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Health

Emotional Decluttering

mindfulness day 2 part 1

…la di dah we’re just gonna waltz on in here like it hasn’t been a month since my last post and a month and a half since my last mindfulness post…

There are a couple of activities on “day 2” and there’s no way I can do even one of them in a day so there are gonna be at least 2 “day 2 v.2” posts. I guess I should re-name this one day 2a v.2? Or maybe day 2 v.2a… Or just day 2 part 1 – y’all know it’s not the stuff from 2021. …anyway, back to the regularly scheduled programming.

Everyone knows what physical clutter is right? The stuff hanging around that really serves no purpose except for getting in your way, or making you feel guilty, or worry about unnecessarily. Well, it turns out emotional clutter is pretty similar.

That tchotchke isn’t inherently bad – it only becomes clutter if there are too many and they overwhelm you and don’t serve their intended purpose anymore (i.e. reminding you fondly of someone or some place). Negative thoughts and emotions are also not bad – fight or flight is a survival tactic. BUT most people don’t need survival tactics every damn day.

Feeling guilty about something is the same – you can use the feeling to see how to change and grow OR it can cause you to seize up and freeze and never evolve.

My “emotional decluttering” focus is definitely centred on guilt. It’s so easy for me to absorb any and all blame. My train of thought recently, as an example:

“We’re in a pandemic and we were going to go visit the family in BC but another pandemic wave hit and so we can’t go and it’s my fault I never thought we should move to be closer to the BC family.”

Seriously.

So this is my focus: Forget the mistake and learn the lesson. Don’t hold on to regret and guilt.

Toby took this awesome picture during a visit to Balmy Beach.

I got tested on this too soon though. I offended someone last week. I was trying to process something about how I felt after an online conversation and I forgot the cardinal rule that really there is no nuance online and while the second conversation would have probably happened very differently if it was in person, I made a mistake. I didn’t think through what I was saying before I said it and I completely missed an obvious interpretation.

I’ve given myself a couple of days to wallow and while I wish I had done it differently, I cannot go back and change it. I’ll consider a bit more about what I can learn from this and how to avoid – or at least minimize the chances of it – it in the future.

as an aside – I am going to try and make time for this. It’s important to me even if it isn’t (and probably because it isn’t) easy. So my calendar says I have to post something about this every Tuesday from now on… *fingers crossed*

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