Declutter Your Way To Happiness

1. Introduction: Hello, friends. My name is Nina. Welcome to discourse about decluttering. I'm a mindfulness teacher. In this course, we will discuss about decluttering physical spaces, but also the mental spaces. When you go through this course, you might see that decluttering your physical space can also have very positive effects on your mental space. By decluttering your physical space and creating more organized and intentional environment, you can experience a sense of calm clarity and happiness in your daily life. There are many benefits of decluttering. You will create a more harmonious living space for yourself. We will go through different aspects of our homes and our lives that might need decluttering. This includes decluttering stuff in our homes, war tropes, and other physical spaces. We will also be discussing decluttering other areas in our lives, such as use of social media and toxic relationships. Clutter can hurt our mental and emotional well being, cause stress, anxiety, and feeling of overwhelm. By decluttering our physical space, we can create more organized and peaceful environment that can help improve our overall happiness. I hope you enjoyed this course. 2. The Mind-Clutter Behind Decluttering: Has been lots of talk about decluttering. People getting rid of the things that don't serve them, and there are all these different methods to do that. Mi anche one in, one out rule, five item rule, and so on. But I well let's talk about the spiritual aspect and the benefits of decluttering. In this course, we will discuss the benefits that decluttering has on our minds. This course is divided into different sections, and they are not all about decluttering our homes, but decluttering our lives. Will be talk about decluttering social media time spent relationships that don't serve us anymore. Decluttering the things in everyday life that keep tracking us down. Everything is not going to apply to everyone, but you can take some of these methods and use them in your life. We start with decluttering our environment because that is often the easiest task to take. It can feel very overwhelmed at first. But I have your back and I believe you can do it. Before we get into that, I would like to share my story with you. A couple of months ago, I was chatting with a friend of mine. We have been friends for 17 years. We were sitting on our lunch and we started to talk about the spiritual benefits of decluttering and owning less. When I was a child, I was not very organized. I was not just that we had lots of things as a family. We had too many things. When I think about my childhood, it was quite chaotic. My mother has a mental illness. She's bipolar. My dad died when I was very young. My mother is a hoarder, but she's very clean and organized hoarder. Despite of her being very organized, We still didn't really have the place to put all our stuff in. What it came to me and my sister, we just had too much stuff, and I do feel that our mother gave us a lot of things because she felt guilty about not being around that much. My sister and I, we had barbies, legos, and my little ponies. We had tons of toys. We had a toy mountain. It was two girls living in a toy heaven, but everything was scattered. Cleaning was difficult because there was so much stuff. You couldn't even close the closet doors. If we think about some decluttering experts like Mary Condo. In one of her books, she said that since she was a little girl, she tried to come up with new ideas on how to organize. When I was a child, I feel that I had the opposite thing happening to me. Somehow I got used to living around bunch of things so much so that it became normal. But in my head, I always felt this constant stress and constant chaos, and my room was always messy. And my room was also filled with stuff that belonged to my mom and my sister. I literally felt like my room was the place where people just dumped their things. I told this story to a friend of mine and she told me about her childhood like me. My friend was raised by a single mom, but she was an only child. My friend told me that she had an uncle who used to work in a toy company and every Christmas and every birthday, she would get tons of toys. Not just like one or two toys, but she might get 20 toys at a time. Eventually, she had so many toys that she could not walk in her room, and the amount of toys gave her anxiety. I am from Finland and average finish person owns 10000-50 thousand items. An average American owns four times as much about 200,000 items. Here I must point out that American houses are usually bigger than finished houses that might have something to do with that. If I use the 50,000 items as an example, research shows that a person only uses 250 items daily. This course is not about being a minimalist, but knowledge can help us to evaluate what are tos items that we use a lot. If we have multiple pieces of the same thing, do we really need all of them. My friend told me that at first it was really nice to get all these toys. It was exciting. But the more she got these toys, she became more and more upset and she couldn't really tell why. She was a little girl. Then she and her mother sold and donated many of the toys and she started to feel a lot better. That is because she got her space back. Declttering the physical space helped her to declutter her mind. Here's a little trick for anyone with children. Pile together all your child's toys and let them choose the ones they like the most. Back the rest, put them into the closet or take them to the attic. Let six months go by, bring the toys back and your kid feels like they are new. They are excited