This year’s theme for my 9th Annual Women's Yoga Retreat was “Sweet Surrender.” One of the hardest spiritual practices is letting go. Letting go of all the would haves, could haves and should haves. Letting go of having to have the universe act according to my own preferences. Letting go of irritations. Letting go of stuff!
For the basic idea of de-cluttering of your stuff, I recommend Marie Kondo’s book The Magical Art of Tidying Up. In it, she not only gives you tips and techniques for getting rid of your extra stuff, but she also tells you that by getting rid of your stuff, you will discover exactly what you need to do in your life. I find this very interesting, because the Yoga Sutras promise the same thing. In her translation of Aparigraha, Swami Nirmalananda says that “Becoming established in non-greediness gives you knowledge of the how and why of your birth.” Y.S. 2.39
For those of you who don’t think that having too much stuff is a problem. I recommend that you consider the correlation of weight/wait and stuff/time. Caroline Myss, a medical intuitive, talks about the psychic weight of having too much stuff and how the more weight you carry around as stuff, the longer it will take you to evolve, or or change. She says:
That constant irritating voice telling you to clean out the closet or organize photographs or any of those tasks that relate to cleansing “stored stuff” is actually a very sophisticated intuitive directive that is a prelude to change. All of your “stored stuff” should be considered psychic anchors that keep your world psychically heavy and slow moving. People always remark that they feel “lighter” after they have cleared out closets and basements – that is a psychic lightness, a cutting of ties to countless past times zones that have been hanging in your energy field literally like “psychic weight”, adding “waiting” time to everything in your life. Thus, your ideas feel more and more like unattainable fantasies because you do not have the energy required to transform an idea from “thought into form”. Even holding on to “stuff” that needs to be shed requires energy; never mind all the psychic energy that goes into to holding on to wounds. Combine all the many forms of psychic weight that a person holds on to and the end result is that a person ends up postponing more and more of his or her life because even the simplest task – like clearing out a closet – looks to be overwhelming. I’ve said so often to people, “How can you hope to pursue your highest potential when you are not even managing half your potential now?”
I also recommend her book: “Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can.” Where she talks more about our desire to change, but our inability to give certain things up. It is this inability to let go, or surrender, that keeps us stuck.
And finally, Michael Singer’s book, “The Untethered Soul,” is one of the best books for learning about letting go of your small “s” self and finding your capital “S” Self. I read from his book about removing your inner thorns. This was about how, when something catches us or irritates us, rather than letting go, we tend to hang onto the “thorn.” We tend to worry it, irritate it and build a protective apparatus around it rather than pulling it out and letting it go.