Avoidance

I've been working with a book called Soul Coaching by Denise Linn. It's been intersecting beautifully with the work prompted by the archetypes in spiritual direction book, and with my strong impulse to unite spirituality with domesticity. The first week of exercises is put in the context of the element of Air, with its properties of Order and Clearing, focused on the home.

I was doing one lesson a day, but stalled out a few days ago with this assignment: Walk around your home, staying in touch with your feelings and your body sensations. Notice where your energy seems to wane and where you feel revitalized. Touch different objects, and notice what happens to your energy. After doing this exercise, you may want to make adjustments in your home.

It took a few days for me to even admit that I was avoiding the exercise, and then a while longer to realize why.

Combine my under-developed trust in my own intuition with my ambivalence about my home? Oh yeah, I can't wait to expose myself to that.

My plumbing is fixed. My house is pretty much in order. I've done three loads of laundry today, balanced my checkbook, and put away my Christmas ornaments. I think tonight is the time to do this exercise.

The Exercise

Okay. . . I did it.
I probably didn't do it as deeply as I might have, but on some assignments -- whatever the venue -- sometimes "good enough" is indeed enough.

The point of the exercise was to look at possessions: which ones have positive, energy-lifting associations, and which have negative, energy-depressing associations.

What I found wasn't particularly earth-shattering. . . mostly that the 'things' I have around me, the stuff that is eye-catching, anyway, is almost entirely positive. I should also mention that I didn't even bother to go into my yellow room: what was supposed to have been a spacious area for exercise and creative pursuits which has been nothing but a place for stuff to accumulate.

But I don't have things around me that have bad memories, or which I display just to make someone else feel good, or to impress others. (There are advantages to being territorial: one of them is that my space is my space, and if you don't like it, you don't have to come round.)

I think that for me the value was more in actually using the technique, so I can keep it in my 'toolbox' as I continue to work on my relationship with my house. As I'm de-cluttering, I should be pausing over the various 'things' I'm moving, to really find out how I feel about them. Does a particular object contribute to a good feeling in my house, or does it bring my energy down? Or is it neutral?