The Organizing Mind

Forming Clutter

When you were five, what do you remember wanting more than anything? I remember wanting a bicycle. Tricia down the street had a pink one with a sparkly seat and streamers on the handlebars. I coveted that bike all summer, hoping for my own slice of five-year old heaven. I was ready to ride, and as Christmas approached, I could smell the new plastic of my sparkly seat and feel the metal handles, warm in the sun, with sleek streamers flying from their tips. I would be the new belle of the block.

I remember I could hardly get to sleep that Christmas Eve. When the sun peaked through the crack of my bedroom window shade on Christmas morning, my eyes shot open and I jumped out of my bed wearing too short pajama pants and a misbuttoned sleep shirt. My heart was racing. I knew what I was about to see sitting by the tree. As I rounded the corner into the living room, my socked feet slipping on the terrazzo tile floor, my eyes spied a glint of metal. There it was.

My excitement was palpable. I can still remember our home with its seventies décor and the smell of a Charlie Brown Christmas tree decorated with homemade ornaments. Beside that little tree was my would-be masterpiece. At first appearances, Santa had come through for me with a blue bike; the color I had asked for. My heart sank, though, as I scanned my prize for the sparkles and streamers that weren’t there. I was secretly mad at Santa. The thing I recall most about that morning was not the thrill of my new blue bike, but my disappointment at what it lacked. Instead of a sparkly bike like Tricia’s, I had a goofy flowery banana seat and a white plastic basket.

Looking back on my life, my feelings on that fateful morning played themselves out time and again. As I grew older, I just got by, always feeling just short of attaining the life I truly wanted. Throughout my young adulthood I was fixated only on what was wrong – things and people that needed fixing. I was always focused on the cracks in the walls of my mansions, so to speak.

Instead of celebrating all the wondrous experiences and love in my life, I picked things apart, looking at ways they should or could be better. Comparison, dissatisfaction and disappointment were my constant companions, which made other people and their opinions more important than my own. I gave my power away to everything and everyone around me. My self-worth was fully in the hands of my external world.

As a result, life was a struggle and my home, relationships and finances always cluttered. Nothing was ever good enough, and I pointed the finger of blame to things and people outside me when I fell short or things didn’t go my way. Comparing, complaining and trouble-shooting formed the basis of my mindset that turned me into a lawyer who wanted to right wrongs. That mindset stole my joy, my clarity and mostly, it stole my abundant present moment. I was stuck in the patterns of my early childhood programming and didn’t know there was a way out.

While working as a litigator and personal organizer, I learned a great deal about inner and outer conflict, and the mirror of relationships. I saw myself in my clients who were trapped by their old pain patterns. Through many years of spiritual study, I learned that childhood programming is like a rotating wheel of memories that replay like a film strip in our lives with different sets, scenes and characters. Repeating emotions are the only consistent players.

Like a vicious cycle, my patterns of disappointment fed my comparing mentality, which distorted my beliefs, which in turn, attracted to me things to disappoint. With the dismal hue of my early programming hanging over my head like a gray fog, I unknowingly perpetuated a reality that otherwise would have had the potential to be harmonious and resplendent. When I realized that my emotions were stealing my joy, I decided to reprogram my own brain and unwind my patterns from the outside in. I was done with self-sabotage and wanted my mind to be at peace. It was time for my heart to take over and lead me to my soul’s loving truth.

Unwinding Patterns

With the help of my higher self, I started unwinding my patterns. Gradually, I dug up emotions and beliefs I didn’t realize were hidden in my psyche. Being able to see how my emotions were manifesting themselves in my outside reality changed my life. By using my understanding of the law of attraction, mirrors of relationships and symbolic sight, I began to expose my internal beliefs and external patterns. Over time, my life turned toward a more loving, grateful and positive direction, and is still shifting to this day. Instead of being lost in disappointment, defensiveness, false masculinity, co-dependency and control issues, my self-awareness practices have opened new doors in my brain to a more unified way of being.

