Mental Clutter:
The Past and the Future
Clearing material and body clutter can have a strange effect on your brain. On the one hand, you may find some satisfaction and an immediate sense of relief. Without the various “to do” clutter on your list you may feel a sense of freedom and release from guilt. On the other hand, you may find yourself at loose ends. As you begin to incorporate clearing clutter into your regular life, it no longer seems to be a good excuse for balancing your mental and emotional life. If your house is in order, there’s no reason you can’t invite friends and relatives over unless there are some other valid issues to address. Mental clutter is a bit more challenging than material clutter; like body clutter, it requires a lifestyle change. Unlike all forms of physical clutter, your very faculty for assessing your problems, your mind, may be the source of your biggest problem. Though clearing mental clutter is no substitute for treating mental illness, it can be a vital part of living a happy life.
Simplify, Harmonize, and Reflect Intellectually
It’s time to clear the clutter and cobwebs out of your brain. This process will be different for different people. Some have busy lives that are overscheduled and under-thought. Others may have days and evenings free of work and appointments, and yet might have a mind like a hamster wheel of negative thoughts, worries, and life patterns. Both people could use a break and a means of purging some of that unwanted stress and baggage. Even if some of the tips in this chapter don’t apply to you, consider whether you would like to try some of them for clearing mental clutter. Something as simple as a spiritual retreat might be a radical change, like going to a cabin or camping in a remote wooded area; maybe it’s more complex, like a complete overhaul of your cluttered life with the knowledge that you can always bring elements into your life as you please. Unlike physical clutter, you don’t have to bag up your mental clutter and throw it away for good.
Step 1: Simplify
Assess how radically you need to downsize your mental clutter at this time. If you feel stressed out, like you have no time to think, you may have to do the mental equivalent of clearing out all the clutter in your home and starting over—meditation. Meditation consists of clearing your mind of all thoughts for a set period of time. There is a joke about meditation that starts with a student approaching a meditation teacher and asking him how long she should meditate each day. The teacher replied that the student should meditate at least an hour a day. “A whole hour?” the student exclaims. “I don’t have time to meditate for an hour every single day!” The teacher smiles and replies, “In that case, you should meditate for three hours daily.”
The joke is funny because meditation is hard. If it was easy, anyone could clear their minds on the spot and mental clutter wouldn’t exist. The good news is that with practice, you can become proficient enough that you will be able to meditate even in the middle of a stressful work day or on a crowded bus. More about meditation and techniques will appear later in this chapter, but for now, here’s a meditation for the complete beginner.
Your first meditations will not be an hour long. If you’re new to this and feeling ambitious, shoot for twenty minutes. And if, like me, you’ve struggled with attention deficit disorder or just plain distractibility, try for five minutes and lower that time if necessary. My first meditation as a teen must have been about thirty seconds, and my three year old enjoys ten- to twenty-second meditations.
Find a comfortable place where you will not be disturbed. Silence your cell phone and power down any other distracting electronics. Lock doors or put up “do not disturb” signs if necessary. Seat yourself and close your eyes. Attempt to clear your mind of all extraneous thought. Naturally, thoughts will arise. “What am I going to make for dinner? What time is my appointment tonight?” Observe them as if they are outside of yourself, and let them float away like balloons. Some may find it helpful to focus on a mantra said silently in the head or even out loud, like the phrase “clearing clutter” over and over again. Others may find it helpful to focus on a part of the body, such as the forehead, right between the eyebrows. This location represents the intellect and the higher self, which can keep your focus above earthly matters. Neither of these extra techniques are required, however. It may simply take daily practice over a few months before you settle into and even begin to enjoy the routine.
Clearing-Clutter Tip: Does your mind sometimes get so cluttered that you can’t remember where you left your car keys or a person’s name that’s on the tip of your tongue? Here is a simple meditation that can be used to clear your mind in order to recover a memory.
Close your eyes and take a deep breath, drawing out the exhale longer than the inhale. Picture a black door in your mind very clearly. Visualize every detail so vividly that it is as if the door were right in front of you. In your mind’s eye, open the door and walk through it.
Now you can open your eyes and continue your day as normal. Don’t try to push yourself to remember anything. The wayward memory will pop into your head.
Another drastic simplification you may need to do is clearing your schedule. Go on a retreat and declare a personal day if possible. Quit or put on hold as many commitments as possible, keeping in mind that there may be a great many that can be taken up again when you feel ready. Allow yourself the time to relax and even get bored. Consider a “technology fast” where you take a break from all forms of electronic entertainment for a day or a week. Give yourself a sabbat day once a week during which you won’t talk on the telephone, use the computer or other devices. If you’re not ready for that, try turning off your phone after six o’clock each night so you’re not constantly at technology’s beck and call.
Step 2: Harmonize
When you allow space in your life for your intellect to blossom and grow, magic happens. You might find that you’re quite creative. Abandoned musical and artistic pursuits may call to you. You might feel compelled to call old friends or family members with whom you haven’t spoken in a long time. You might feel a tug pulling you toward spiritual or religious study. After you’ve sat with the “boredom” of cleared mental clutter, follow your whims. This time, however, make sure you don’t end up cluttering your life all over again with things that are too stressful and not meaningful to you.
Avoid re-cluttering by remembering your list of what you considered to be most valuable when you were clearing the clutter from your home. If the new activities you’re signing up for don’t fit in with your deepest values, you shouldn’t make room in your life for them. This is especially hard for me, because I love signing up for new things, but am pretty bad at following through for the long haul. Like me, you may have to exercise the tough skill of saying “no” even when it is to people you care about very much. However, when you stick to your list of only the most valuable things in life, you’ll find that your life activities seem to hang together in a weirdly synchronistic way. You can put more on your plate because things fit together well on that plate.
Step 3: Reflect
How’s that meditation going? Are you able to fit it into your routine? Consistency is key to gain and maintain proficiency in this useful skill. Think about what was most easy and most difficult about your first try at clearing your mental clutter. To what extent were you able to clear your schedule? Are there still things in your life that aren’t valuable but you cling to them and continue to put mental effort into them? You may have very important emotional or ethical reasons for doing so, and now is the time to metaphorically and literally meditate on those choices. What follows are some things to ponder and some tips and tricks for clearing mental clutter. As with physical clutter, this cycle of clearing will be ongoing.
