How to Organize Your Home With Mindfulness

Organize Your Home With Mindfulness

It is not everyone who can be a genius; however, everyone can organize their own personal space, because an organized space equals a calm and controlled mind.  When focusing on the big things in life, you don’t want to be stumbling over multiple pairs of shoes or crunching on an I-pad, leading to fits of unnecessary rage.  A healthy living space is essential for the modern age because, let’s face it, we have so much stuff that we don’t know how to arrange it properly.

Step One

The first thing to do is to take one room at a time, make a ‘to-keep’ and ‘to-go’ list on two sides of a piece of paper, and then decide on which list you wish to tackle first.  Even this first step can be quite therapeutic, because YOU are taking control back over YOUR life, rather than your possessions and objects owning you.  Yes, a healthy body often means a healthy mind, but did you know that a healthy living space leads to both a healthy body and a healthy mind?

By the way, ‘mindfulness’ is quite a difficult term to define.  It has various origins, although for the purposes of the personal management of space we may define it as the following: ‘re-tuning’ the mind so that it learns to re-gain control over the immediate, present space in which the body lives, so that the mind can become free to accomplish what it wants.  Our minds are often on distant, uncertain things, things over which we can exert no control, and which make our lives more complicated and stressful than they need to be.

Step Two

Now that you have your two lists you are ready to go.  It is best to start with one room, and not to move on until you have completed the shedding of that which is unnecessarily cluttering your life for a declutter.  Why rush?  Everyone outside your home is telling you what to do, how to do it, and when to do it by.  Not so at home.  This is your space.  Take back control over it, and determine to complete the process step by step, room by room.

There is alternative, though.  You can organize this process by category rather than by room.  You may, for example, own a large number of books, or shoes, or cups, or other, which may be spread throughout your home including lots of blenders.  You may then decide to tackle all of one category first, before moving on to the next category.  One advantage of this is that you are not faced with an entire room, which might become a mental barrier.  You are gradually sifting through the levels of your life, and deciding on what you really need, and what is there just because you think you need it.

Phone a Friend?

It doesn’t have to be all up to you.  Why not get a friend or family member to help?  It is often easier if someone is interrogating you, being harder on you than you are on yourself.  They might say something like, “Come on.  Do you really need this?  What about this?  Why do you need this?  Come on, let it go.” or words to that effect.  Just as we might see a counsellor in order to externalize our problems, and engage in catharsis, or a trainer to help train our body, we may see our ‘interrogator’ as someone who can help us to justify our decisions out loud, rather than tossing things round in your mind for days at a time.  When push comes to shove, we are often able to make surprisingly clear and logical decisions.  Procrastination is often our worst enemy, and perhaps a cause for a lot of the baggage we have allowed to accumulate within our home.

Step Three

You can also impose upon yourself a deadline, which your friend can help you adhere to.  If they are there at both the beginning and the end of the process, then you will not want to let them down.  Just as we plan to save up for that next big vacation, we might also plan to downsize and streamline our own personal living space and save up for that next big moment of calmness and wellbeing.  Deadlines can be friends rather than enemies, so long as we are the ones setting them.

If that decision between ‘to-keep’ and ‘to-go’ seems too harsh, you may also consider another one – ‘to-store’ and ‘to-use’.  It might not be necessary for you to completely get rid of a thing from your life.  It might be that that thing needs a break from you, just as you need a break from it.  Consider putting what you need a break from in the attic.  You don’t have to say goodbye to it forever; maybe a rotational system might be right for you.

Source:

1. How You Can Create a Healing Environment at Home – Taking Charge of Your Health & Wellbeing