I started the self-awareness process by questioning everything I thought, felt, said and did. Objective observing replaced self-doubt, as if my soul was an ally ready to help me replace any shadows blocking my heart with light. Having a spiritual ally offered me a safe space to ask questions about myself without judgment. I asked my soul why I lived the way I did with clutter and dust everywhere, dishes in the sink overnight and trash on the floorboard of my car. I asked why my relationships were all failed, failing or at the very least, difficult. And, I asked why I was always so financially stretched and dependent on other people. By asking these questions, I had to look at and let go of the old me, but as I did, the authentic me started shining through – the abundant, calm, confident and loving version.

Swallowing pride doesn’t taste good, but I did it each day for many years, and I opened my mind to new possibilities. The answers I received were all about loving myself and feeling connected to my outer world and other people with the power of my heart. The more I did this, the more I learned that my reality – everyone’s reality – is vibrating at certain frequencies that come from emotions.

Feelings like joy and compassion increase, or raise, our frequencies and bring us closer to love. Negativity and judgment on the other hand decrease our frequencies by separating us from others, making us feel isolated. By comparing myself to others, I lost myself and felt lost and alone. When I saw this ugly truth, I chose to reconfigure my thought and belief systems to open doors to higher frequency beliefs.

As I walked this new path, I started seeing how our inside always reflects on our outside. I saw how each room in my home held symbolic meanings that reflected certain emotions. Feng Shui was a tool in my toolkit, so I used it to better understand the energetic symbols that my body and home shared.

Essentially, I unwound belief systems that I had stored in my mind and body by seeing the disorder in my home, finances and relationships as keys to unseen doors of opportunity. They were showing just how disconnected I was from my true self. By looking at my habitual ways of being more objectively and asking “what must I believe” for things to be as they were, I was able to use my light of awareness to heal my past without my having to dive into the details of each trauma I had ever experienced.

Clues about my subconscious mind started to reveal themselves as I looked for emotional patterns in my daily life. In other words, I connected the dots between feelings of low self-worth and my income, or how I felt in relationships so I could better understand my default attachments, patterns and frequencies. For each anger, sadness or judgment I felt, I claimed it all as something I unintentionally created instead of being a victim.

I no longer cared about the source or reasons for my negative thoughts and emotions. They were mine. I inherited them like antique furniture from grandma that I didn’t really want, but it was my responsibility to free myself by releasing myself from its existence. Emotional triggers were gifts that could shine light into the dark spaces of my psyche. It took time, but as I cleared my emotional blocks with my insight, I started to see life through the eyes of my soul and the love of my heart instead of the heaviness of my ego’s fear.

Authenticity gradually surfaced, and my outside started matching my inside in a calm, clean way. The big message is that most people are trapped by inherited or accumulated mental patterns, and unless they do the work to clear them, they become loaded with more and more negative belief patterns that can become very heavy. This heaviness translates into the physical world as home clutter, money clutter or relationship clutter. Clutter keeps you on a negative trajectory that pulls you into a downward spiral, so it is important to change your default vibrational state by untangling the knots of your patterns.

Changing Frequencies

Something clicked inside me about clearing, or unwinding, energetic knots inside me when I read the following Buddhist proverb: “What is in the way, is the way.”

At one of my lowest points, a friend who had been a US Air Force pilot told me a story that showed me how this applies to real life. He was in Afghanistan flying some people to the embassy, when someone on a building below shot a heat-seeking missile at the plane. The plane’s detection system warned him about the incoming trouble, and his training took over. He flew his plane directly toward the missile while shooting a flare into the opposite direction. Since the missile was programmed to seek a retreating object, flying into the path of the missile disturbed its natural heat-seeking course. The missile redirected toward the flare. Leaning into the attack had saved all on-board.

Similarly, as you lean into the negativity in your life with a curious mind and a desire to open your heart, you will disperse the negative energy patterns of the negatively programmed mind. By facing your inner blocks head-on, you will change belief patterns and their resulting thoughts and emotions. This work will raise your base frequency and will help you live a well-ordered life, naturally.

To start this process, it is important to first see how you’re seeing. Once you make the decision to turn your proverbial ship around with conscious intention, your higher self will guide you toward emotions that need healing with the light of your awareness. Some call this shadow work, but I call it claiming responsibility for your state of being so you can remove blocks around your all-powerful heart.

