How You Can Declutter Your Life Emotionally and Physically with Peggy Fitzsimmons
As we kick off the month of October and begin to look toward the end of the year, I thought it would be important to get some insights into what it means to free your life of clutter, both emotionally and physically. So I brought in our guest this week, Peggy Fitzsimmons, author of Release: Create a Clutter Free and Soul Driven Life.* Learn why “most people think decluttering is about forcing themselves to get rid of things against their will. What actually happens in the process is that things let go of us,” what causes emotional, mental, and emotional clutter and how to free ourselves of that to live in alignment with our true soul nature; along with some practical tips on how to de-clutter.
Who is Peggy Fitzsimmons?
Peggy Fitzsimmons, Ph.D. has helped many people get their houses in order through intensive decluttering. She also is a former staff of the Omega Institute and was a consulting producer on Oprah Winfrey’s Emmy-winning TV series Super Soul Sunday. In her new book, Release: Create a Clutter Free and Soul Driven Life*, she shares spiritual and practical insights with readers who want to free themselves from clutter and live in alignment with their true soul nature.
Working in Clutter
For Peggy, helping people declutter is what she’s always done, she was the “friend who would come over and say, ‘hey, do you want to clean out the garage?” She attributes part of this to being a Virgo because she likes when things are in order and “beautiful in their ways. But as I did the work, I really realized that it was all connected. Clutter is just the physical representation of thoughts and emotions and energies. So when you work with someone in their home, you see everything right there in front of you. And that helped me to write the book in the way that I did, including all forms of clutter. Not just the stuff in your closet, but the stuff in your emotional closet, your mental closet, that kind of thing.”
Peggy has also come across the opposite of clutter, when someone has a more scarce energy. Part of this comes from our culture “pointing fingers at the hoarders. I believe we're all hoarders. We all hold on to things that don't necessarily serve us. But lack is another kind of manifestation of this ego-mind. And that's kind of what I do in the book, I kind of differentiate between our soul nature and our ego nature.”
In her book, Peggy says that “most people think decluttering is about forcing themselves to get rid of things against their will. What actually happens in the process is that things let go of us.” Her philosophy behind that comes from working and observing people and then recognizing that most of the time, when we’re dealing with clutter in our lives, in any way, it’s usually happening when we’re “facing some sort of transition. So you're moving out of your house, you're going through a divorce, you're changing jobs, these kinds of things kind of bring up a desire to move differently in the world, clear space, bring everything into present time, to move on into what's happening now instead of the past.”
When we’re in these transitional times, we feel the need to get rid of some stuff, but we also feel like we have to force ourselves into it and it becomes “a big drudgery, it's a big dread.” But the way Peggy looks at it, and encourages others to as well, decluttering can, and should, be a “release party. Because I believe if you're clear about who you really are as a soul, then when you look at everything in your environment, and you say ‘does this contribute to who I really am and what my soul is longing for right now?’ In that situation, when we start to look around at everything in our lives, then the things that don't match up, that aren't in alignment, they kind of reveal themselves, and all of a sudden, you go, ‘oh, I don't need that.’ And it is ready to release you. So that's kind of how I see the process.”
Filter Through the Suffering
Peggy shares eight questions in her book to basically filter what we’re feeling and release that emotional suffering:
Does this emotion contribute to my soul intention?
Is it beautiful?
Is it useful?
Does it love me back?
Is it in present time?
Does it have a sacred place to live?
Does it help me to serve my love to the world?
Help me serve my love to the world?
She calls those questions the “roadmap for people who are going through any kind of clutter, those questions stand up against any kind of clutter.” Our true nature and the ego aspect of ourselves are what battle and cause clutter, especially emotional clutter. Peggy explains that our true selves “have one purpose, which is to serve our love to the world. And the soul is eternal, it's wise, it's loving.
The soul knows that we're all connected to each other and to everything else. The soul knows joy and appreciation, gratitude, right? So that's our true nature.” But the ego part of ourselves is the “image we construct of ourselves, our needs, our beliefs, our possessions, the roles we play. And the ego’s main concern is self-preservation, success, survival.” So when our ego selves are in control, you’re in a negative mindset experiencing negative feelings, “you're going to hang out in certain emotions, you're going to hang out in fear, you're going to hang out in anxiety, you're going to hang out in anger, jealousy, resentment, guilt.”
These emotions aren’t wrong to have, it’s natural as humans, but Peggy stresses that it’s important to “understand that, yes, you want to invite every emotion, when it comes to your door, you want to invite it in, you want to know it, you want to welcome it, you don't want to push it aside, you don't want to be afraid of it. All emotions are real, all emotions are part of us. But the ego emotions are different than the soul’s emotions, and muscles, emotions are joy and appreciation and gratitude and peace and contentment. This is our natural state. And we get confused thinking that the other emotions are our natural state. And they're not. They're an altered state. But we're used to their familiarity.”
Working Through Triggers
So if you’re reading and thinking to yourself, '“getting rid of emotional clutter sounds great but I have a trigger response,” first, you’re not even close to being alone in that, and second there are ways to start feeling safe again. We live in a pretty difficult world and most people will experience some form of trauma in their lives, but Peggy says that “the first thing I say about trauma, which I wish someone had explained to me when I was growing up, is just that we're all bigger than just our emotions, our experiences, our personality. And all of these experiences are part of our soul's growth somehow. And you can't know how until later because it shows up in the rearview mirror. It's not available to you right there.”
Peggy also experienced and has seen others experience, a “spiritual bypass. It's like, I'm just gonna think positive thoughts. And everything's okay. And to me, it's like, no, we have to be in all the muck of being human. We have to be willing to go deep into those places of trauma, emotional discord, you know, all kinds of things. Because once we enter them that way, then there's a real chance to integrate them and get the help.” We can’t just tell ourselves to move on from experiences, to learn from them, to be “bigger than that,” because that doesn’t help us work through our trigger responses, that is “where you then are open to getting all the help you need.”
In her book, Peggy shares TONS of tools for when you’re working through triggered responses or even just trying to release clutter, but her favorite is just “always, always, always about remembering the big picture, that's the safest cocoon to land in. It's like there's a bigger story operating here, I am on a soul's path here. And I just have to keep showing up.” Going along with this is also remembering that whatever you’re faced with, whatever “shows up, that I show up for, is here to help me somehow. I keep staying in my own shoes, as a soul, as a person who knows that, you know, my job is to be here to serve my love to the world. How do I do that? I got to be present, I got to be willing to be in those kinds of places because that's where other people need help too. We all need reminders of who we are and that we're going to be okay. And that we are okay.” Lastly, Peggy does a lot of grounding work as well, “letting energy come run through coming back to myself, you know, nature's a big resource for me that way.”
To listen to the full conversation click the links beneath the main photo to listen on your favorite platform!
Affirmation
I align with my most authentic self and allow energetic and physical clutter to let go of me.
Links From the Show
Grab a copy of Release: Create a Clutter Free and Soul Driven Life*.
Join our private Facebook group here.
*This is an affiliate link. Purchasing through affiliate links helps fund The Good Space at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting us!