Meditation Techniques
You’ve already tried the simplest form of meditation in chapter 2, on page 38. Other meditation techniques are alluded to in the section in that same chapter on caring for your body. Meditation can certainly help your body and mind by lowering your blood pressure and reducing stress, and it can also be a spiritual practice as well. Letting go of your thoughts in meditation is a gesture of releasing attachments and desires, even if only for a moment. Meditation can also allow you to be receptive to positive thoughts and energies as they come to you from your natural environment, the divine, or fellow people. If you’d like to explore the practice of meditation further, or if you’ve been struggling and would like other meditation tools in your toolkit, try some of these spiritual meditation techniques.
Breathing meditation
Focusing on breathing can be one way to make meditation much easier. Giving yourself a singular thing to think about in your body can help keep intrusive and distracting thoughts at bay. Breath has always been a metaphor for spirit, and breathing itself is a way you share the element of air with every other person who has ever existed, past and present. Breath itself can also spiritually nourish the body. Here are some more ways you can use breath control to aid and enhance your meditation.
At first, attempt meditation by simply observing your breath, without controlling it. Notice how your breathing slows the longer that you sit in rest. Next, you can try controlling your breathing through a basic technique called square breathing, called so because you breathe in for four counts, hold your breath for four counts, breathe out for four counts, and hold your breath for four counts again. If you try this technique right off the bat, it may feel very difficult; you’ll want to gasp for breath. But this is good! The challenge will engage and distract you from thinking too much during meditation.
To make square breathing easier, try choosing counts based on your heart beats. This way, if your heart rate is elevated, you won’t be exerting energy unnaturally and feel the need to gasp so much for air. Now try breathing in for four heartbeats, holding your breath for four heartbeats, breathing out for four heartbeats, and then holding your breath again for four heartbeats. If at first this is still too difficult, you can modify it by only holding your breath for two heartbeats.
When you master square breathing, no matter how annoying it may feel in practice, stick with it for a few minutes of meditation. At first, you may have to give it everything you’ve got. After a few minutes, however, your body will adapt to the pattern and you may find yourself forgetting that you’re even doing it. At that point, the relaxing effect will work its magic to slow your heart rate and deepen your meditation perhaps even to the point of trance.
Walking meditation
A walking meditation may appeal to those who are more fidgety. As a person who struggles with attention issues, I certainly find walking meditation to be easier than the seated style. The action of walking replaces breathing or other focii to reduce distracting thoughts. Best of all, if you can perform your walking meditation out in nature, you can commune with creation, Mother Earth, or however else you conceptualize divinity in the natural world.
Choose a safe place for walking meditation that is not near any dangerous traffic. You don’t want to have to force your active mind to stay alert. Instead, find some place where you can zone out without any fear of being attacked or hit by a car. Begin walking at a brisk pace. If you can get your heart rate elevated during this meditation, so much the better, as you can rely on endorphins in your body to help you achieve a trance state. Focus on your footfalls hitting the ground and try to think of nothing else. As a runner, I meditate while running and find some amazing benefits: the thoughts that do creep into my meditations are positive ones. My focus begins to sharpen on moments of beauty. I’ll hear a bird’s song, see a beautiful mushroom, smell fabulous food on a barbecue, or hear a child practicing a musical instrument in a nearby home. By the time I’m finished with my run, my mind is empty of my worldly worries and cares, and I’ve accumulated hundreds of new moments of beauty I can cherish forever.
Psychic meditation
Meditation can be used to attune with your psychic self. “Psychic” here refers to the intuitive senses inherent in all people that cannot necessarily be attributed to the usual five senses. Psychic does not mean omniscient. In fact, everyone is at least a little bit psychic. Meditation can be one way to receive psychic messages from your inner self, the universe at large, from the divine, or from wherever else you think such wisdom might originate.
Before your psychic meditation practice, make sure you have a pen and paper handy to write down any insights that come to you. You may also wish to select a topic, like love or career. Or, you can choose a question on which to focus. To practice psychic meditation, you should work especially hard to eliminate all distractions; there won’t be any walking meditation for this one at first. Make sure you silence any electronics and lock any doors that might disturb you during your meditation. Sit in silent, receptive meditation and clear your mind. Try not to distract yourself, even by focusing on your breathing. If you must aid yourself with a focus, turn your attention to your solar plexus or navel, the area believed to be the home of an energy center you use to psychically observe your surroundings naturally at all times. Conversely, you could focus on your topic or question, driving all other thoughts from your mind.
Wait for psychic messages to come to you. Time your meditation with a timer that will chime at the end of your session, and stretch your meditation to the limits of what you can stand. At the end of your meditation, record any thoughts or insights you can recall, even if they don’t seem to be anything important. Some intuitive thoughts that come to you during psychic meditation may seem like riddles and could make more sense later on. Through experience, you can learn to interpret your psychic meditative thoughts.
Mantra meditation
Another way to make meditation feel easier is selecting a mantra. A mantra is a repeated phrase or affirmation that you can speak aloud or think in your head, depending on your preference. Saying a mantra, especially one you can say while breathing in and out, can be a way to make the meditation time seem to move faster and it maintains a singular focus for the duration of your meditation. Your mantra can be a prayer like, “Let all I do serve God,” or it can be an affirmation of what you want such as, “Clutter be gone.” A prayer-style meditation can be helpful if you want your life and actions to become more spiritual. An affirmation can be helpful if you want to take the psychological approach to try to change your habits into whatever you want.
If possible, I recommend making your own mantra. That way, there will be no question that it makes sense to you. You can also tailor your mantra so it will fit into your breathing pattern. An ideal mantra is something you can repeat while you push out air and suck it in. Remember, you’re not trying to communicate the phrase to another person; it doesn’t matter if you sound funny while you’re gasping and speaking at the same time. The point is that you can speak comfortably whether at a murmured whisper or singing a song. Try creating your own pair of mantras, three to six syllables long, one a prayer and one an affirmation. You can string them together if you like.