to play with toys they have not seen for a while. Children are not any different from adults. They have the everyday things that they use and play with on daily basis. When I guide you through this course, I'm also going to talk about my own lifestyle change and how my views on owning things have changed. I really started to declutter again about a year ago. I was having a very difficult situation in my life. I was constantly feeling stressed and anxious. I have also decided to move abroad at some point and before that, I want to get rid of all the things that I don't need to take with me. De cluttering is a mind shift change, and it takes a lot of time at work. Sometimes when I go through my upper shelves and I find things that I had forgotten. Last week, I sold my carrier box. I had gotten my cat stroller and she likes the stroller a lot more than the box because there is more space to move around. The cat box had been there unused in the upper shelf for a year and I had completely forgotten about it. I listed it to one of the online marketplaces and I saw it the next day. Things like that happen when you start decluttering. You come across things that you had forgotten. 3. Clutter Avalanche: Let's talk about clutter avalanche. What is a clutter avalanche? Clutter avalanche happens when you want to clean something in your home, but you cannot complete it without organizing something else first. It is very similar to procrastination. In your mind, you might delay the challenge coming ahead. I don't have a dishwasher at the moment. I live in a pretty old house, and my sink gets messy quite easily. An example of an avalanche would be me needing to clean the sink. But instead, I will clean the spice rack rather than the sink and then maybe move on to organizing my try ingredients. That is an example of how our mid plays tricks on us. How to overcome that. I listen to a lot of podcasts and when I am cleaning or decluttering, you might want to listen to music or radio. Something that can help you to focus on the task at hand. There is also clutter that we don't even know we have. This is the stuff that is usually hidden on top shelves or the boxes under the bed in the basement or in the attic. Every time when you tackle this kind of clutter and make a decision to organize it, remember to tank yourself because that is important. We don't do the cluttering for other people. We do it for ourselves to feel better about ourselves, our home, and the space in which we live. Do remember that, and you don't need to go through everything in one day. I have been doing this for a year and I feel like I am halfway between my process of decluttering. I also have a background of growing up in a home with hoarders. So I needed to do a mind shift change inside my head. I personally do believe that our own energy very much affects the way we are attached different items. This can benefit us during the process of decluttering. A simple method is to make three sections, the one for keeps, the one for maybe, and the one to get rid of. Our heart knows what items we want to keep. That is my firm belief. Decluttering is also practicing your own intuition. Is this something that I use on day to day basis? I hope that this course will inspire you to do some decluttering gives you ideas and maybe helps to think about our relationship with things. 4. Wearing Only Clothes That You Like: One of the things that I did during my decluttering process was to sort out all of my clothes and only start wearing the clothes that I like. This had some very surprising benefits. It is a huge time saver. I am originally from Finland and we have four seasons. So I would have multiple pieces of clothing for summer and for winter and for snow and rain and sun. But it was only half of those clothes that I actually wore on everyday basis. There are lots of women who like shoes. That is not me. In total, I have only six pairs of shoes, and I got rid of four pairs. Now, I have two pairs of sandals for the summertime, two pairs of winter boots. I have rubber boots for the rainy days, and I have one pair of sneakers. If you like shoes, you definitely don't need to follow my example. All of these six pairs of shoes that I have, I really like all of them. When you only wear the clothes that you like, it saves time because you don't have overwhelming amount of options to choose from. This has made my life so much more simple and stress free. The second benefit is that it really makes you happy. Imagine this, you open the door of your closet, and the only things that you see are clothes and bags that you really like. The materials are smooth. They are all your favorite colors, and because it is not a huge pile of clothes, the space in the closet is airy. Another thing that you experience is confidence boost. And you wear the clothes that you like, it is assigned to the world around you that you feel comfortable in your own skin. You feel comfortable in the clothes that you are wearing. This also leads you buying less because you are wearing more of the clothes that you already have. I mostly have dresses and skirts. That is something I wear a lot. There's not a guide on how many pieces of clothing you should have, and when it comes to your favorite pieces of clothing, the amount varies between different individuals. This is something that I would recommend you to try. I'm pretty sure when you go through your clothes, you will find out that all of your favorite clothes are more than enough for you. Sometimes it is very difficult to let go of a piece of clothing that you used to wear, but now it is too small. By saving only the pieces you love and adding in a few new pieces, if