A good way to get started is to ask your higher self for another way to see and be, and also “what you must believe” about life, yourself and others so you can see yourself from a more objective stance. The clearer you become inside, the higher you vibrate, and this allows for the energies of your body to align with the energies of your soul. My work started on the outside of me as I pieced together my obvious faulty belief systems with my patterns that had me locked in judgment and disappointment.

As I cleared them with a conscious and open mind, I let go of the lies of my ego-mind so my heart could grow stronger. As this happened, I became more present in the moment, thus creating new, more positive cycles. The more I did of this work, the easier life got. My brain worked better, my home was easier to keep up with, my health recovered, my finances improved and as a result, my sense of self-worth grew.

From the beginning, it was easy for me to find things to clear and heal in my life. In my home, paperwork and clothes were my biggest issues. No matter how many times I sat in front of the television going through piles of mail, or putting away piles of clothes, the clutter resurfaced. Clutter seemed to stick to me like fly-paper. I couldn’t get out from underneath the piles.

Without judgment, I asked myself what I must believe about myself that I would live this way. These questions led me to understand how my brain had formed a negative connection between what I get in life versus what others get. I had put myself at a lower, self-sabotaging, victim level so I would continue to subconsciously experience negative situations to be disappointed about. My money beliefs were another form of clutter, keeping me on a mediocre path to receiving just okay things in life. Over time, I connected the dots and cleared the energy blocks around my heart by asking, “What must I believe” about it all.

Attracting By Default

It is quite difficult to teach this because not everyone has physical clutter to deal with, and it is difficult to face and truly own ghosts of the past that need clearing. Many people just want to change the outside so they feel better on the inside and leave the emotional / non-physical stuff to therapists and churches. I was told once by a wise man that focusing only on the outside is like decorating a prison cell.

Until we clear our emotional blocks, unseen emotions make us sick, physically and mentally. Doing that type of work can feel a great deal like getting naked and walking down Main Street, though. I have found that most people avoid it by projecting their emotions onto others through judgment, thereby creating a gulf of division and a wall around their hearts.

The us versus them mentality is an ego-construct. I have seen many people (including myself) avoid certain “low vibrating people or thoughts,” so they can keep their frequencies high, but this is error. I’m all for making high frequency choices and saying no to negativity, but deeply held, subconscious beliefs make it impossible to avoid like physical results. What you resist persists, so whatever triggering thing, thought or person you avoid will stay attached to your psyche until you clear the underlying emotion. Until you do, what needs healing will continue to appear in your life until you face it and love it.

This is where recognizing patterns comes in handy. The repeating trigger or low-vibrating situation is there for a reason. You attracted it to you. It is your mirror revealing your beliefs to you. It is a gift.

The law of attraction by definition means that we attract things based on our default vibration, not on what we want or don’t want. No matter how much material goodness or good life you experience, if you’re on Earth, you have emotional clutter to clear. Leaning in to negative situations with curiosity is a good way to do that.

Authentic openness, confidence and natural abundance come from doing this hard work. It's worth every discomfort to become more aligned with your heart so you can be more comfortable inside your skin. This makes it simpler to be peaceful in the present moment, which raises frequencies and opens a doorway to your soul. This connection magically creates opportunity. When the mind is still, your body is grounded and your heart is open, and this makes your soul’s magical presence in your life inevitable.

Clearing Clutter

Hidden inside each present moment is access to a power source so great that to pay attention for prolonged periods of time to this nexus of space time stillness is to claim your rightful position in life. This space will guide you into a quiet, unified, and organized, mental and physical experience. This is the Organizing Mind. As you work from this Organized Mind, you will experience a more natural flow of life force energy in your body and mind, which is the source of true order.

For true and lasting Spring Cleaning, I propose you try the following 10-step formula in your own life every day for at least three months if you want to clear mental, physical and emotional clutter permanently:

(1) Wake up on purpose with an alarm clock, or five minutes earlier than normal.

(2) Within five minutes of waking, sit in the dark, alone and in the quiet.

