It’s true! I did lose 240 pounds in 12 minutes.
That’s how long it took me at my local waste management facility to toss that many pounds of old papers into their recycling bin! Papers that were taking up space in my basement storage room.
Maybe I didn’t lose actual weight from my physical being – but I sure felt lighter on my way home!
Here’s the proof 🙂 
I realized it was no coincidence that I felt this urge to declutter my external environment. Last week I spoke about how my experience travelling through France in August felt like an expansion of my life energy. And then not even a week later, I’m throwing away clutter that has been around for far too long. Really, did I need that tax return from 1995???
There is a massive movement nowadays toward minimalism. A movement that posits happiness doesn’t come from ‘stuff, it comes from relationships and experiences. Reducing clutter leads to less stress and overwhelm. Paring down and living in a clean organized space supports greater focus on really important things in life.
In fact, I recently read a study where wives were asked to describe their physical home environments. The responses were categorized into those that said, ‘cluttered, unfinished’ and those that used words like ‘restful, pleasant, like a calm lake’.
The group using more stressed words were found to have chronically higher levels of stress hormones, high enough to be negatively impacting their physical health as well as an increase in daily depressive moods compared to the group using restful, often nature based words.
Of course, the desire for minimalism and decluttering is unique to an individual and to their particular current life context. What I know for myself, and what I don’t believe we talk about enough in our work with clients, is the connection between what happens between our external environment and our internal experience of life. Each is a mirror of the other.
This is one of the fundamental principles of Conscious EFT™. In our post trauma growth framework there is no need to dive into a client’s potentially harmful historical traumatic and painful experiences. To the extent that the client, for whatever reason, did not have the capacity to process the information of that experience in the past, the implications of it will show up in today’s external context and internal experience of it.
Working within today’s context to improve the quality of life today will itself expand the client’s capacity to hold the energy of peace and joy today, allowing the body to naturally process the residue of the past.
My expansive experiences in France increased my internal capacity to hold peace and pleasure, resulting in a biological urge to clean up my physical environment today. External and internal moving in an exquisite and harmonious dance.
A pleasure dancing with you,
Nancy
PS: If you’d like to read more about the study, check out: No place like home: home tours correlate with daily patterns of mood and cortisol.