Aspire Magazine: Inspiration for a Woman's Soul.(TM) Feb/Mar 2020 Aspire Magazine FULL Issue | Page 53

Reaching the truth about what you value in life is one of the most powerful ways of knowing yourself, your stuff, and your space intimately. By knowing what you truly value in life, you will know how to organize all that you own. Desiring a creative and simplified way to get yourself and your space organized is a normal response to living with clutter. Yet the life you want to lead — full of activity, fun, and purpose — is more important than being a weary and downtrodden clutter caretaker. You want to declutter with grace and dignity — and with a professional flair instead of feeling embarrassed and flustered. Typically, the fluster and frenzy heighten when you want to find something important before walking out the door, and it’s nowhere in sight, making you late and anxious. Or you struggle with an inadequate, failing system of disorganized, ever growing piles. To stay calm and functioning, day to day, you find yourself hiding your stuff, shoving it in drawers, moving it around, and storing it haphazardly — but you know this is not how to live with the stuff that you love. The round and round “human in a hamster wheel” behavior of going from clutter to clear and back to clutter is exhausting. It tires you out and makes you itch for more things to covet, instead of appreciating what you already own. From my perspective, getting organized is not about cleaning up a closet or a pantry. It’s about analyzing the causes and personal challenges associated with cluttered and disorganized environments. Realizing that outer space is a reflection of the inner self helps motivate people to look deeper for the cause of clutter. When a person’s mood is off-kilter, it colors how their space will appear. Instead of living in a sacred and splendid space, they will end up living in a cluttered and out-of-control space. A cyclone effect within a home or workspace is often correlated with inner turbulence and commotion. The inner self will also influence how you look at what you own and how you feel about yourself and your appearance. For instance, an outfit you loved a week ago will suddenly make you feel miserable, but it’s not the outfit that is causing your angst. Feelings come from your inner self, processing thoughts and formulating conclusions about your life. When the inner self is cluttered with self-doubt and insecurity, even the most elegant clothing won’t inspire feeling confident or beautiful. Your inner state can blind you to the beauty of life and all the things that you love. Since inner, emotional clutter will trigger physical clutter over and over again, it’s important to first declutter your emotions and your thoughts. This begins with understanding and articulating what matters to you most. Then and only then will you be able to move forward with the Clutter Remedy strategy. The strategy gives you well- thought-out and specific criteria for all the objects you own, and it helps you 53 Instead of wanting to hurl everything out the window or into a dumpster, transforming your life — and space — with stability and confidence is the path to perpetual organized living. My goal is to help you become organized forever, which is accomplished by examining how you view yourself, your life, and your objects.