Vogt - Your Spacious Self : Clear the Clutter and Discover Who You Are

When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.

Lao Tzu

Copyright 2012

by Stephanie Bennett Vogt, MA

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work in any form whatsoever, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief passages in connection with a review.

Cover design by Adrian Morgan

Cover art istockphoto

Author photo by Daphne Weld Nichols

Text design by Jane Hagaman

Hierophant Publishing

8301 Broadway, Suite 219

San Antonio, TX 78209

888-800-4240

www.hierophantpublishing.com

If you are unable to order this book from your local bookseller, you may order directly from the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012944216

ISBN 978-0-9818771-8-1

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed on acid-free paper in the United States

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To Jay and Camilla.

I love you more than words can say.

We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

Joseph Campbell

I was suffocating. Everywhere I looked there was stuff... and all that stuff was slowly squeezing me to death.

Then I came down with a garden-variety sore throat that I attributed to the stress of holiday season; this morphed into a fever, a cough that wouldn't quit, a bad case of insomnia, and my first-ever sinus infection, which was so painful that I thought I would go mad. The meds that helped relieve the pain in my head would deliver a terrible upset in my stomach. Placing my hand to contain one leak would uncover another. I felt like a ship that was running aground.

Desperate to fix this thing, I grasped at anything I could get my hands on: antibiotics, homeopathic remedies, teas and tinctures, vitamin pills. I ranted and thrashed and sweated. Nothing was working. I couldn't stand feeling so sick. I couldn't tolerate lying in bed like that, doing nothing but hacking my guts out. I couldn't bear not knowing what was happening to me.

My approach to any life challenge at that time had always followed a logical sequence: If something doesn't work, you fix it. You figure it out; you force or will it to change, if you have to. You do something about it. I had no concept that my body, in its infinite wisdom, knew exactly what it was doing to heal and rebalance itself. Bodies, like homes, are in a constant state of rebalancing all the time, creating and adjusting as they dance with the choices we make and the laws of nature. My job, if I had only chosen to listen, was to get out of the way!

A full-blown body rash seemed like a fitting end to a month of poor-me shenanigans. This last straw was so bad it was funny. And because I could finally laugh about it, I began to let go and (surprise, surprise)... to get well.

In hindsight, I can see how my body was simply reflecting the huge buildup of stress that I had not bothered to recognize for years. The stress was the cumulative impact of twenty years in the classroom, four years of invasive fertility treatments, and a major move from one neighborhood that had been home for nine years to a new home in a new town with a much longer commute. No doubt, my expanding collection of physical clutter was also a major contributing factor to this perfect storm I had created. I was forty-two years old at the time, a mother, a wife, a teacher, and I was burned out! I didn't know who I was anymore or what I loved. I had lost my rudder and all contact with my heart's longing. I had lost my way.

Sometimes we're so caught up in our heads that we need a major shakeup to get our attention. My healing crisis that winter showed me that I was seriously out of step with my true self. I knew that if I didn't address these early warning signslike, prontothings could get a lot worse.

So I did the unimaginable and gave notice. I walked away from teaching at one of Boston's preeminent schools. I was at the top of my game, and, just like that, I said goodbye to a twenty-year career, a senior position, a monthly paycheck with full benefits, and a community that had been family to me... to leap head first into the terrifying void of not knowing.

What was I thinking?

I wasn't. That's why I could do it.

Pulling the plug was no small achievement for someone so tightly wired to a daily routine, a professional identity, and financial security. All I could do for the first few months after quitting was grieve for the old parts of myself that I was deliberately dismantlingunaware that my little sore throat was like a pebble that had started an avalanche of clearing and transformation that continues to this day.

By releasing a huge part of my personal and professional identity, I was able to get in touch with the things that made my heart sing (and cringe): my passions, my longings, my fearsmy clutter! For the superorganized neatnik that I am, this last revelation came down like a sledgehammer on my self-concept and worldview.

As my husband once said, Change happens slowly, then all at once. For months after I'd quit I simply followed my knows and improvised my lifesometimes making lame stabs at clearing out a drawer, sometimes doing things that made my heart sing, sometimes doing things that made no sense at all. There was no particular pattern or unifying principle or plan. I allowed my little dinghy, now repaired and in much better shape, to float along looking for the next strong current.

Though modest in the beginning, the process of shedding my physical clutter seemed to grow organically and exponentially: Searching for a pen in a drawer that was jammed to the gills with every conceivable writing implement (including the pristine box of personalized pencils that I got when I was in grammar school) led to clearing that drawer and the one below it, which led to clearing the bookcase, then the piles of magazines with the mouth-watering recipes I never got around to trying.

Looking for a plastic food container led to recycling dozens of excess lidless yogurt cups, consolidating the condiments in the fridge, and tossing unidentifiable freezer items laden with inches of frost. Removing sticky bulletin board notices, dog-eared flyers, expired coupons, stale artistic masterpieces, and rubbery refrigerator magnets (selling pest management services) led to the long-overdue renovation project that opened up a dividing wall in our kitchen, added a fresh, colorful coat of paint, and offered a new lease on life.

The easy things led to clearing out more difficult ones, such as the clothes I might be able to fit in again someday (not), my daughter's adorable baby clothes, my matchbook collection, all my graduate school term papers, classroom notes, and twenty years of teaching paraphernalia.

Before I knew it, my clearing effort had grown into something way bigger than a string of random feel-good exercises. It became a journeya journey that had much less to do with clearing out things than it did with clearing out my attachments to things.

Weeding out the material excesses of my home and life became an enlightening practice of feeling the experience of clearing. Feeling how congested or gummy or even nauseous I can be after an hour of moving junk around. Feeling how much my feet hurt or how clearing makes me more thirsty and sluggish. Feeling how hard and painful and embarrassing it is to let some things go. Feeling how good it feels in the house after I've put stuff in the recycling bin and walked it out to the curb for the Friday morning pickup. Feeling my feelings fully and completely without attaching any drama to them or taking them personally.