you weight changes in the future, you still have a functional capsule wardrobe. You don't need to have insane amounts of the same outfit in various different sizes. There are reasons we keep clothes that we don't really wear. Sometimes we have clothes that we don't even like. One of the reasons is guilt. Maybe you spend a lot of money on it. Remind yourself that the money is already spent. Keeping it in your closet will not get the money back. Keeping it, it is not going to help the situation. Let it go and remind yourself to make better shopping decisions in the future. I know you can do it. I have full faith in you. Second is this idea that we must have something. For example, I don't have a little black dress. Don't keep a piece of clothing just because you should. It is your woodshop. You decide what goes in and comes out. If a little black dress does not fit your style, you are not going to need same goes with style and course. Sometimes we get things because they are trendy or in fashion. But things go out of style, and maybe it doesn't work for your body. When you know what kind of clothes you like and what makes you feel comfortable, it is easier to go through the closet. A lot of times things that have been given as gifts or have sentimental value are the most difficult to let go. My grandmother passed away a few years ago. She was really dear to me. When I was about 18, she needed me these blue long woolen socks, and I wore those socks for many years. They were really pretty, but as it happens with woolen socks, I wore them out. I actually kept those socks. For years and years and years before letting them go. They were completely worn out at that point. I wasn't wearing them anymore. I just couldn't let go of them because they remind me of my grandmother. I eventually did let them go. They had so many holes in them. I realized that I didn't need them to remind me of my grandmother. But I still remember her and those socks very fondly. If you have these kind of sentimental feelings about a piece of clothing, you are not alone. It is very common. And I want to say to you, don't beat yourself too much when it comes to sentimental items. People struggle with them the most when decluttering. That is because we are humans. De cluttering of the wardrobe also has benefits, when it comes to spending habits. When you know what you like to wear and what suits you, the next time you go shopping, you t a lot more, what kind of clothes you wish to buy. There is 80 20 rule when it comes to our clothing. It is estimated that people wear 20% of the wardrobe, 80% of the time. This means that 80% of the items in your wardrobe are sitting there waiting and that 80% of clothing is what people wear 20% of their time, which can mean that those clothes are maybe worn once between ten or 20 years, which is pretty crazy when you think about it. If you have a larger wardrobe, you are probably already wearing your favorite clothes for most of the time. Knowing this can make it a lot easier to go through your closet. If there is one tip I would give about decluttering the wartrobe it is trust your guts. If you want to keep something, keep it, if you want to get rid of something, let it go. There are multiple spiritual benefits of decluttering the warrobe. It is the same as with any space. If you have too many clothes and shoes and backs, life can feel overwhelming, unorganized and confusing. Having fewer options helps with focus, when all of those options are clothes that you enjoy wearing, this makes the choosing more pleasant and even dressing up becomes more fun. 5. Decluttering Social Media: Decluttering subscription services. Have you ever had an unexpected bill for a subscription service that you have forgot to cancel. Welcome to the club. One of the reasons why I still have DVDs is because there are tons of TV and film subscription services, but they don't necessarily have my favorite programs. Subscription services exist for pretty much anything from movies to TV, music and games. I work in the creative fields and quite many video editing software programs that I use work with subscription models. I don't have as many subscription services now as I used to have. A few years ago, I remember I went to my Google account, and I could see quite a few subscription services that I had gotten from Google Play. It was too many, and one by one, I had to tick them off. If you wish to declutter your subscription services, first, I would recommend making a list of all the services you have signed up for. Once you have the list ready, you can start to evaluate which ones you like to keep and which ones you don't need. There is a mind clutter that we get when we are given too many options. Subscription services also includes something that is called subscription trap, which usually means that you are given a free trial, if you don't cancel it on time, you will pay them the big bucks. Some of these companies are really tricky to get in touch with. If something sounds too good to be true, that usually is too good to be true, which leads us to de cluttering, social media and e mail. I deep cleared my e mail two months ago and how to declutter e mail. The first step is to unsubscribe from different mailing lists. I like to travel a lot, and at one point, I had signed up for every Mondo and super saver newsletter to get deals for free flights and such. This lasted for some years, but I don't think I ever read any of those e mails. And now it feels kind of stupid. My lifestyle has also changed quite a bit because I don't fly that much. But that is just one example of how we sometimes sign up for a newsletter and then we never open those e mails. It is