Practice meditating while speaking your mantra aloud. In one session you can try your mantra at a whisper. In another, you can try speaking your mantra in a monotone. One session could be about trying to set your mantra to a simple tune. And you could also try just thinking your mantra without saying it out loud in another. Take note of how each attempt affects your attention span and your level of happiness. Choose which method of chanting works best for you.
The best thing about making up your own mantras is that you can have a specific mantra for every situation. You can have a mantra for clearing clutter, a mantra for Mondays, a mantra for when you’re feeling especially stressed, and a mantra for when you’re just feeling thankful to be alive. It might complicate things if you change your mantra too often within meditation sessions, but choosing a new mantra each time you meditate is fine. This new bit of novelty may be the trick to make meditation easier for you.
Peace meditation
Meditation doesn’t have to be something that only pertains to your own personal life without impacting others. Ideally, your spiritual practice will positively affect and influence those around you. Meditating on peace can help you in many ways. It can relax you and clear the clutter from your spiritual life, leaving only whatever makes you feel at peace. Secondly, the energies you generate in yourself having to do with peace could possibly inspire or influence those around you, creating a ripple effect of peace. This isn’t to say that world peace is a simple accomplishment, of course. You don’t have to guilt trip yourself about human nature or quit your martial arts lessons if those give you joy. However, any little bit of peace you can add to the world is good.
Peace starts in the heart of each individual. During meditation, if you can find peace even just for yourself within your soul, you can begin to share peace. The sharing of peace begins with those closest to you, like your children or your spouse. Beyond that, you can share peace as a family with your community, schools, and workplaces. Your communities can then radiate peace to your nation and the world beyond.
To perform a peace meditation, try the following. If you have a white candle on hand, light it. If not, simply visualizing a lit white candle will do just fine. The guru mentioned in the next chapter, Amma, invites everyone on the planet to perform a peace meditation at 7 pm local time to send a wave of peace across the world at any given moment in time. She advises the Sanskrit mantra Om lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu (OM loh-KAH sah-mah-STAH soo-kee-NOH bah-VAHN-too), which basically means, “of all the universe, may all the beings everywhere find peace and happiness.” Repeat this mantra as long as you can, and then end it with Om, shanti, shanti, shanti (OM SHAN-tee, SHAN-tee, SHAN-tee) which basically means “universal peace, peace, peace.” Extinguish your candle and go about your evening. This meditation can be done while doing your household chores, or in walking or seated meditation.
Transmission meditation
Transmission meditation is another sort of meditation designed to radiate peace and other great stuff to the rest of humanity. It was invented by a man named Benjamin Crème, who believes that there are many great people on earth who are already working towards peace and clearing clutter from humanity’s minds, bodies, and spirits. The idea behind transmission meditation is that you and I can sit in meditation and allow energies to flow from the divine through us to the people already doing good works. It’s sort of acting like a battery or a transmitter for activities already in motion. Transmission meditation is delightfully like a spiritual volunteer job for lazy people, allowing anyone to be a link in the chain towards a more utopian existence, or possibly even enlightenment.
Practicing transmission meditation is mercifully simple. The first step is to sit in meditation and clear the mind, as usual, but you get two focus tools to help the job along. First, you can turn your attention to the spot between your eyebrows. This spot is often called the ajna or third eye, as it relates to the higher psychic center, associated with the divine rather than just surviving with what intuition you need to use to navigate human interactions. You’ll find that your attention naturally drops lower through your body as you get tired and bored. If you find yourself focusing on the navel or solar plexus, snap your attention back up to the third eye.
The next nifty tool that you can use for transmission meditation is to use the simple mantra “om.” Om is a word that is supposed to represent the entire universe. If you say it slowly like, “AUM” you will slowly open your mouth into a round shape and then seal your lips in a hum. This is said to mimic the creation of the universe and the eventual inevitable contraction of the universe to nothingness. As such, the “om” sound is a powerful sound because it contains everything that can and will be. You can use this sound to center yourself on the spiritual whenever your attention wanders. You can say “om” out loud, or you can simply think it in your mind without even saying it out loud. You’ll notice that the sound naturally draws your attention back up to the third eye where you want it to be. Meditate until your predetermined time is up and you have completed your session. You can practice transmission meditation daily or weekly. Benjamin Crème designed transmission meditation to be performed frequently and in groups of three or more, with a special invocation spoken to encourage the divine to bring positive energies through the meditation.
Overscheduling and Time Thieves
Imagine a big empty jar and next to it is a pile of rocks and sand. Every day, you have to fill this jar with that pile of rocks. If you haphazardly throw the rocks in the jar, many of them won’t fit. Instead, you should begin by placing the largest rocks in the bottom. Smaller rocks can fit in between these larger rocks. Sand could easily fill in the smallest gaps. Life is much the same. You can paradoxically get more done if you plan for just a few of the most important things that need to get done in a day. Get those things done, and a wide expanse of time seems to open up for the good and little things.
Life can get cluttered with scheduled events. There may be work, school, exercise, and personal care appointments. If you have kids, you might be shuttling them to sports practice or instrument lessons. The life of the modern family looks very different than it did in the past; there is very little room for boredom. Kids and even adults have no time for unstructured play. Yet, out of boredom comes creativity and the yearning for balance and harmony with your spirituality. An overscheduled life is a cluttered one. I live by my calendar and pride myself on not being flakey—everything that lands on my calendar sticks. I have to be cautious about not adding too many things to my calendar or letting things become unbalanced.
Paradoxically, sometimes adding time on your calendar to complete tasks will help to clear your mind. For example, putting twenty minutes of exercise into your daily planner in the morning is better than rushing to squeeze it in to your evening after everything else has been done. Go ahead and add the chore of taking the trash can to the curb to your calendar. Now you don’t have to think about it all day, cluttering your brain with a nagging task.
Clearing-Clutter Tip: If you’re a visual sort of person, try color coding your day planner or online calendar.
For example, work projects could be green, family appointments pink, medical appointments in blue, leisure time in purple, and so on.
