open if you want to! How did depending on air-conditioning like this ever get to be a way of life?
Apart from the huge ecological cost to the planet of using excessive air-conditioning, many studies have shown that people who live and work in permanently air-conditioned spaces develop compromised immune systems. Their bodies become so used to living within a narrow band of temperature fluctuations that their immune systems lose their resilience so they are generally the first people to succumb when there is a bout of cold or flu going round. It's similar to the autoimmune problems that are now known to arise with children who are brought up in environments that are too hygienic and sterile. Scientists now know what our grandparents always knew - that it's healthy to be exposed to some dirt and germs in our formative years in order to build up resistance.
Here's another cool feature at Singapore's international airport - a sunflower garden.
Located in Terminal 2 on Level 3, you step through a glass door, leave the air-conditioned airport interior, and suddenly you're in the warmth of the open air and a different world. Against a backdrop of planes taxiing along the runway and taking off, you find yourself in a garden filled with hundreds of sunflowers that you can walk among and enjoy while waiting for your flight. More photos
One of the most debilitating aspects of air travel is spending so much time in air-conditioned spaces. It's energetically reviving to simply be able to step out of that environment for a few minutes into such a space, especially when transiting on a long haul flight. Kudos to Singapore Changi Airport for thinking of this in the first place and going to the expense of creating and maintaining it.
Sunflowers, with their universally loved cheerful yellow colour and amazing ability to turn their faces towards the sun as it journeys from east to west each day across the sky, are the perfect choice for this garden. Plus, of course, you feel like you can really have a relationship with a plant that stands as tall as a man and looks you in the face!
What is Space Clearing?
People sometimes ask me, "What can I do with all the crayoned masterpieces made by my children when they were young? I want to let the pictures go but they have sentimental value."
As the time draws near for me to leave Bali, I've been reflecting on the things I have loved about living here.
Ever wondered why it is that most people prefer new things to secondhand?
Laptops with LCD or TFT screens emit much lower electromagnetic fields (EMFs) than regular computers and are much easier on the eyes too (less flicker). However this is only the case while the laptop is running on battery. As soon as you plug it into the mains, the electric field of most laptops soars. I've taken readings as high as 800 volts per meter (V/m) on some laptops, and it's rare to get readings of less than a few hundred V/m.
Clutter clearing some books recently in preparation for leaving Bali, I came across a passage I had marked in one written by an Australian news & current affairs journalist who happened to be on vacation in Bali in 2002 when the night club bomb blast happened. As he witnessed first-hand the aftermath of the bombing in Bali's hopelessly inadequate hospitals, he took some time out to write about the effect the carnage was having on him personally.
In case you haven't guessed from my last two postings, I'm in Singapore for a few days.
Here's another cool feature at Singapore's international airport - a sunflower garden.