Cleaning the Soul’s House
There is so much that needs to be faced and acknowledged and cleaned up. No one can break free from bondage when they live in a state of denial or continue to run from past mistakes that have caused pain.
All the things I’ve tried to deny and run from still exist in my life. Ignoring them didn’t make them disappear; instead, they are right in my face, waiting for me to put my attention on them. The list right now is huge…money issues, health issues, relationship issues, etc.
Trying to play outside of the laws of life doesn’t work. When things are out of balance, they need to be looked at head on. The accountability must come in, along with an openness to doing whatever it takes to bring it into balance.
The soul becomes fragmented into broken pieces when things are out of balance. The only way to feel whole is to retrieve those lost pieces–pieces that were stolen or given away or simply lost in the midst of some moment of temporary insanity.
Healing is about wholeness and balance–cleaning up all those areas where we have made errors–not by blaming ourselves or others, but by recognizing our part in it, making amends, asking for forgiveness and finally, forgiving ourselves.
Bad choices, mistaken beliefs and errors in judgment happen to everyone., but there is a major difference in the lives of those who clean things up and those who ignore them or run away. In the end you can never really run away–I am proof of that–a distance of 3,000 miles hasn’t removed any of it from my life. The unresolved stuff comes with you whether you like it or not. It is patient and will wait until the day you die and beyond to resolve it and clean it up.
Facing the Truth (and ourselves) without the veils or stories takes incredible courage. It is our stories that make sense out of the senseless, our stories that connect the dots, and our stories that make up the glue that holds who we think we are in place.
But it is also our stories that keep us from experiencing life as it is. We are so busying filtering that what we see is bent and refracted in ways that “fit†with our beliefs and past experiences. We frame our relationships in the same way. We blast people with a muddy cocktail of projections from our vast library of beliefs and associations connected with them, that they don’t stand a chance of being seen fresh and new in the moment.
To clean house, so to speak, is to drop the stories (and the justifications, rationalizations, and explanations) we put around our experiences and take stock of what’s left. What you typically find is a bit of a mess—things that you thought you could ignore or deny right out of existence that now need to be handled and resolved.
Some of the messes are a big deal and some aren’t. But once we can see them, we wondered how we lived with them for so long. Cleaning them up seems like the most natural next step in our lives. Suddenly, there is no longer a good reason not to.
As we move forward in this way, we begin to feel the way you do after a good spring cleaning: lighter, freer, and more able to breathe. There is more space, more light and more openness to the present. We are available now because we have unburdened ourselves, released these weights we’ve been dragging around for years.
After all this hard work, my intention for myself, at least, is to prevent this type of laboring in the future by cleaning up my messes as they arise. A kind of clean as you go approach. Because though I’d love to stop making messes, as long as I’m human, there will always be messes made that need to be cleaned up. If I can simply eliminate the extra task of unraveling the stories around them, I’ll spend far less time in the muck and mire of existence, and more in the lightness of being.