That way, you can quickly see whether your life is getting out of balance or overwhelmed. All free time is not equal.
If you have too much work on your plate and not enough play, you will need to make slight adjustments as time marches on.
Give yourself the gift of downtime and even boredom. What about a retreat? Whether a weekend of camping or a stay at a hotel, giving yourself a time away from the usual demands of your schedule can help you gain perspective about what you really want and need. If you can’t afford a real retreat, give yourself a virtual retreat by simplifying your schedule down to just the basics. Aside from what you need to keep your family going, cancel all your social obligations and step down from any leadership or hosting positions you don’t really need to fill. Those opportunities will still be there later if you decide to add things back into your life. Once you’ve simplified things down to the basics, it may be easier to determine which things are more important than others. When your plate is too full, everything on your schedule appears (falsely) to be just as important as everything else.
The Right Attitude Toward Life
An attitude adjustment may be in order if you find your mind cluttered with negativity. There was a reason your mother told you that if you have nothing nice to say to say nothing at all. Years ago, I decided to take that advice. Previously, I had thought I was being honest and open by sharing my complaints all the time. Our culture of oversharing and constant social media certainly encourages this. But it turns out that this habit encourages a bad attitude.
After realizing I was just feeding my own negativity, I kept my whining to a minimum. This doesn’t mean I never complained again; however, when I spoke about a problem that needed a solution, I allowed my displeasure to be voiced. Perhaps I could get some help solving the problem. But if the problem was unsolvable, permanent, or out of my control, I learned not to give it more power over my life by mentally and verbally obsessing about it. If each of us gave voice to every complaint we had in life, from the grit between our toes to the glare of the sun in the sky, there wouldn’t be enough minutes in the day to catalogue all those complaints. So instead, let them go.
Focus on positive thoughts. When you put out positive thoughts and energy into the universe, you will receive that energy in return. At first, you might have to fake it until you make it. Face a person you don’t care for and think to yourself, “I like you.” Or pick one thing you like about that person if you think saying you like him or her too disingenuous. Force yourself to smile, as the physical act of smiling can actually lift your spirits, even when joy was not there at first. Assume the best of people whenever possible and safe. Seek out the little joys in life and seize them. Enthusiastically blow them out of proportion.
Purify Your Thoughts
Negative thoughts can become somewhat of a lifestyle. My mother taught me this as a child, that thoughts become things. When I would whine that I didn’t have any friends at school, she encouraged me not to speak of such things, lest they become a pattern in my life. At the time, being the friendless kid had become a melodramatic identity that felt comfortable. I resisted change because getting rid of those negative thoughts felt like letting go of part of myself. When I did purify myself of those thoughts by replacing them with more positive ones about my character, my fate and friendships changed.
Take a scrub brush to your mind and scour all the negative thought patterns you find there repeating themselves every day. This process might feel difficult. Perhaps you’ve built an identity around hating your body every time you look in the mirror, for instance. At one point in my life, I had forged my identity around hating myself in every way. Climbing out of that hole felt like a lie at first, but my stubborn insistence on this misplaced “honesty” was just an excuse to wallow in my mental clutter. I didn’t have clinical depression forcing my brain to think in those ways, so I was able to turn things around for myself. Here are some tips that worked for me and that might work for you.
Catch yourself when you’re thinking negative thoughts. Make note of what precipitates your negative thinking. Maybe you’re tired or hungry, or maybe something else triggered your thinking, like seeing an unflattering photo of yourself. If you can do anything about these patterns, change them. Find ways to flatter yourself and take care of your needs so you won’t find your thoughts slipping into dark places.
Sometimes, the brain can ruminate over bad things. I might make a big mistake, for instance, and blow things by saying something rude or cruel to my husband. Then I tend to agonize over that mistake long after I’ve said my apologies. At night, I will replay the conversation over and over in my head, kicking myself for doing the wrong thing. If you find yourself with these repetitive negative thoughts when there’s nothing you can do to make the situation better, replace them with positive thoughts. Try using affirmations about what you want to hear. Use the present tense as if you had already achieved what you want. Instead of saying, “I want to be rich,” say “I am wealthy.” At first, replacing your old narratives with new ones will feel awkward and fake, but once you start catching yourself making the switch smoothly, pat yourself on the back.
Purify Your Desires
You don’t have to take a vow of chastity to have pure desires. But you should know your place in the grand scheme of life, and not fight that place so hard that it poisons your life. The mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote about this, saying, “Follow your bliss.” If you are on your right path in life, your challenges will seem relatively easy or at least appropriate for you. If you are on the wrong path and not following your true pure and highest ideals, even the simplest troubles will seem insurmountable.
Let me illustrate this with an example. When I had a job I hated with an hour-long commute, I suffered through the daily drive. I sighed noisily at red lights and I swore at other drivers. I gritted my teeth and my blood pressure must have been through the roof. But when I had a three-hour commute to a job I loved, the drive was entirely different. I turned on the radio and sang out loud. My trip through the countryside was a time for me to relax and prepare for the work ahead. It seemed like nothing to me, and I was genuinely surprised when others said they could never handle the same commute on a regular basis. I was following my bliss. Look back to your list of the most valuable things in your life to see some of your purest desires, or explore more of your spirituality in chapter Four to discover new, pure desires. Cut impure desires out of your life ruthlessly.
Happiness is a measure of your appreciation for what you have versus your desires. If you could write out an equation for happiness, it would look like this:
Happiness = Appreciation ÷ Desire
To acquire more happiness, you can either increase your appreciation for what you already have or decrease your level of desire for what you don’t have. You’ll have to take a hard look at your individual situation to find out what is going on. If your mind is cluttered with desires large and small, you might have to purge some of them. One clue that this is the case is when all your desires seem equal in strength. If getting a new pair of shoes seems as important in the moment as taking care of your health, you’ll need to purge the irrational fixation.
Purify Your Motives
Imagine your life is a series of cups labeled with different things that motivate you. One cup might say “career” and another might read “family.” Now imagine you also have a vessel filled with oil. Every time you pour the oil from one cup to another, you lose a little as it clings to the walls of the cup. That is, you use up the inner resources you have in life when you switch from one extrinsic motivation to another. Spiritual people try to be motivated by spirit, because spirit is a sort of magical cup that never needs to be replenished.
