Time to Hang Your Worries and Create Calm

There is a little story that was being passed around through email that my mother sent me years ago. The story was about leaving your worries at the door of your home – hanging them on a tree to allow you to walk into your home without carrying the burdens from your day’s work into your home. Figuratively, it is a nice gesture to think about to prevent your bad day from permeating into your home life.

Your mood and emotions affect others around you. In science it is called the emotional contagion.

So if you are feeling stressed from work or a bad commute it is best to deliberately hang those worries on the proverbial tree so you don’t contaminate your home — a place that should be a sanctuary of sorts for you and those with whom you live.

I started to think of what that truly meant – to have your home be a sanctuary. To feel as though when you walk into your space there is calm and peace. I know for me my home feels like a sanctuary and a fortress of sorts.  No matter what has happened in the outside world to me or around me, when I come home there is an ease. There is a comfort.

And there is safety in that.

Part of what creates the sanctuary, I truly believe, is how we create our space. These days we are saddled with so much stuff, I am not so sure we truly feel that calm and peace. We are not only disrupting our sanctuary with negative emotions and stress from the outside world, we are upending it with what we physically keep on the inside.

As a Life Architect, my job is about helping people create a life they love.  Which isn’t about reaching for perfection but rather about aiming for growth. Part of creating your life is about seeing where we trip, fall, ignore any number of things. And despite it all keep pushing through the results of bad decisions and unconscious living to change things up, adopt a new way of seeing and doing things, all with the goal of living on purpose and with a greater sense of joy.

We find joy in our life because our life has meaning.

And we gain meaning when we dig to get to what we really want to feel as breathing beings on this earth.

Clutter causes confusion that gets in the way of the joy. It is both a physical roadblock and a mental barrier that affects our sanctuary and how we feel in it. Clutter alone turns our sanctuary into an abomination.

To bring your home to life and make it the place of peace you need and deserve consider doing this:

• Reduce the clutter; purge immediately what you know you don’t like or need
• Be diligent in questioning what you bring into your space. Let it be only things that you know beautify it (that includes your negative thoughts!)
• Get help if you need it. You don’t have to go it alone when it comes to getting organized. There is no shame in delegating or asking for help especially if it means you get rewarded with wellness and peace of mind.

You deserve that.

Sometimes the only answer people are looking for when they ask for help is that they won’t have to face the problem alone. – Mark Amend

The story about hanging your worries on a tree outside of your sanctuary is an important one.  It’s not that we shouldn’t have the worries or the burdens but that we can re-frame them and decide how, and if, we will carry them with us.  We have control over what we let into our space. What we let in – whether it be thoughts or things – does affect how we feel and therefore what we do.

And how we act.

And who we are.

Every time you walk in.

Need help creating calm? Schedule a free 30 minute phone consult with me to get you started. I love to create what makes your head hurt.