usually just because we either don't have the time or we just forget social media and decluttering. For those of you who don't want to entirely cut out your social media usage, I have some tips for you. The first tip is that if you wish to be on social media, only use the platforms that you enjoy. I am currently on three platforms. Those are YouTube Pinterest and Instagram. I use social media for my business, so my use of social media can be different to some of you. One of the things that I don't like is the social media newsfeeds. I don't like it when YouTube recommends videos for me. I like to find things myself, and I use a Google app called distraction free YouTube. This app hides all the recommended videos, and I really liked it because then I only have one video on the screen and not tons and tons of videos. There's another similar Google app that can be used for newsfeed to hide the newsfeeds on any platform, and that one is called newsfeed Eradicator it can be used on Facebook and Scram you name it. Those are two apps that I use because I'm not getting recommendations 2047. That has also led me to spend less time on social media. There are also apps that you can adjust to limit your time on social media. For example, you can get a notification that you have spent this and this much time on TikTok and Instagram. A few months ago, I deleted Instagram from my phone, and I felt very much liberated. I still use Instagram from my laptop. I keep in touch with my clients that way. But just the simple act of deleting it from my phone made me feel so much at ease. It really felt amazing, and that is another thing you can try. There are scientific reasons why we are addicted to social media. Every time when we see a new e mail, a new message, comment or like, our brain releases a hit of Dbamin it is that Dbamine that we are addicted to. What we as spiritual beings could start to think about, could there be another way to get that Dbamine hit? There are different ways to replace this time that we spend on social media. We can spend that time with loved ones going out in nature, fulfilling our spiritual lives more and having exciting experiences. When this happens, we can start thinking about our life's purpose, And leave with more intention. Be present when you are on social media. Why not make browsing a more enjoyable experience? This means muting outside noise and concentrating on the material in front of you. I've had those times when I have just browsed video after video, and after an hour felt that I just wasted time for doing nothing. Be careful on the things that you are consuming. We consume content that, for example, does not fit with our morals or is somehow agitating. That is going to have a negative impact on our mental health. This does not only apply to social media, but also to what we watch on TV or what we listen on the radio. Social media is not all bad. Use social media as a tool for growth and self reflection. Follow people who inspire you and help you to grow as a person. I'm a big consumer of different podcasts, and many of those podcasts I have found through social media. The first social media platforms like Facebook were originally created so people could have an easier way to keep in touch with each other. Is that the goal of social media today? That is debatable, but that does not mean we cannot use social media to be in touch with our friends. I have lots of friends who live abroad and calling them would be pretty expensive, so I do connect with my friends on social media. But for the friends who live in the same city in the same country, social media is not all that necessary to be in touch with them. Most people are a lot happier when friends and relatives give them a call. There are also good things about social media and there is nothing wrong with being on social media. There are also major benefits of quitting social media or cutting down a bit. I told you earlier how I deleted Instagram from my phone. One of the benefits that happened to me was that when I was on the go in the town or sitting on a bus, I would not be on Instagram. I was listening to a podcast or I was reading an earbook or an actual book. The amount of books that I have read since I deleted Instagram increase a lot. There are lots of benefits of cutting down social media. One of the biggest ones is that it gives you so much more free time. This can mean more time spent with your spouse or with your family. You have more time for your personal projects, more time for your hobbies, and time to pursue your dreams. There is this one meme, which shows a couple in bed at night and both of them are lying there with their eyes on their phones. There is no connection. There was another picture that I saw, there was a group of young men in a gondola in Venice surrounded by all these beautiful historical buildings, and all these men were just staring at their phones. Both of these scenarios are quite sad. Very true. Despite the fact that there is the word social in social media, it actually drives us away from other people and does not give us actual human connection. Ironically, cutting social media actually can make us more social. Without constantly being on social media, you might be more motivated to spend time with your family and friends and maybe try new events or start new hobbies with a chance to meet new people. This also leads to more meaningful dialogues, important, sometimes even life changing discussions. And those are good for our mental health. On social media, we sadly do find people who are fake By quitting social media, you can realize who your real friends are and focus more on building meaningful relationships