Welcome to a refreshing journey of renewal with me, Sally Burlington, as we embrace the rejuvenating tradition of spring cleaning, woven seamlessly with the art of self-care. Imagine transforming the seemingly mundane task of tidying up into an act of joy and personal fulfillment. This episode of Create Harmony takes you a celebration of the new season and a fresh start for your mind, body, and space. Let's embark on this adventure together, discovering how to declutter not just our homes, but our lives, making room for what truly matters.
We’ll talk about the profound impact of a spruced-up environment on your daily routine and how these tasks can evoke a sense of clarity and preparedness for the sunnier days ahead. So, whether you’re a seasoned spring cleaner or someone looking for inspiration to get started, this episode is your guide to making the process a fulfilling part of your self-care regimen.
Welcome to a refreshing journey of renewal with me, Sally Burlington, as we embrace the rejuvenating tradition of spring cleaning, woven seamlessly with the art of self-care. Imagine transforming the seemingly mundane task of tidying up into an act of joy and personal fulfillment. This episode of Create Harmony takes you a celebration of the new season and a fresh start for your mind, body, and space. Let's embark on this adventure together, discovering how to declutter not just our homes, but our lives, making room for what truly matters.
We’ll talk about the profound impact of a spruced-up environment on your daily routine and how these tasks can evoke a sense of clarity and preparedness for the sunnier days ahead. So, whether you’re a seasoned spring cleaner or someone looking for inspiration to get started, this episode is your guide to making the process a fulfilling part of your self-care regimen.
To learn more, go to mycreateharmony.com
Speaker 1:
Welcome back to the Create Harmony podcast. I am your host, sally Burlington, and this is episode 75. So this is a podcast about savoring life's blessings and settling yourself into an intentional rhythm, and together we try to learn how to use our imagination as a way of listening to God. And if you are looking for a place to refresh your life, you can find it right here In this place. We'll take a few minutes to celebrate those everyday joys and remind ourselves how to notice goodness all around us. So around here we usually try to tie our content into the seasons and the changes in nature that we see going on outside, and this is springtime right here in North Carolina, where I live, and in springtime we really like to think about spring cleaning.
Speaker 1:
Everybody associates cleaning with spring. So in preparation for this episode, I gave some thought to why do we call it spring cleaning? I mean, why isn't it summer cleaning or fall cleaning or whatever? How did this tradition originate? So I did a little research online. I went to our internet providers and I found that the tradition of spring cleaning goes back about 3,000 years. I bet you didn't know that 3,000 years people have been cleaning out things in the spring, so there are a lot of foundations of this tradition in the Jewish faith that it's the preparation that the Jewish people did in preparation for Passover, and there's also evidence of people spring cleaning in the Iranian culture and in the Chinese culture. So what I'm saying is this this is not a trend. It's not something that we just came up with here in our more modern times. It is a time honored tradition that when the weather gets warmer we freshen up our houses, we emerge for winter and transition into spring.
Speaker 1:
There are probably a lot of different things that fall into the category of spring cleaning. Sometimes that refers to decluttering, cleaning out your closets or even like deep cleaning, things that you don't get to on your regular routine. Cleaning out your oven and washing out your drawers and washing the baseboards, changing the air filters things like that, cleaning your ceiling fans those types of things fall into the category of spring cleaning, anything like that. You're going to take a little bit more time here in the spring to open up the season and get things freshened up. Getting rid of your old socks you can't find the match to cleaning out your coffee maker. It can be outside chores to get your yard ready for the growing season, opening up your patio or your porch. So a lot of things that we're going to talk about today are more interesting.
Speaker 1:
Typically, women are more focused on how to be effective at spring cleaning because it is women us women who have taken care of the lion's share of domestic duties. But if you are a man and you are listening to this podcast, this applies to you too. There is somewhere in some part of your life that you can connect yourself to this 3,000-year-old tradition, no matter what your gender, that you can do some spring cleaning. Maybe it's your closet, maybe it's your desk at the office, maybe it's your car, or I'm sure that the women in your life would appreciate if you just started helping out with the spring cleaning in your home. Clean out the baseboards and the ceiling fans. They will appreciate that. So there is something here for you too.