Motivation is different from desire. If your desire is a stable house and home, for example, you might be motivated by an impure motive like greed, or by a more pure motive such as harmony with family members and having enough (with some to spare to give away to those who do not). Motives are tricky to separate from desires because our culture has specific tracks that you are supposed to follow to get what you are supposed to desire. We’re told to grow up, get a job, get married, and have children. If you feel unhappy after failing to complete one or more of those tasks—or worse, after dutifully accomplishing all of them—you will feel rightfully confused about your motivations. We all know that single people are not “incomplete” and can be just as happy as people who choose to build a family.
But talking about happiness is where things start to get abstract and maybe uncomfortable for those who like to map out life in simple steps. Purifying your motivations means clinging to those highest desires and letting go of your fixation on how they will be achieved. Pay attention to how you may be wishing, hoping, or praying to see how to streamline and purify your motivations. Let’s say you find yourself thinking, “I hope my boss lets my paycheck come through a couple days early this month so I can get my car out of the shop.” Replace this with, “I have safe and reliable transportation anywhere I need to go.” The new statement is in present tense, as recommended earlier. Most importantly, it releases the manner in which you receive what you need. A friend might come in town and lend you a car. You might win a class action legal suit you never knew you entered and receive a settlement. Your next-door neighbor might get a job at your workplace and offer to carpool. Your motivations are transmuted from anxiety and fear to faith and your true desires.
Letting Go of Envy, Jealousy
“Comparison is the thief of joy,” Teddy Roosevelt once said. Envy can be a subtle enemy; you don’t have to gawk at celebrity wardrobes to be its victim. Instead, envy can be borne out of a lack of self-esteem such as wondering if you’re doing as well by your children as some other mother or father out there. In other words, admiring others can turn to envy if you put yourself down in the process. Letting go of envy means boosting your self-esteem, which is the same technique for clearing the mental clutter of jealousy.
Jealousy is rooted in the fear of not being good enough for a significant other, friendship, or even a relative. A related problem is a reliance on external validation from somebody else who is important to you. For some people, this can be pretty intense. As a young adult, I was devastated any time my parents or my significant other felt angry or sad and would immediately blame myself. Eventually, I had to seek my own internal validation because I cannot force somebody else to feel a certain way about me or anyone else. All I can do is work to clear my own cluttered emotions.
Self-esteem takes time to build, but the good news is that once it is established, many cluttered thoughts will melt away. To build your self-esteem, turn inward for validation whenever possible. If you find yourself reaching out to a friend or a lover to make everything all better, stop yourself. Instead of asking someone else whether something is okay or looking to examples of others, pay attention to your own core values. If you don’t quite match up to what you want to be, that’s no reason to beat yourself up. Rationally, you know that negative self-talk won’t get you any closer to your goals. You’ll need to either readjust your expectations or simply keep doing the best you’re able. Just like a physical fitness plan, your self-esteem “fitness” will take time to form. You can’t break all your bad habits overnight but you can slowly reduce their occurrence. I had such low self-esteem when I was a school teacher that I would actually schedule thirty minutes into my daily appointment book to cry. Yes, that’s right, I allotted time to feel sorry for myself and cry over all the mistakes I had made. That way, it was actually a blessing if I didn’t have to use those thirty minutes.
Releasing Worry
Worry is worthless. True concerns are different from worries, as being concerned about something implies there is a way to change or fix it. Worry is a useless exercise you put your brain through when nothing can be done about a situation, and those mental gymnastics can actually be harmful. Here’s an interesting trick I learned from palmistry or fortune-telling using the hands. Take a look at your dominant hand on the fleshy part of your palm at the base of your thumb. You may see many small lines radiating from your thumb. Those are worry lines, and legend says the more worry lines you have, the more of a worry-wart you are. If those lines cross your life line, the line that curves across your palm, it means your worries are affecting your health and longevity.
Whether or not the palmistry is true, we all know that constant stress can affect mental and physical health. Releasing worry can be a difficult thing to do, however. Happily, there are many effective strategies. Simplification of your life is one way. This may require delegating your worries to other people who can take action regarding those worries, turning them into concerns. Some people delegate their worries to God, and giving worries up to the divine is the ultimate expression of faith. For others not willing or able to take that step, simply distracting the self from worries until such time as ignoring worry becomes habit may have to suffice.
Reacting to Criticism
I seem to attract people into my life who are great at overreacting to criticism. My father was a perennial blame-shifter, which led to my own aversion to accepting blame. I would turn into a giant diva whenever criticism came my way. My husband is a perfectionist who avoids starting anything about which he might get criticism. And now I have two young children who might very well dissolve into tears if I use anything less than a cheery tone. Why do we all clutter up even constructive criticism with all these feelings and aversions to change?
Part of the reason may be self-esteem, which you could be working on already. Once you have a high enough self-esteem, criticism will seem less like a reason for sadness and more as an opportunity to better yourself. Paradoxically, an over-inflated ego can also hamper appropriate response to criticism, as it may feel like everyone is attacking you with bogus claims. It is challenging to find that sweet spot where you know yourself but are also willing to change.
The best way to react to criticism is to detach the actual critique from the person delivering the message to you. Evaluate it objectively without immediately reacting. Sometimes, even a wildly bogus assertion may have some nugget of truth in it you can use for self-improvement. Give yourself some time to objectively consider the criticism after you have time to separate the criticism from any social situation in which you may have received the feedback.
Clearing-Clutter Tip: Try these steps to clear con-
flict, modeled after the Baha’i faith practice called “consultation.”
1. Gather all conflicted parties together.
2. If appropriate, begin the meeting with a prayer for all to go well and to establish a goodwill atmosphere of a community coming together to help each other for the good of all.
3. Lay out all of the facts of the matter. Try to re-move judgment and speculation, although the way someone feels can count as a fact.