with them and you compare yourself was to other people. This is one of the curses and major problems in social media. You might look at an influencer and how they seem rich, beautiful, and successful. And that creates major problems and can lead to depression and lower self esteem among the followers and viewers. In reality, the flexure might not be that wealthy at all, and most of the photos are photoshopped and have filters. But this is known to affect body image and mental health. When you quit social media, you also quit this kind of damaging comparison to other people. A lot of times, this kind of comparison is unconscious, which makes it very sneaky. When you are free from it, you can focus more on your own goals and you don't need to compare yourself to other people. Social media is profitable. When you are on social media, you'll see advertisements. You are being recommended products and services that you don't really need. By cutting off social media, you feel less pressured to buy these things and you will stop buying things that you don't actually need. Then you can focus on living your life with more intention. When it comes to spirituality, there are really two major benefits. The first one is the free time that you get, and the second one is happiness. Social media can be addictive. Sometimes I have listened to the stories of Instagram influencers and tubers who have experienced burnouts. They were addicted to seeing how many likes they had gotten and how many views. This has led into higher blood pressure and stress levels. If you use social media, do that with intention, honor your mind, and your body. 6. Spiritual Aspects Of Decluttering: One of the things about decluttering that nobody tells you is that it can be highly addictive. Ever since I started my decluttering journey, there are some areas in my home that I have gone through multiple times and I keep doing it again, even if I wouldn't have much to declutter. But at the same time, when you have a smaller amount of items, they bring you twice as much joy. Much more than if you would have more items. Home is where we spend most of our time. So when we make a home beautiful and we enjoy living there, we signal to ourselves that we respect the space we are living in. We also respect ourselves more. Here is the real secret to why decluttering is a spiritual practice. When we declutter our physical space, at the same time we are decluttering our mental clutter. According to decluttering expert, S Chase Cott, there are four types of mental clutter. The first one is daily stress. We all experience this, having problems with work colleagues and taking kids to school when they are cranky. Daily stress can also be caused by clutter. I have noticed as an adult, every year I want to own less. This goes directly to my childhood when I had tons of stuff, and I was very unhappy, and my childhood was very chaotic, and I have noticed that personally, decluttering is also therapeutic. One of the causes of daily stress is information overload. This can create headaches and sleepless nights. Social media is something that feeds into this. We are given so many choices. Information overload leads to the second type of de cluttering, which is the paradox of choosing. This is the time when we get overwhelmed by all the choices that we have. When I open my TV, I have tons of choices. I can watch Netflix, Disney plus discovery or 100,000 other channels. I can browse through them and get overwhelmed by all the movies and TV shows, or I could choose to close the TV and read a book instead. I can choose to read from my kindle or my phone. I have a book shell filled with physical books with pretty covers. Just waiting to be read. We make these choices every day without thinking about them too much. The paradox of choice can cause daily stress. This kind of stress is unconscious, but it is very common. The third up of clutter is too much stuff. This can be physical stuff or mental clutter. I work as an illustrator and when I was on the Internet and I saw a pretty picture, I saved that to my laptop because you never know I might want to use that picture as a reference someday. I used to do this a lot, and then my storage ran out. Now, I use Pintres to save the images, but I did notice that when I saved the images to my laptop, even though they were very nicely organized in folders, I did feel a little stressed because there was no way that I would need hundreds and hundreds of these reference photos. The four type of clutter is negativity bias. This is a challenging type of mental clutter. When we are stressed about things, we tend to overthink them, and we view situations more negatively than they are because our brains are wired to look for the negative. Traced back to prehistoric dates, primitive man had to be able to register threats to avoid danger and increase survival rates, more attuned individuals stayed alive longer and past on their genes. How to minimize the negativity bias. One way to do that is to turn the negativity into positive. I like to watch true crime shows, but too much of true crime can be depressive. I balance that by watching something completely different afterwards. Something light like comedies. Is your news feed filled with negative ins and follow them and follow people who make you laugh. Here are some ways to control the mental clutter or even get rid of it. The first one is meditation. Many of you know the benefits of meditation. Meditation helps us to connect with ourselves in the most profound ways. Breathing helps us to ground ourselves and be more focused on the present. Go outside. There was a study made some years ago which showed that people