Making Space

I recently spent quite a bit of time tackling my roommates craft room. I noticed as I sorted through the piles that a lot of her stuff was still in the bags that she brought the stuff home in. Those bags then got buried under other bags or items that had to be temporarily moved "out of the way." Only temporarily became not so temporary and out of the way became in the way of the items underneath. This lead to forgetting what had now been buried underneath or remembering, but not being able to find it when she needed it which resulted in her making more purchases of things she already had but just couldn’t find. All this resulted in a lot of space being used really inefficiently. I jokingly told her the new rule was any new purchases could not stay in the bag. The items had to be removed and placed in a spot at least near other like items.

What happened in my roommates craft room is a great example of what we do with our thoughts. It's so important to be AWARE of what we are thinking. What is our thought “inventory.”

By getting in the habit of taking our brain stuff out of "the bag" we can see what's going on up there. As we work with our thoughts we have the opportunity to get organized.

Once we know what is going on up there we can decide what thoughts are worth keeping, what thoughts need to be replaced and discard thoughts that we no longer need. The better we can get at knowing our thought “inventory” the less likely our thoughts will get jumbled up and the less likely we are to use our mind as a dumping ground. We will be able to see right away if thought patterns are building up and whether or not those thoughts serve a positive purpose or are the taking-up-space kind that will only clutter our minds and make it harder to get to the thoughts we do want to access.

Committing to doing daily thought work whether that's just brain dumping and writing out all that's on your mind, creating a daily art piece that depicts what's going on in your thoughts, or meditating and putting down on paper the insights from your meditation, it's crucial to stay knowledgeable about what's going on up there.

With this type of daily interaction with our thoughts we have a better chance of keeping our mind space clean and organized and when we do have an issue that needs to be addressed, we can easily find it because it's not buried and forgotten. When we can easily find our mind drama, we can actually work on our mind drama.