Speaker 1:
Some of us love this process and they find satisfaction in getting things done and having it feel fresh. Those of us in this category. They don't really feel overwhelmed, but instead get excited when they see the list of these chores and find joy in doing them. And then there are those of us who want things cleaned out and enjoy the feeling of it being cleaned out, everything being decluttered and no more dust. But they find it hard to either find the time or sustain the motivation or just get going in order to get the job done. And people in that camp need maybe a little bit more incentive to get the process underway. And for me, I'm really kind of in both of these categories, depending on the task, and a lot of it depends on the scale of how much needs to be done and kind of also it depends on how the rest of my life is going and what else is on my calendar.
Speaker 1:
And that may be true for you as well. You may find that decluttering makes you feel good. That may be true for you as well. You may find that decluttering makes you feel good, but you might feel like the cleaning part is more of a chore. Or maybe you like the stuff outside your house, you like to work out in the yard, but you're really not all that excited about doing the things, the deep cleaning on the inside. All that to say, I wonder if you could add a little self-care, some of the aspects of self-care, into spring cleaning and that would help maybe make it a little bit more exciting. And you might be wondering what does that mean? What is she talking about?
Speaker 1:
Self-care and cleaning, and the general idea is to make this experience more pleasant for you. Do the things that are going to make this feel like a a special experience for you, and the way to do that is pretty specific to your life and to your project. But a good place to start is where we always start using our senses. So if you like things to smell good, you could light a candle before you in the area that you're starting to clean and give. That creation of an atmosphere makes you feel like your cleaning time is special. Or maybe you want to create your own smell of a cleaner and that that will engage you into the process.
Speaker 1:
Maybe you could listen to something, use your ears, listen to something to get you going. If you're a fan of music, put on your favorite energizing tunes. Whatever you do when you're trying to engage yourself in a workout. Maybe think about it that way. Or if you're a person that gets easily distracted, music might not grab your attention quite enough, so you could put on a book or a podcast to sort of hold your attention for a little longer. You could also clean and decorate an area at the same time, something that would look pretty to your eyes. So this would be your visual sense. If you like putting out different decor for the seasons, this might be appealing to you. You could add a little creativity into the job. Maybe you're one of those people that wants to have all of the rainbow colored bins and everything beautiful, and that will get you excited about decluttering Whatever it takes. Just focus on that in order to get yourself started.
Speaker 1:
Now, if you get easily overwhelmed by these types of projects which we all do there is somewhere something in your life that you feel overwhelmed by doing. I do have some additional suggestions about how to make progress, so here's what you could do. You could select a small area and just focus on that part. Maybe you need to clean out and organize your garage, for example. That might be very overwhelming, because the whole garage and all the mess is just way too much to try to get done. But you could start as small as one little shelving unit or one wall, or one shelf, for that matter, and just say to yourself I'm going to clean out this one little part today, and then tomorrow I'm gonna clean out the next shelving unit or the next wall and break it down. And breaking it down into those small chunks, that'll help you see some results. And when you see that new shelving unit that you cleaned out and got all organized, maybe that'll give you the momentum to keep it going to all different areas around your house or office or car.
Speaker 1:
Okay, one pro tip for making this work this is a pitfall that sometimes happens to me. When I select a section like, okay, I'm going to take this one shelving unit and I'm going to clean it out. And I begin to clean it out and I find all sorts of random things and those things don't have a clear purpose or a home and a lot of decision making is involved and sometimes that decision making process gets me a little bit off task and I you know these random things. I then I'm walking all over the house trying to find where does this go? And whatever this is broken, what am I going to do with it? And I'm right back to where I started with overwhelm.
Speaker 1:
But my suggestion is, if you are cleaning and decluttering a small piece of a bigger project for example, the example I used earlier if you're working in the garage and you've chosen one shelving unit to focus on for today to keep yourself from just feeling like, oh gosh, I can't get all this done. Just create a zone for things that need further attention later. Find somewhere that you could collect all of that stuff and put it together, stuff that doesn't go right here. It's not going to be in the finished project of the shelving unit, but it doesn't have a home or it is something that like. If you, for example, if you were doing your closet, you might find clothes that need to be altered or ironed or a button sewn back on. Just collect those into that zone and then later you'll choose that zone to focus on and you'll get those little things. One thing will be ironed and something will be altered and eventually you whittle down the list. So if you create that space, then you'll have every that will be left as your loose ends once you're finished cleaning out everything else.