4. Encourage everyone present to offer solutions. As each solution is offered, all should release ownership of the idea.
5. Strive for consensus on a solution. It may be helpful for all to agree on trying one solution only for a set period of time.
Procrastination
Since I write a lot of books, people around me think that I’m immune to procrastination, just as it might appear from the outside that my house repels clutter. Neither could be further from the truth. I battle these problems same as everyone else. Procrastination and attention are a particular bane of mine. As with the techniques for clearing physical clutter, the only way to confront procrastination is turning to your list of the most valuable aspects of your life and deciding which pastimes fit into those categories and which do not.
Think carefully about what you throw out here. For example, I spend a lot of excess time surfing the Internet. However, one valuable thing in my life is recreation. What sorts of time-wasting activities should I allow in my recreation? I decided that things like games are important because they support my love of play. However, spending too much time on snarky blogs or news sites makes my worldview more negative, and doesn’t fit into the sort of carefree and rejuvenating recreation I envisioned for myself. Therefore, I quit reading those blogs and dedicated the time I would have spent reading them on my work and spending time with my family, since those were also valuable things for me.
If you find yourself procrastinating too much, you might have to get serious with yourself and set a schedule for recreation and work, giving yourself specific amounts of time for each activity. I like to start with the most difficult or dreaded project first. Just as it’s a good idea to eat the tastiest food on your plate first, it’s better to start with the activity that makes you feel more accomplished. Don’t load up on empty time-fillers. Start earlier in the day with your most valuable projects, even if you’re traditionally a night person. Make your priorities … your priority!
Perfectionism
Although it may not seem that way, people who hoard or collect more things than they need are perfectionists. Each item piling up represents a piece of the puzzle that is an ideal life; a life that is never quite lived. Perhaps a broken radio represents a dream of fixing something useful. A musical instrument abandoned on a shelf can seem like the potential to be a free-spirited musician. Likewise, the mental clutter of a perfectionist can be an odd assortment of obligations and paradoxical avoidance of some duties. If the perfectionist can’t have it all, he or she will settle for nothing.
Relinquishing perfectionism is a tall order. For some it may begin with accepting constructive criticism. For others, it may help to think of themselves as a friend. Perfectionists are hardly ever as strict and harsh with friends as they are with themselves. Step outside of yourself and imagine what advice you would give to a friend who came to you with the troubles you have now.
For me, my perfectionism comes out strongest in academia. As an only child, I was encouraged to have the best grades possible. In fact, I was rewarded monetarily depending on what grades I achieved, with a bonus for perfect grades. This extrinsic motivation made me determined but nervous. In my head, I connected my parents’ love and approval with the payout amount. One day, halfway through a quarter of college schooling, I found myself on the edge of an impossible and self-imposed dilemma. If I excelled, fine. If I didn’t get perfect grades, I would drop out because I was struggling and not doing as well as I would have liked or expected of myself. Thankfully, I found another option: I told my parents that I had outgrown their reward system and that I would keep my grades to myself from that point on. My parents were bewildered, as even imperfect grades used to earn me cash, though not the “jackpot” of perfection.
To beat the clutter that perfectionism makes in your life, try practicing “good enough.” Assess your anxiety level first in the same way you would if trying to let go of treasured objects. If you feel like you would lose your mind if you made an average grade on a paper or slacked off when painting the interior of your house, by all means move on to something that makes you less neurotic. Perhaps cutting corners on a recipe or ignoring a messed-up stitch when knitting a sweater is more your speed for now. I know that our house started getting clean when I quit trying to do top-to-bottom deep cleaning and settled for frequent but relatively half-assed cleaning.
Breaking Habits
I’m sure you already know what your bad habits are. Clearing clutter from your mental life may mean tackling some of your vices and bad habits head on. This may be incredibly difficult if you’re set in your ways for the same reason that trying for anxiety-inducing goals first is difficult. It may seem odd to try to dismantle habits that aren’t necessarily bad, but such an exercise can gently expose you to the light anxiety associated with breaking any habit. With practice and added confidence, you will be ready to eliminate a bad habit that perhaps you’ve failed to overcome many times.
Breaking even benign habits can help open your world up to a freedom you haven’t known and thus remove clutter from your mind. For example, imagine that you eat the same thing for lunch every day at the same restaurant next to your place of work. If you never break that habit, nothing bad will happen to you. But you might never discover amazing new dishes at more interesting restaurants and perhaps even make some new friends in the process. Worst of all, you might fall into a rut in another area of your life. You might take the same route and the same stairs to get to that restaurant. The rut in your life might take on a ripple effect that makes routine feel like the only comfortable thing.
Challenge your habits and especially the bad ones (of course). It may be that you’re already working on those. If you manage to eliminate one, good for you. But if you fail to quit a bad habit several times, try attacking a smaller daily habit. Change up what you buy at the grocery store. Buy a “challenge” ingredient to cook into a new meal. Teach yourself to do something long overdue, like how to swim, speak a new language, or ride a motorcycle. Take a bicycle to work instead of driving. Try a vegan diet. Anything that will break you out of your usual routine can bring you freedom from old habits and help you realize that you can change anything in your life at any time you wish.
You can replace your less stellar habits with good one. I can tell you that when I first started an exercise routine that included running, I hated it. But now, I can happily say that I have a positive addiction to running. Old habits can be broken and replaced with positive new ones that will energize and encourage you.
Relationships: Taking a Hard Look
Are your relationships in life valuable to you? There may be some relationships in your life that are not serving you in the way that they had in the past or should be now. Perhaps an adult son is draining your financial and emotional resources instead of setting off on his own. Or an ex-girlfriend may still insist on having you pick up her dry cleaning, even though you’d like to move on with your own life. Though it may seem cruel, you should take a hard look at those relationships and decide whether any pruning needs to be done. Setting healthy boundaries doesn’t have to be a negative thing that makes you feel guilty. Be real with yourself. If you do have these types of relationships, chances are that deep down you know you aren’t really getting back together with that ex or being a real help to your son. You’ll have to be tough with yourself and clear those relationships from your life so you have room to breathe.
