Monday, October 19, 2009

Getting Out of Sync With Your Own Stuff

Over the weekend I wrote about techniques of getting out of sync to avoid getting entangled in the news of the world and to avoid getting the world entangled in your story. After I wrote those two posts I realized there was a further issue with entanglement that I needed to mention, something that is actually a bigger issue for most people. This is the possibility of getting entangled in your own story.

The idea of getting entangled in your own story can be confusing to begin with. Wouldn’t you want to resonate especially well with your own story? But it depends. If you are doing something with great success and just want to keep going at it, resonating with your own success story is one of the simplest things you can do. But if your story is of things you aren’t doing, projects you can’t seem to finish, and possessions you bought that you don’t seem to have time to use, resonating with that story can keep all that frustration going and keep you stuck where you are.

You know this is your situation if you have a to-do list and you don’t really like to look at it, or if every time you’re in a particularly good mood, you want to go out somewhere, just to get out of the house. When you just want to get out of the house, it is mostly a desire to get away from clutter, from your unused possessions and the story they tell about what kind of person you are.

Getting out of the house just to escape is a short-term solution. The next step I would suggest is to clear the clutter out of one important room in the house. This could be your bedroom, office, kitchen, or living room, but it should be a room where you do important things — or you would, if the atmosphere in the room did not seem so oppressive. Take away all the possessions you don’t use or that don’t relate to what you imagine you would do in that room. With one room cleared, you’ll have a place at home to escape to — you’ll no longer need to leave the house every time you want to escape. You can use that room as a base of operations to clear away the clutter from the rest of the house.

It’s hard not to pick up the resonance of your immediate physical surroundings — but when your home is filled mostly with things you don’t use and don’t have time for, the energy that creates for you is the energy of fatigue, inaction, and waiting. It is the same energy that is created by a to-do list of things you don’t do. By changing this, so that the energy you surround yourself is more active, you become more active, and it becomes easier to change whatever it is you want to change in your life.