(3) As you see thoughts starting to ramp up about your day ahead, tell them to stop, see them as static just above your head and envision a white light that replaces the static and pours into the top of your head.

(4) Let this light fill up your body and flow through your feet into the Earth.

(5) Next, see this light fill up both your body, the Earth and everyone on the Earth.

(6) Once everything is filled with white light, ask your higher self (or your soul) to direct your vision and to help you see absolute truth every time you feel emotion about anything, good or bad on this day. In this world of duality, even good thoughts are based on comparison to bad, which serves only to separate you from the peace of a unified mind and open heart.

(7) Start tracking your habits of thought during your awake hours. When you have opinions about anything or anyone, even yourself, good or bad, name the thought as either a “separated” thought or a “unified” thought - and ask your higher self to help you see truth. A fearful mind will think thoughts of separation or comparison, which creates suffering. If you see that your thoughts are either bringing you together with all of life or separating you from it, you will become more self-aware and open to positive change.

(8) When you’re with or observing people, as you notice situations that cause you to feel resistance, whether they are feelings of negativity in relationships, problems in your life or experiences of actual physical clutter, ask yourself, “What must I believe about myself that I have attracted this into my life?”.

(9) As often as you can during the day, let all the colors inside you drain out of your body and into Earth, and as you feel empty and spacious, focus on the present moment, see the light above your head and in your heart at the same time. Let the light fill you up and make your heart swell with love.

(10) At night, look back on your day and review your separated or unified thoughts. Forgive yourself and others, ask your soul for help in thinking more unified thoughts. Then, run light through yourself, Earth and all people again before you go to sleep.

If you do these steps daily, and write down your habitual thoughts and dreams, you will begin to see yourself, others and life very differently. The light of your awareness will be doing the clearing.

Becoming Comfortable with Discomfort

Doing new things like this can feel easy for a week or two – maybe even three – but eventually the discomfort will grow and the comfort of your old patterns will tempt you backwards. Old patterns are familiar and predictable, and so they feel comfortable, even if they are destructive. Pushing through resistance to be present with the unfamiliar is key.

This is what I call becoming comfortable with your discomfort. When you find that you’re distracting yourself because your mind is feeling overwhelmed and needs soothing, ask yourself what your heart needs in that moment. Meditation is also a very useful tool to help you push on through to the other side of the old you.

If you ask, your soul will work with you to quiet your mind and heal any addictions you have to negativity that keep you trapped. As you become more aware of your brain's self-defeating machinations, and the fact that you are attracting everything you experience, you will find it easier to look for your unconscious patterns. This Organizing Mind process is waking you up to your truest self that wants to heal your life. Make no mistake, this is hard work, but no matter what you do on the outside to make you feel better on the inside, until you get into alignment with your heart's deep inner truth, imbalance will keep you feeling an undercurrent of fear.

My main goal as a professional organizer is to help people free themselves of this fear, to step into their peace and power - and to live the life they have only dreamed about. I want my clients to know that they are not broken and nothing is wrong. They just have to connect the dots between their inner truth and outer reality, and ask their soul for another way to see life.

I don’t mind helping people move their stuff around, or purge it, but until they do mental and emotional clearing, the clutter will always return. Life without this type of deep cleaning is like circling the drain, with the fear of loss keeping you stuck in survival mode. It is my hope that my experiences and words help people clear their childhood patterns so the calm state of their hearts can ignite their authentic selves.

Living from an Organizing Mind removes fear through harmonious emanations of light and sound that give birth to an abundance mindset. The Organizing Mind process turns surviving into thriving, houses into castles and businesses into empires. Life is meant to be the kind of magical fun that only a five-year old can create.

I will leave you with the words of spiritual teacher and author, Matt Kahn, who says it best:

When we love ourselves too deeply to be stagnant and respect the divine too deeply to stand in the way of our next incredible milestone of expression, the beauty of tangible change is a gift to receive and never a punishment to endure. To find this truth and embody it fully, we must dare to love ourselves more, not less, no matter the time it takes to change, regardless how often we seem to miss the mark, and despite the kicking, screaming, begging and pleading that only needs more of your loving support to shift old patterns into new possibilities.