Mother Earth News - Mother Earth News 2017

Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui (Revised and Updated): Free Yourself from Physical, Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Clutter Forever (Harmony Books, 2016) by Karen Kingston shows readers how to transform their lives using feng shui to get rid of clutter. Her unique approach lies in understanding that clutter is stuck energy that has far-reaching physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual effects. Kingston explains why people keep clutter, how clutter causes stagnation, how to clear clutter and how to live clutter free. This excerpt comes from chapter 16, How to Clear Your Clutter.

Here are seven tried-and-true tips for effective clutter clearing.

Most people find they have a best time of day for clutter clearing. Some people prefer the morning. Others find it easier at night. Discover when you are at your most decisive and do your clearing then.

Decide when you will begin and schedule it on your calendar, as you would any other activity. Make a date with yourself to do it, and show up. It can be a whole day, a half day, or a series of appointments of just an hour or half an hour, depending on how fast you want to progress.

Its a well-known fact that all jobs expand to fill their allotted time limit, so if you tell yourself you will clear your stuff until its done, dont be surprised if the process takes forever. Timebox each job. Break each task down into chunks, decide how long it will take you to complete each one, and then set your timer. Work against the clock to do each chunk within the timebox you have set yourself.

You can also use this technique to accomplish other types of tasks. For example, if youre doing a job at your computer, you might use one of the great timer software programs out there. Instead of a boring alarm sound when times up, you can set the program to burst into life with any soundtrack you have on your computer.

If youre the kind of person who procrastinates because you love the adrenaline rush of getting something done just in time for a deadline, youll adore timeboxing. You wont have to wait for a big deadline but can get your fix many times a day. However, I have to warn you that with practice, youll be able to timebox yourself without a clock, and will routinely start completing jobs on time. So use this technique only if the rest of your life is interesting enough not to need adrenaline highs (your kidneys will thank you for this and serve you longer because of it).

Some people prefer to clutter clear in silence, but many find they are able to keep going two to three times longer if they have the right music playing. If this works for you, be sure to use external speakers (not headphones) and set the volume loud enough to make your body feel like dancing. For best results, set your player to automatic repeat so that it just keeps going. Avoid alternating fast and slow songs the ballads will cause you to lose momentum. If you have a lot of clutter to clear, it would be a good investment of your time to make your own music compilation especially for this purpose. But dont let doing this be yet another delay to making a start!

Just as red dancing shoes make your feet feel like moving, so does wearing red clothes make you feel like taking action. If you dont have anything red, then wear colors from the warm end of the spectrum (orange, yellow, etc.) rather than cool colors like blue. Many people keep clutter as a way of comforting themselves. Warm colors are more emotionally comforting than cool ones, so if you wear colors from the warmer end of the spectrum while sorting through your stuff, youll probably find it easier to let things go.

Black attracts low-level vibrations and will quickly make you feel tired when clearing clutter. Gray is also not a good color to wear because it can cause you to be indecisive about what stays and what goes.

Its human nature to seek gratification, so if you reward yourself in some way after youve clutter cleared, part of you remembers this and is more inclined to want to do it again. Promise yourself that when the job is done, youll reward yourself with a massage, watch a movie, go out with a friend, or whatever kind of treat is possible, affordable, and meaningful for you.

Excerpted from Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui (Revised and Updated): Free Yourself from Physical, Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Clutter Forever Copyright 2016 by Karen Kingston. Published by Harmony Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

Turn clutter clearing into a fun activity by playing upbeat music or rewarding yourself for a job well done.
Photo by Fotolia/Joseph Helfenberger

Clear your Clutter with Feng Shui by Karen Kingston states that getting rid of clutter and practicing feng shui are not separate activities.
Cover courtesy Harmony Books

From stiff joints and mild inflammation to full-blown debilitation, life can take its toll. In my case, Im reminded every morning as I hobble out of bed of the brake drum that fell on my ankle, while still attached to the vehicle it belonged to, roughly 40 years ago. In my 60 years, Ive found some smart and some less-smart ways to keep on keeping on, but one things for sure: I look for ways to work smarter so I can still do what needs to be done. Several issues ago, we heard from folks looking for tips on how to stay on the homestead, even with a serious hitch in their get-along, and weve compiled many of the fantastic tips you all submitted, right here!

Hank Will, Editorial Director

Homesteading presents more challenges each year. Here are some ways I cope:

Gardening. Because I have trouble bending to harvest, I use salad bars. Yes, theyre small, but they provide plenty of greens for two or three people. I use three: two shallow bars and one thats 15 inches deep. While I purchased mine from www.Gardeners.com and Costco, they could easily be constructed from scrap lumber.

I use raised beds for most vegetables so I dont have to till. I weed only at the beginning of the season and apply some compost. Ive tracked my garden produce for three years, and the yields havent decreased enough to warrant constant weeding. (Id like to see actual statistics on the value of a weed-free garden. I mean, I know mine is ugly, but the food seems just as good.)

Deep digging is a challenge, even in my raised beds. For the past two years, Ive been using grow bags for potatoes. While I cant raise a huge crop this way, I get some delicious potatoes with no pain at harvest time. (With a heavy-duty sewing machine, you can make your own grow bags from water-permeable weed-barrier fabric.)

Food preservation. Lifting heavy objects is getting more difficult, so I use a childs little red wagon to bring in bushels of produce. After the produce is inside the house, I transfer it to a wire utility cart with three shelves and roll that over to the sink for processing. My cart holds hundreds of pounds of apples, squash, and the like. I can wheel it into the pantry and out of sight if company drops by unexpectedly.