Are you Marie Kondo-ing your home? Or at the very least, your closet? Have you seen her show on Netflix? If you aren’t sure what I’m talking about, Marie Kondo, the author of “The Magic of Tidying Up”, recently premiered a show on Netflix that is all about organizing, decluttering, and yes, tidying up the mess in our home. It’s taken the world by storm (again); everywhere I look I see people using the Konmari method, posting before photos of mountains of clothes and afters of perfectly organized closets. I love it.

I am a huge fan of decluttering. Last January, I experimented with the Minimalist Game and removed about 500 items from our home (you can read more about that here). It was wonderful, and exhausting, and enlightening, and ruthless. It was also, as decluttering often is, focused very much on what to remove.

Marie Kondo’s method focuses on what you want to keep, what you want to carry forward into your life from now on, not on what you must get rid of. One of the major tenets: if a thing “sparks joy”, you keep it! No judgement, no practicality required. It is your life, what sparks joy for you is personal and profound and the only measurement required. Items that no longer spark joy are thanked for their service, and released.

You might think that this focus on what you are keeping would be less effective than focusing on what to remove. It seems the opposite is true. As people get better at connecting with themselves, with their body, with that feeling of joy being sparked, their level of clarity becomes laser focused and they find it easier and easier to let go of things they otherwise might have thought they “should” keep.

“The question of what you want to own is actually the question of how you want to live your life.”
- Marie Kondo

I simply love this flip, this focus on the positive, on the joy. It releases one from that scarcity mentality, from keeping things “in case” you need them in the future, from gripping onto things our of fear. It helps you focus on who you want to be, what you want to carry forward into your future. It requires tapping into your body, listening to the wisdom there, trusting it rather than your mind’s “rational” guidance.

[I am going to leave to the side, for a moment, the fact that a show like this, a movement like this, could only exist in a world of privilege, where the accumulation of stuff is a problem. It speaks volumes that this insatiable need to acquire things has created a whole new set of problems, and that these problems are the purview of only a sliver of the world. But perhaps that is a topic for another day.]

And now, finally, I come to the point: what if we Marie Kondo our minds? What if we let go of the thoughts that do not bring us joy? What if we hold each belief in our hands, so to speak, and allow our bodies to tell us wether or not it is one worth keeping? Imagine if we were able to purge our minds of the toxic thoughts we are holding onto, the negative beliefs that are cluttering up our bodies and brain? Imagine if we chose to let go of the thoughts that weigh us down, that we keep because we think we should?

We think these limiting thoughts are keeping us safe; we worry that if we don’t worry, we will be caught, clueless and unawares by “bad things”. But worry does not prevent bad things. Being the first to think a negative thing about ourselves, making sure we preempt others’ judgments by judging ourselves first, does not protect us. It simply smothers us with unnecessary sludge and makes living the life we dream of almost impossible.

Take a look at your mental closet, your spiritual closet. Is it cluttered with hand-me-down beliefs and outdated thoughts that no longer serve you? Are you carting around patterns of thought that you think we need to keep “in case”? Do your thoughts spark joy? Can you even tell?

It takes mindfulness and awareness to even notice the thoughts we are thinking. It takes presence to tap into how these thoughts make our body feel. What if we practiced that mindfulness? What if we paid deep attention to how those thoughts affected our body? What if we trusted our body to guide us? To lead us to thoughts that spark deep and profound joy, that bring peace?

The next time you find yourself gnawing on a particular thought, like a dog with a bone, see if you can step back a bit. Notice how your body physically feels as you worry over this thinking. Take a breath. Does this pattern of thinking bring you joy? Does your body feel good? If not, maybe it is time to let it go. Thank the thought for trying to help you, for trying to keep you safe, and then choose to let it go.

This is the decluttering we can focus on. This is why I think the KonMari method is so beautiful: her method encourages us to reconnect with our bodies, to recognize when we feel that joy. The more we strengthen that awareness, through decluttering or meditation or dance or whatever you choose, the more we build the trust in ourselves, in our own inner wisdom, to guide us on our path.