Photo by Volha Flaxeco on Unsplash
One of the best things you can do for yourself over the month of January is to clean, declutter, organise and Feng Shui your home.
Seriously, get your home in order and it will reap benefits in other areas of your life.
I know that sounds like a lot of work, but you do have a full month to do it. A month when there’s often not a lot of exciting social activities to distract you (even pre-Covid times).
And if you’re looking to bring about meaningful change in your life over the coming year, this work is a perfect foundation. Because spring cleaning is emotional clearing.
It has this magical, alchemical effect on our energy. It’s as if clearing out the physical debris in our homes has a metaphysical correlation on the mental and emotional stuff that’s been weighing us down.
It’s amazing how many people report an upturn in their mood, their creativity and the opportunities coming their way after a thorough decluttering of their homes.
So while spring cleaning might not be a traditional January activity, this year more than ever, it’s a great time to focus on sorting out your home.
So tidy up the coat and boot mess in your entryway. Clean and reorganise your kitchen cupboards. On a dry day, wash your windows, even if there’s still plenty more rain to come in the weeks ahead.
Go through your home room by room and remove anything that you don’t actively love, or use. Stop holding onto ornaments, artwork and knick knacks that were gifted to you by loved ones, unless you love the actual gift as much as the gesture.
At the same time, make a list of any repairs that need to be made. Undone tasks are a form of mental clutter, and they drain our energy on a subconscious level every time we notice them. So make that list, and start ticking the items off it as you move through the month.
Learn about the Feng Shui bagua, which divides your home into nine equal zones that energetically correspond with different aspects of your life: health and wellbeing, relationships, finances, career path, personal development, family and community, reputation, travel and helpful people.
When you regard a corner of your home as being reflective of your financial situation, it will motivate you to keep it in good order.
There are a lot of rules and guidelines that Westerners may not resonate with, but the important lesson we can all benefit is to create homes where the energy can circulate freely.
This is why decluttering can have such a powerful effect on our lives, not just our homes.
Piles of stuff that need to be sorted through, cleared away, or moved around when we need to get to whatever they’re blocking, is a constant drain on our energy—even if we’re not consciously aware of it.
When we declutter and clean, we also cleanse the space on an energetic level and leave room for that energy to move unhindered around our homes. On the contrary, clutter causes stagnation in our homes’ energy, and also in our lives.
And quite apart from the Feng Shui benefits, a decluttered home helps us in other, simple ways which generally improve our day to day experiences in our homes:
- Less items to accumulate dust makes it easier to clean and improves respiratory health issues.
- Precious time is saved when we no longer need to hunt for items.
- Decluttered spaces are calm spaces, and calm spaces are easier to relax in than busy ones.
- We can use our space and furniture properly, for example sitting to eat at the dining table instead of balancing a plate on our lap because the table is buried under books, paperwork and ironing.
- We can see all the clothes we own and access them more easily. Although the quantity of our clothes will decrease, the variety of what we now wear will probably improve.
When our homes only contain what we need for the day-to-day functioning of our lives, and just enough artistic and decorative pieces to give us a lift, we gift ourselves with a home that is so much more than a shelter from the world.
It becomes a true sanctuary for our bodies, minds and souls.
Instead of draining our energy, our decluttered homes gives it a boost. And that empowers us in all the other areas we’re hoping to make changes.
If we didn’t know it before, 2020 taught us that our home is our castle. And it’s in our best interests to enable the energy to flow easily and make it as uplifting a space as possible.
So, let’s use this oft-maligned first month of the new year to get our houses in order.
First published on Newsbreak.com