Even vital and necessary relationships can accumulate relationship clutter. Relationship clutter happens when the interactions between people become muddled with filler. Imagine coming home from work to a partner who immediately nags and berates you about the work you’ve neglected around the house. As a result, you might feel exhausted and negative about coming home after a hard day at work. The nagging might not be about anything important, and most relationship bickering isn’t about the truly valuable things in life. Nevertheless, this relationship clutter can detract from shared values that could be enjoyed over a whole lifetime. Over time, this clutter can even undermine and destroy a relationship.
Many relationships get cluttered when one or both people in the relationship engage in mental accounting of things the other person does. This starts out with good intentions, as it indicates that a person has high expectations and is driven towards fairness and equality. The pervasive notion that people should always compromise in a relationship increases the feeling of being shorted if you do this mental accounting. In reality, each person has to go above and beyond the call of duty rather than meeting the other person halfway. It’s only when you overlap your efforts that you can weave a strong relationship. You can’t control the other person’s actions, but you can set a good example and lead the way.
Getting Rid of Relationship Clutter
Again, nagging, bickering, snarky comments, and other relationship bad habits are things that will take time to prune out of your life and vocabulary. Start by imagining what you would like your interactions to be like. This is sort of like a visualization, only you may have to use all of your senses. Close your eyes and think about what perfect interactions with your partner would be like. Are you smiling at each other? Do you feel warm compassion for your partner as you talk? Are you touching each other or showing other signs of affection? Are you showing interest about each other’s days and using active listening by making eye contact and asking curious questions?
As you move forward in your relationship, strive to make your interactions match your vision. You can initiate the sort of behavior you hope to see from your partner. It might be hard to change the whole pattern of your relationship all at once. You can try a day at a time, removing a little clutter at a time. For an entire day, for example, refrain from nagging and instead make it a point to recognize some good work your partner does and compliment that. On another day, instead of making a snarky put-down joke, say something to enhance your partner’s self-esteem. You can decide whether or not it helps to let your partner in on your relationship improvement goals. You know your relationship best.
Eliminating Debt
Though it may not sound like it, debt is a form of mental clutter. Let me share with you an analogy I learned from my mother: Picture a rubber band ball. When you feel stressed and your life is full of clutter, it is as if your head is the core of this rubber band ball. Every rubber band taken off the rubber band ball reduces the amount of stress in your life. All the things you are supposed to do in life are rubber bands: calling and finally making a dentist appointment after months of stalling, paying a bill, getting your oil changed, and everything else. Major debts are many small and large rubber bands squeezing on your life, but every one you remove is a big burden released, even if it’s just a small baby step toward debt freedom.
Some suggestions on eliminating debt include: credible counseling services, talking to your bank about consolidating or otherwise managing payments, getting a financial advisor, and creating a budget. Make sure to verify that any credit counseling or financial advisor professionals are licensed, well-reviewed, and have a good reputation with the Better Business Bureau. Creating a budget is beyond the scope of this book, but there are many fine books that outline a step-by-step process, and they can likely be found at your local library as well.
Working on your debt depends on your personal debt problem, of course. These are things you can discuss with a financial advisor. However, it is important to be aware of how seriously debt can clutter your mind. In American culture in particular, debt is socially accepted, and it’s a way of life. But it may not be personally acceptable according to your own psychology. In such a case, having major debt can feel just as mentally cluttering as if you were not living in alignment with your values in any other facet of life.
e-clutter
Now that a “desktop” refers more commonly to pixels on a computer, virtual clutter has appeared along with it. Just as it is difficult to find an important piece of paper on a cluttered countertop, it is hard to find a valuable file on a computer in which nothing is organized and nothing is ever deleted. This virtual clutter represents mental clutter, because a crowded desktop and added minutes on your life when searching for an email are just as disruptive as physical clutter.
Sure, it may seem that one of the benefits of moving things to a computer is the lack of physical clutter. But virtual clutter can affect your life, so it is important to address the issue. Part of this may simply require organizing, like naming files and putting them in specific folders so you can find them quickly. Another strategy may be deleting excess photos or videos (especially blurry or mistake photos) to save space. Your strategy will have to meet your specific technological needs and limitations, so just remember that e-clutter should not be overlooked. Start by thinking about which areas of your virtual clutter may be affecting your life the most, and start deleting and setting an organization scheme in that area.
Clearing-Clutter Tip: Overhaul your email inbox. Be sure to route all your emails into one place and deal with them there. Don’t use your inbox as a “to do” list by leaving emails in there to chatter at you.
Instead, sort through and deal with each email one by one, taking the time to unsubscribe from or filter the ones you no longer wish to receive.
Add something to your calendar or your “to do” list if you can’t deal with it immediately. If you can, set yourself a half hour or an hour a day to check email and deal with messages so they aren’t constantly distracting you.
The Chattering Monkey Mind
If you closed your eyes and tried to meditate at the beginning of this chapter, you probably encountered your monkey mind—the constant chattering that distracts you from experiencing the moment, your meditation, or simply from relaxing. The monkey mind might seem malevolent to some, telling you that what you are trying to do is stupid and that you will never be able to achieve true mental peace. For others, it might be a playful and cheerful distracting influence, encouraging you to check your Internet pastimes instead of paying attention to what’s in front of you.
It is hard to defeat the monkey mind because it seems so constructive. Even the criticizing monkey mind might seem like it has some honest nuggets of information to share. However, be observant as to when the monkey mind presents itself. Even if it speaks the truth, the information may not be helpful to you if it comes in the middle of the night or when you are trying to concentrate on your work. Likewise, a playful mind is a good thing. However, playfulness at the total expense of any productivity can lead to more shame or discouragement than the joy that it brought in the first place.
The key to keeping your monkey mind from trashing your inner temple and creating mental clutter is to be deliberate about when you let the monkey run free. If you’re creating a painting or writing a novel, this might be the perfect time to allow your inner narrative to run wild. However, if you’re attempting to study for a final exam or to put the finishing touches on a major project at work, you’ll need to be able to rein in your monkey mind. More importantly, if you’re having a heart-to-heart talk with your spouse or child, you’ll have to listen to him or her over the chatter of your monkey mind.
