The only important house to clean: your mind

Spring Mental Cleanse is coming: March 25-28, 2021.

Sign up for Thursday only, Thurs+Friday, or the whole retreat Thurs-Sunday (Saturday’s a bonus day for everyone enrolled).

It’s all sliding scale, you choose (suggested fee a minimum of $60 per session).

Thursday 3/25, Friday 3/26 and Sunday 3/27 we meet 9:00am-12:30pm Pacific Time, and Saturday we meet 8:00am-9:30am PT followed by dancing–online–for those who’d love to attend.

It’s a time for deep cleansing internally on the beliefs we’ve sometimes been carrying with us unconsciously for years and years.

Read more about spring cleaning retreat here.

Speaking of the need, and the joy, of deep cleaning….

We all know what that’s like when you do it for reals.

Like, with actual cleaning.

Way under the bookcase there’s are dust bunnies in literal clumps. Along the back of the couch spiders have been congregating all winter in the crack where floor meets wall.

The file cabinet needs to be unstuffed and papers shredded. Books and old clothes need to go to Goodwill.

Maybe you’re not sure exactly what that gunk is in the back of the fridge, which also has an unrecognizable rotten thing in tin foil we forgot about a few weeks ago.

OK, a few months ago.

I like the way, for a good thorough cleaning of something we’re tackling, we open up the thing entirely.

We literally pick up the piece of furniture and move it to the center of the room.

We empty all the contents.

Sometimes the whole place looks worse before it gets better.

Bottles and tins and bags are strewn all over the dining room table in stacks while you get the fridge drawers pulled out and scrub them in the sink with hot soapy water.

It’s a project.

Sometimes along the way, you might think “Good lord, why did I start this? It’s taking way longer than I imagined.”

“This is exhausting. How’d it get sooooo dirty?”

“I wonder how much this would cost to pay someone to come and do this instead?”

Cleaning is not exactly….easy.

But neither is letting everything get dirtier, and dirtier, and more sticky, and more dusty and black and thick and gross.

And if you’ve ever really done a good clean-out of anything, it is amazingly satisfying.

A strange kind of joy comes when you neatly place the thinned-out clothes in the drawers again, or have room in your closet for everything you own.

It’s tending to life, tending to the hearth, the home.

That’s how I think of doing The Work with the unkempt mind–the unquestioned mind.

The mind that gets a bit bleak, dirty, thick with dust.

It gets ugly in there. A few spiders, if you know what I mean.

Good news.

Nothing like a beautiful piece of inquiry to find freedom from repetitive thinking, or repetitive behavior or worry.

The mind is so brilliant, it carries around memories and impact from far earlier times and shows them to you like a slide show over and over until you’re willing to look, and feel fully what you’ve been hiding, or simply ignoring, under the couch.

Sure, no one escapes pain.

We have immense loss: people we love die, viruses descend, jobs end, houses burn, money goes, it seems our dreams don’t manifest, we ourselves grow older.

All those things happen. But then there is suffering about them, through reminding yourself of them and feeling bad all over again.

Unnecessary suffering.

Suffering because we get stuck in a mindset, a way of thinking–and we don’t know how to stop of get out of it.

Heck, we don’t even know we’re doing it!

At least this is what I’ve seen so many times with my own work.

For example, I used to believe–without really even knowing consciously I believed it to the core–that I was abandoned, could be abandoned and probably will be abandoned in the future by people I care about.

I had a strategy I then decided that it’s better to Not Be Attached, so that I don’t get hurt by potential abandonment.

Abandonment being a fact and all.

I didn’t even know I had this running so strongly until my first husband left after 16 years of marriage, and I was fully and completely reminded of my father’s death many years earlier.

I had the solid belief about life: people leave, people die, people are unreliable….and it’s very very sad, dangerous, intolerable and I’m all alone when it happens.

I didn’t know how things had piled up and gotten thick and dusty and heavy.

I didn’t know the demands I had on my first husband to remain in place, or else….

I was dependent, without even realizing it.

Dependent on his presence, on his staying whether he liked it or not, on things going “well” (i.e. my way) so I could be safe and happy.

The four questions changed this kind of painful thinking for me.

Fundamentally, entirely.

At a deep spring cleaning level.

It’s like opening up the cupboard, emptying out everything so you can take a look, and beginning the scrubbing.

It might look worse before it looks better.

But it’s oh so worth it.

The freedom of a clear, organized closet–a clear, organized mind.

I hope you’ll join me in the spring cleanse in The Work of Byron Katie, an annual event that will now for the second year be again online.

In four days you can do a whole lot of cleaning–probably the entire house.

Including the basement. Maybe we’ll start there.

Join me HERE.

Spring Mental Cleanse Schedule Online: