I first heard about Mari Kondo in 2018 because my ex-boss could not stop talking about how inspirational her book was. I didn’t really pay attention because he said, “it’s important to those who need to organise their spaces at the office!”. As a new employee, I couldn’t help but hold in my smile, looked around, and saw that the office was indeed quite… all over the place.
I’ve never looked it up because I am proud to say that my spaces are very well organised; I am that particular type of psycho who tucked in her bed every morning. Later on, after her show “Tidying Up with Mari Kondo” became a hit, memes pondered through every social media, and that did the trick on me. I decided to peek a little on what the hype is all about. Then I got hooked, then the next thing I know I threw away half of the stuff I hoarded all these years.
There are six steps that Mari taught me to do to commit to decluttering.
- Make time to myself for tidying up.
- Imagine a more ideal life.
- Before getting rid of my items, sincerely thank each item for serving its purpose.
- Tidy by categories.
- Follow the right order.
- Ask myself if this sparks me joy.
The day was a journey of ups and downs. Some belongings were harder to let go than I thought it should. The hardest was to let things go that had emotional values attached to it. But once I thanked them for serving their purposes, I have set closures and it gave me space to move on to another chapter. Which to me, this brought decluttering to another level; the mental space.
“Like toxins slowly filling our bodies, if anger, despair, or sorrow accumulate in our hearts, we have to do something about it. Exercise, talk to your mentor, meditate on loving-kindness. As we begin to make the effort, the toxins start to lose their grip.” — Haemin Sunim
I’ve noticed how letting go of my belongings, physically clears out space in my room. It was as if the air was fresher and the lights were brighter. All these to help me realise that mental decluttering will provide spaces in my mind that will help me make space for the next chapters in life.
It is not a one-day job, it is not an overnight cure, mental decluttering is a long term process requiring commitment and effort. It is merely the first three steps of Mari Kondo’s method, but we need to take it to another level.
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Make time for self-introspection
For the first step, I decided to practice meditation. I am realistic enough to practice five minutes at the end of the day before I go to sleep, to think about the things that I have been putting under the mat for too long.
“How can you know it’s been put long under the mat if it’s hidden after all these times?”, well if you ask me, I know because I was the one responsible for putting it there. To dig down to this, I suggest thinking about an uncomfortable event and ask yourself why you felt uncomfortable? What were you feeling at that time? Was it really necessary to act the way you acted? Or was it triggered by a past trauma?
In the beginning, my five minutes meditation drives me to places I’ve been abandoning for a long time. I cry, regret, feel anxious, got mad, and my feelings decided to show up abruptly. It might be very intense for a few days, and you might want to decide to give up. But, what I did was convince myself that feelings are meant to be felt, in order to flow away and create space. So I manage to learn to drive it, rather than being driven by it.
2. Imagine a more ideal life
As an organised person, I am always constantly picturing my ways to Rome. I know what I want to try and achieve in life, therefore I do the things that will support myself to achieving these.
From time to time, I thought that to be able to achieve things in life is to put one brick on top of another. Little did I know, the foundation needs to be strong so it won’t fall apart anytime the situation whirl-wined. It is from mental decluttering I’ve learned that making peace with the past is the foundation of building strong buildings.
3. Sincerely thank each experience for serving its purpose
To me, every experience happened not only because it happened, but because it needed to happen at that moment. I’ve been a fan of this thought since I lost both of my parents when I was a teenager. It made no sense to me to be an orphan at 19. Now, five years later, if it wasn’t for these happening to me, I would not be where I am today.
Where I am right now might not be that special, it might not be that grande when compared to others. But where I am right now is meant to happen at the now, it is enough, and I am thankful for that.
So like letting go of items, I sincerely thank my experiences for serving me its purpose. This includes the feelings that comes within the experiences, the thoughts, the lingering emotions, and all of it.
Once again — and I cannot emphasise this enough, the steps to mental decluttering is not an overnight process. Be aware that this process will make you want to give up because of how uncomfortable it is to feel it again. It will make you feel very intense and scared, as it did to me. But again, changes are scary and apparently so does moving forwards.
I believe, sometimes we linger in the past because it is familiar, it is comfortable. What lies ahead of us stays an unopened page because we are turning to the past over and over again. Other times, we also linger to the same hurt because it gives us identity, and we think we’ll loose ourselves if we do not feel that feeling anymore. But it is never the case.
“When you have an unpleasant feeling, don’t grab a hold of it and turn it over and over. Instead, leave it alone so it can flow. The wave of emotion will naturally recede on its own as long as you don’t feed it by dwelling on it.” — Haemin Sunim
Mental decluttering is similar to decluttering our materialistic belongings. Though it is not as easy, it will help you breathe better and see things on the bigger scale. To all these, I am no one to tell you what’s right and what’s wrong. We are all entitled to how and what we feel.
I can only share my experiences and advice you to take as much time as you need. To me, it took five years to be able to write down this kind of article. Until today, I am still in the process of decluttering my past, but through consistency and commitment, I feel like I can breathe better every day and see things more clearly.
So over and over again, when I turn back to find comfort, I ask myself: “does it spark joy?”
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Previously published on medium
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Photo credit: Photo by Sarah Brown on Unsplash