were working more productively when they had a chance to look outside from the window and see nature. Just looking outside can uplift our moods and being outside triplett. The third one is creativity. To me, that is painting for you that can be music or journaling or something else. Anything where you can create something and express yourself. How is the cluttering connected with spirituality? What if you would think about your home as your Temple of worship? When we think about our homes as sacred spaces where we connect ourselves with the divine, we intuitively start to create that environment for ourselves. When we create these open spaces in our homes, fit with light and beauty, we feel inner peace in that space, and when we have that space, it allows us to have better spiritual connection. The more stuff I have given away and sold and donated. It feels like a burden has been lifted from my shoulders. Simplicity itself can be seen as a spiritual practice. Simplicity means trying to make things more easy for yourself, but also more enjoyable. There is a verb called homing, which means making your home comfortable. Some of you may know the Danish word Huge. Huk means creating a warm atmosphere and enjoying the good things in life with good people. De cluttering is really a spiritual process because it makes us leave our comfort zone and experience ourselves. We put lots of power into objects, and there are cultures where materialism is something to be desired. For example, in China, there's a whole industry based on this. There are companies that rent luxury brands for influencers, so they can pretend to be more successful in the public eye than they truly are. The power in the objects often represents our identity. They can represent things that we want to be or give us security. They can be memories or collectibles. I read an interview about the finish lady who is a very successful entrepreneur. She had a habit of buying stuff because she wanted to show the world how successful she was and how much money she was making. And at some point, she started to feel quite obnoxious with herself because those things that she had bought, she didn't have any emotional attachment to them. She had bought all of those things to boost her ego, and those revelations of herself led to self discovery and eventually decluttering. We don't need to put this power two objects. When we see that this power is actually within ourselves. That is when we become free from wanting items that we don't need. When we reach this point where we realize that we don't need all this material, that is when we start to pay attention to the things that are important to us. Then we start to live with intention. I used to be more materialistic, and a lot of my ideas about the future were about me having things. And then I had a mind shift, and I value very different things now. I also like myself a lot more because of that. When we are younger, we also tend to compare ourselves to other people. We want to be like we want to be like everybody else because if we are not, we might start getting negative attention. This is something that a lot of teenagers go through last summer, I read a study on human happiness. It was done by the University of Yale. According to the study, material possessions did not contribute to human happiness a great deal. What did contribute to happiness, the most were human relationships and experiences. A person who went camping for the weekend and spent their evenings watching the stars by the fire was happier than the person who got the most fashionable clothes and the newest fall. The material stuff brought happiness, but it was short term happiness, not long term happiness. Getting stuff is one dopamine hit. Having multiple positive experiences means multiple more long lasting dopamine hits. When we start to declutter, we start to feel guilty about the money we have spent on stuff. This is inevitable, and it happens to everyone who does decluttering. The shame goes away when we know in our guts that we don't go back to the old. When you declutter and you start to do that more often, you almost unconsciously start to change your shopping habits because you don't want to bring more things to your home. If there is something that you really need, you think about it before you purchase it. Why people buy things, security and comfort. We had many wars here in Finland at the beginning of the 20th century. And I remember my grandmother never threw anything away. A lot of people can't say the same about their grandparents all around the world, because this is a generational thing. People have gone through wars and great depression and There were times when there was lack of everything, paper, food, warm blankets, heating. In this world where we are living today, the production cost of items is a lot cheaper. Items can bring comfort. People like to buy new things for themselves for comfort, and there's nothing wrong with that. But in the end, we don't need to buy things for comfort because we can comfort ourselves. I was in an artist residency in Greece last year for a month. I really pampered myself and I had a good time And last night I was browsing my Instagram and the photos I took when I was there, and I was happy when I thought about that trip. It happened many, many months ago, and I got that same happy feeling from it. Just browsing those photos. Give yourself good experiences that you remember. 