Speaker 1:
So another idea for getting motivated if you get overwhelmed is to set a timer. If you'd rather not set a space, like make it a zone, then just set an amount of time. It doesn't matter how much I'm going to start in this coat closet and I'm going to do that for 30 minutes. At our house sometimes we have what we call the 10-minute tidy. I've talked about that. Before you take a room that needs to be cleaned up, you clean in there for 10 minutes. See how much you can get done. Probably not going to get a lot of really deep cleaning done in 10 minutes, but you might get the baseboards on one side of the room done or whatever, and that everybody has 10 minutes. You can do it for 10 minutes. It makes it breaks it down into a bite-sized piece and therefore you can sort of move along through the process and it's really pretty shocking how much you can accomplish in 10 minutes. But you may set your time limit for longer. You might say a half an hour or a half a day, but having that small boundary it it just makes it more accessible. And for me, once I tidy for 10 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever, sometimes that in itself just gets me started. It gets me beyond the starting line and I'm off to the races.
Speaker 1:
So the bottom line here is, as the season changes, maybe it's time to evaluate anything that needs more attention in your life than your regular everyday routine affords. That's where you're focusing your energy. When we talk about, we're refreshing your life. This is what that means. You'll be following the lead of people who did this for over the last 3,000 years, and that will feel good. So now for our closing.
Speaker 1:
Today we're going to do a visualization exercise, and the theme of this exercise is called looking for a clearing. So before we get started, I'll give you a little bit of backstory. I did an episode a while back called looking for a clearing, and the message it was about our lives being busy and full and overwhelming. And the message was when you're navigating the wilderness of your life and everything is loud and it's crowded and complicated, you want to seek the feeling that you have when you come across a clearing in the wilderness, what it feels like to think of the the. You're in the trees and you stumble upon a clearing, an opening for light and peace to come in. So while we're doing this exercise today, I want you to connect with that idea. I want you to that your spring cleaning and decluttering process is leading you to a clearing from the wilderness of life. So it's time now for us to shift into our more mindful posture. Make sure you're in a comfortable position and settle your body, analyze your body, release any tension you can feel yourself holding. I often say that at the beginning of a visualization and it's surprising that if you just think about tension, you can release some that you might be holding, that you didn't even realize was there. So let that go right now and take a deep breath, breathe in possibilities and breathe out gratitude, and if it makes sense for you to close your eyes right now, you can do that Now.
Speaker 1:
Place yourself in a dense forest. The light is dim, you are surrounded by trees and branches. You're trying to walk, but you're having to push branches out of the way as you move. You are having to step over limbs and leaves to move along through the forest and it's tough to figure out where to go next. You feel entangled. Your body is almost constricted by the foliage all around you, but you keep working your way through. Up ahead you see a space and you see more light coming through. There is a break in the trees.
Speaker 1:
When you get up close to the opening, you see a large clearing ahead of you, space where the constraints of the branches open up and the sunlight streams in. You step into the clearing and you feel free and unbound. The sun warms your face and it feels peaceful here, soak up the feeling of being in the clearing. This is the feeling you have been looking for A space in the middle of the wilderness that gives you a chance to rest. You lay down on the plush green grass, you dwell here for a bit. Now it's time to step away from the clearing, but you're going to bring that peaceful energy back into your life, bring your awareness back to the podcast, take a final deep breath, breathe in possibilities and breathe out gratitude, and if you closed your eyes at the beginning, you can open them now.
Speaker 1:
Thanks so much for joining us as we talked through all the different ways to make spring cleaning a little bit more accessible to you, and it is my hope that you'll take these ideas into your life and find a clearing for yourself in your busy schedule, that these practices will make you feel refreshed and ready to face the next season. Now, if you have an extra minute, if you find a clearing in your life and you have an extra minute it would be great if you could leave us a review. You find a clearing in your life and you have an extra minute. It would be great if you could leave us a review the hardest thing about having a podcast is growing your audience, and the most effective way for other people to find us is more reviews. It would be most most appreciated if you could just add those up, put some more reviews out there and help us out a little bit. So we'll be back next week with some more spring ideas and hope you'll join then too. And until next time, peace.