So how do you keep the monkey mind under control? You can’t just cage it up and beat it. Treat it like a pet that you love but need to be obedient. Firstly, give it some freedom at designated times, maybe a creative outlet or a certain way that you play. Once you’ve got the care and feeding of your monkey mind down pat, you can try a little more training. If you haven’t yet made daily meditation a routine, the potential escape of your monkey mind is a good reason to start. At first, it may seem nearly impossible to keep that monkey mind under control. You might have to ignore and release chattering thoughts with every breath you take for five miserable minutes. But over time and with practice, you’ll find the process easier. With luck, you’ll be able to attain freedom from your monkey mind whenever you want and for as long as you like. It is worth the gradual struggle to overcome the will of your monkey mind.
Stop Multitasking
When I was a small child, tests determined that I had Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I always joke that I don’t remember the testing because I wasn’t paying attention. Later, I developed brain disabilities that made it even more difficult to stay on task. True attention problems are murderously difficult to deal with on a regular basis. As soon as you sit down to work on something, you are convinced that the project is impossible to finish. Your mind zips around like a hummingbird. If you let it, mental clutter can make it impossible to make real progress, so don’t fall victim to that self-fulfilling prophecy. Your attention problems can be managed through careful scheduling and using the following tips.
One way to clear the clutter of your mind is to stop multitasking. While part of our culture these days, the human brain is still bad at multitasking. Even though the novelty of a new email message or checking a fresh screen feels satisfyingly motivating, it still takes time for your brain to switch gears every time you change tasks. If you split your tasks into several large chunks of time in a day, you’ll accomplish much more work than if you gave partial attention to a larger project while occasionally working on other side tasks. The hard part is giving up those side tasks. The instant gratification of seeing something new when working on a tedious task feels amazing. Try telling yourself that single-minded work will allow you to complete all of your tasks sooner, giving you more freedom for what you want to be doing. Also, if you divide your tasks up by time on your daily planner, you can look forward to the light at the end of the tunnel at a specific time on the clock no matter what task needs to be accomplished.
How can you stop multitasking? Start by reducing the amount of time you allow for it. For example, spend several uninterrupted hours on your most important work when you arrive at work in the morning. After that, you can give time to some of your side tasks. If you really enjoy multitasking, you can allow yourself time to indulge. Reduce the changing of the gears as much as you can within a day. If you need, you can take baby steps toward this goal, such as turning off all distracting electronics when having family time, or even designating some areas of your house as electronics-free zones.
As the mother of two small children, I know that sometimes multitasking is absolutely necessary. There’s no way I can work on this book while completely ignoring my babies. However, I can still work to keep the gear-switching to a minimum by lengthening the time I work between interruptions. That means no procrastinating after I’ve taken care of the babies and really have no excuse to delay sitting down at my desk and working. Even if you don’t have the ideal amount of time available for the work at hand, you can still increase the amount of what you get done in a given day by resisting the pull of multitasking.
Most of all, though, if you truly suffer from attention problems, you’ll have to learn to live with the grinding of those gears as you force yourself to get back on task. Sometimes I just can’t avoid being pulled away from my work to deal with helping a baby or a preschooler. Of course I have visions of the perfect work space where I can write when I feel inspired and remain undisturbed, but the reality of my life is that this will never happen. If I wait for those conditions, I will never get my work done. Instead, I’ve practiced until I have become an expert at resuming every task immediately after a disruption. It doesn’t feel great. In fact, sometimes it feels positively painful. But not every chore feels wonderful all the way through, and mastering this particular skill can make your life feel more streamlined and less cluttered.
Clearing-Clutter Tip: A few hours before bedtime, power down all your electronic devices. Looking at the light from screens such as the television, computer, laptop, tablet, or even smartphone may actually make you feel wired and not ready to sleep.
Consider downloading a program or application that changes your screen lighting settings depending on the time of day, so your eyes gradually get reduced exposure to blue light, which is most associated with sleep disruption. Make this one small change to give you more restful nights.
The Here and Now
Sometimes the life of a dog or a small child is enviable. They live in the present without being haunted by past mistakes. They don’t worry or plan endlessly about the future, and they don’t even directly concern themselves with thoughts of death. This, essentially, is the complete lack of mental clutter—the ability to enjoy the present moment for what benefits it might have. A pleasant temperature, a satiated stomach, a feeling of health in the body, a dry place to take shelter; all of these exist in the “now.” Before my father died, one of the last books he read was The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Devastated by his passing, I quickly took the book to read for myself, since my mother said that it had received rave reviews. The embracing of the present moment seemed to be the message he tried to share with me in his last couple years of life. To a young adult daughter preoccupied with relationships, education, and career, he tried to describe the precious moment that is enjoying a cup of tea while overlooking a busy city street.
Living in the present moment is simple but incredibly difficult; you certainly can’t let go of your future obligations. One solution is to release the way you beat yourself up over the past. Remember that concerns are things you can change, but worries should be relinquished if they are about things beyond your control. Relinquish all worries about your past. Forgive yourself for past wrongs you can no longer do anything more to right. If you’ve vowed to never do something bad again, offering whatever reparations and apologies are possible, you’ve done what you can and must move forward to get something good out of it.
Letting go of your future is not so simple. You can do it for moments at a time during meditation, but at other times it can seize you with (sometimes incredibly necessary) fear. One strategy for reducing this pressure is to release attachments to outcomes, which you can read more about in the next chapter. Otherwise, you can simply work to expand the time you spend focusing on the present. Find time to be grateful for what you have and what you are experiencing in the present moment. Take time to notice the beauty of a sunrise or sunset. Take a moment with your child when he or she has an interesting question or catches your eye with an expression of love. Savor a bite of delicious food without immediately swallowing it to finish your meal. You may think you don’t have enough hours in the day to appreciate the present moment, but the most exciting news about living in the here and now is that you always have time to just be yourself. Appreciate every moment as you live it. This isn’t so much a switch you flip as it is a muscle you learn to use when you make everyday movements. Once you notice how it works, though, there’s no turning back. You’ll notice the beauty of a thunderstorm even when your bus is late on a rainy day.