For the last two weeks, I've been unpacking and getting settled into my new home. This is always something of a traumatic and stressful experience for me, but this latest move has made me realize a few things. I've always been really slow with unpacking. Most of the time the only things that get unpacked are electronics, books and dvds. Most everything else stays in their boxes and they get dragged with the rest of my belongings as I move from place to place. When people see all the dvds and books on the bookcases, they think "he's got a lot of stuff", and it's absolutely true -- I do have a lot of stuff. But what you see "out" is only a fraction of the stuff I have. I have closets full of boxes, full of stuff.
More stuff on stuff, energy and the plan of attack after the fold.
Once upon a time, with 1 carload of stuff, I could carry everything I needed. Moving was easy -- throw all the clothes into a suitcase, and throw everything into a couple of letter size boxes and I was done. It's gotten a lot harder with the multiple wardrobes, and the book and dvd collections seems to have just exploded over the last couple of years. I've been able to combat this growth by moving into larger and larger places -- this is the first time in a long time where I've had to move to a smaller place, and I'm faced with needing to get rid of stuff or risk being buried alive in the stuff.
One thing that I've been able to conceptualize from this experience is that all objects within the home have the ability to contain and reflect energy and the reflection of this energy affects the well-being of the people within the home. The energy that surrounds the object is dependent on its position within the house and its use by the owner. Condition has an effect as well -- something that is new, for instance has a different energy than something that is secondhand.
When I first moved in, my boxes were everywhere -- in the living room, in the dining room, in the hallways and in the bedroom. It was so bad in the evenings I'd constantly bang my shins across boxes or trip over boxes or dodge the towers of boxes. Not only that, but with so many boxes in the way, there was a definite blockage in the flow of space.
While inanimate, these boxes seemed to have taken a life of their own, tormenting and torturing me by appearing in the place that would inflict the most damage upon me. In order for me to change my relationship with the boxes, I had to change how I was relating to the boxes -- in other words, I had to unpack. I had to take the contents out of the boxes, and compress the boxes flat -- only then would the boxes no longer hurt me.
Every object in my home has memories attached to it. Some of them have positive energy surrounding them because I use them everyday, and I get a good feeling when I use these items. Other items in my home have negative energy surrounding them because they aren't used very often, or serve as unhappy reminders for areas in my life that have been immobile too long.
As part of my unpacking process, I've been throwing away many of the things that seem to be enveloped with negative energy. I had a couple of boxes of books that I got rid off -- the books weren't enjoyable, and everytime I looked at the books, all that I would feel were the unpleasant feelings associated with the books. When I finally sold them last week, it did two things -- it got rid of the things that were negatively impacting me (both in terms of emotion as well as space) and it opened up more space in my home for things with positive energy.
The culling process isn't over, however -- it will likely be a few more months before I have my belongings pared down to the amount that I actually want to have, because if I don't clear out this stuff I feel as if I will be suffocated by it. I've started to really reduce the amount of stuff that I keep. My goal is to get down to just what I need (and I'm sure I don't need it all).
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