When we live with clutter, we shrink. Our things become bigger than us. A part of us believes that it's our things home, not ours. We learn to be tiny.
It's hard to be small. We have to crouch both inside and outside. We have to restrict our thoughts and actions. It's hard on us because we are built to expand, grow, learn and explore.
But we are brought up to think that the things in our life define us. We learn to think that we need things to be powerful and happy. We end up not believing in our personal innate wealth. Because of this, we don't see it. We get lost in the illusion. Our things take over our space and our life.
But there comes a time when we begin to be aware the pain of shrinking. It become unbearable. We question the source of the pain. We see that we have forgotten about ourselves and that we put the value in our stuff. This pain is what inspires us to clutter bust.
I see this in my clients faces. There's the exhaustion in their eyes that comes from living tiny for so long. But there's also the glimmer of the waking up. That's the part that I talk with. I want to encourage the person to take back their life. To be big!
A recent client didn't want to look in a big plastic container of papers. She said it was too much to think about, and she'd rather leave the contents alone. I asked her to lift the plastic container. She picked it up and set it right down because it was so heavy. I said that the stuff in the container was on top of her, pressing down its weight every day. But it's her home and her life. Not the container of stuffs. I said the time had come for her to stand up again, unencumbered. The world would benefit from her mightiness. She went through the papers and became big!