7. How To Let Go Of The Past And Focusing On The Future: When we start practicing being present, our herds have less control over us. This gives us more freedom. De cluttering does not mean leaving everything behind and moving into an empty cabin in the woods. It means letting off things that no longer serve you. It can also mean letting go of behavioral patterns and thought processes that no longer serve you. If one of your bad habits is that you are too harsh on yourself and you do not speak yourself with kind words, treat yourself like you would treat your best friend. A lot of times people are afraid of negative feelings, anger, resentment, and fear. One of the things that helped me to cope with depression was this awareness that bad feelings will go away and that I am going to feel better. We all experience negative emotions because we are humans. But this knowledge inside you that these feelings will pass can help you to get through them. De cluttering can also be seen as a form of self care. You deserve to live in an environment that serves you and an environment that is easy for you to navigate. Our homes, our items, and our relationships should really serve us in the best way possible. It is not the object that brings us joy but the experience that we remember and hold dear to our hearts. When I was decluttering, I realized I don't need much to be happy. I felt happier when I got rid of things. I came across items that reminded me of the person who I used to be and the person who I am now. The items really reflect our personal history. Letting go of things does not mean that you are letting go of parts of yourself. It really means the opposite. It is the manifestation of the growth we experience in ourselves. Society itself pushes us towards capitalism and consumerism. The greed and this culture where we are almost programmed to envy those who have more is a distraction from things that really matter. Love, relationships, self knowledge, connection with the universe. When we step into the decluttering journey, we could also consider cleaning our spirituality let go of old grudges, hurts, and bad things that happened and replace them with more self care and empathy. De cluttering is as much about introspection as it is about clearing physical spaces around us. Many will realize that the true beauty of minimizing and simplifying your life is not tidy home rater. It is the time and space you receive in return for getting rid of the tangible and emotional clutter in your life. By tackling this decluttering challenge, I was able to also reflect on how I was spending my time. The beauty of decluttering is not having a tidy home or work space. It is the acknowledgment of how much more space you will get after the decluttering process. One of the problems I had was that I had way too many tables and surfaces where I would pile things. Once I got rid of those tables, I could feel the energy flowing so much better in my apartment, and I found things a lot easier. The toy probably would have thought that having surfaces everywhere was a good idea. Time is one thing we cannot declutter, but decluttering can give us more time, and that is precious gift that you can give to yourself. Here are some questions to ask. Are you mindful about the media you are consuming or are you wasting it on mindless entertainment? Do you take enough time for yourself. Are you making enough time for your loved ones are the tasks that you do not care that much, that you could outsource that take a lot of time away from you. Having more time also leads to gratitude. This is one of those things that Mary Condo talks about. She encourages people to tank the items once they let go of them. Gratitude is something we should incorporate into our daily practice. When I wake up and I see the sun peeking through the curtains? Those are moments when I feel very grateful. While decluttering, one of the things that has made me grateful is when I have sold something or given away things, and the person who has come to get them is extremely happy when they get the item they want. It is a simple act of gratitude to be happy about the other person's reaction. The small moments that we get in our more spacious homes are precious, and we can be grateful to ourselves for doing the decluttering. De cluttering is not easy. It is time consuming. It can be very emotional. It can be messy, but we know it is worth it. Recognize the progress you make and reward yourself. It takes a lot of work to declutter. Enjoy the feelings and space that opens up from simplicity order and detachment. Here are some things on how you make de cluttering, spiritual practice. Set a time for de cluttering. You can decide to take 1 hour, a day or one day or a week or book a whole weekend for decluttering. It might be fun to declutter together with a friend or a family member. You can listen to a podcast while decluttering or some music. I like to make myself a nice cup of tea, and then I am ready to go. D cluttering does not need to be a boring household shop. One of my favorite meditation teachers, Sura flow teaches about meditating while doing household tasks. What would it take for you to get into that nice flow space while decluttering? You can burn incense, light your favorite candles, or watch your favorite show at the same time after the decluttering de intentional when you observe your surroundings? This is one of the reasons why people find decluttering addictive. Suddenly, there is more space around and everything feels more calm and different. Embrace this new space with intention and all your senses. De cluttering is a wonderful spiritual practice, for it is a journey to oneself. When you create more space, you also give yourself more space to go after your dreams. Thank you so much for joining me on this decluttering journey. I hope this course gave you lots of new ideas, and I hope to see you on the next one. Bye.