SPRING CLEANING

Hello and beautiful morning!

Spring is here! Song birds are chirping, the sun is warming and people are smiling more.

Spring represents the time when Mother Earth wakes up from her winter sleep. She is warmed by Father Sun. He excites Her potential to create anew. Soil and seed are stimulated, fostering new growth and development.

During the Spring season our creative potential also wakes up, invigorating us, giving us the energy to implement new ideas, to the possibility that we can live differently.

Most people feel busy, whether they are busy or not due largely to the environment most of us live in.

If you were to walk into the office shown here after meditating and finding your center, I suspect you’d find it hard to maintain your centeredness because the energetic clutter of the environment enters you and pulls upon your center because by engaging in any environment, you embody it.

When we look at or interact with something, someplace, or someone, we engage in a relationship. We are always 50% of every relationship we enter for the simple reason that all sensory inputs, be they visual, auditory or kinesthetic, occur within us.

For example, if I’m sitting next to a woman in a café who’s got her back facing me and I’ve got a snotty nose, I’m unlikely to smell her perfume; she’s just another person with her back to me and I’m less likely to enter into an interactive relationship with her.

But, if my nose is working well and I smell her lovely perfume, I have embodied her scent within me. She has entered me. Now that she’s there in scent, I’m entangled with her. I may want to start a conversation. I may wait until she turns or moves so I can see if the rest of her is as beautiful as her smell. As long as I’m entrained by her scent, I’m entangled with her and she’s part of my environment.

Because I’m acutely aware of my environment and its effects on me, I’ve always done my best to keep my work and home environment so that the organization and presentation of things aren’t a hindrance to being productive and won’t distract my mind.

One of my favorite places that allows my mind to feel uncluttered is in my rock-garden at home.

Here you can see me sitting and meditating while writing Tao-TE-zen surtas. I go there often to do my creative thinking and artwork because the energy there is natural, ordered, open, inviting, warm, accepting and nourishing to my inner-being. I can become quite and still there.

Chances are, I would not have ever been able to write the 72 Tao-TE-zen sutras in the office seen above!

If you are at a time in your life where you need to make some changes in order to feel safer, create more abundance, be more productive, or cultivate more energy, you may find the best thing to do first is clean and organize your environment.

I have found the principles of Feng Shui very helpful, as has my wife, Penny. When we moved into our current home several years ago, Penny remodeled the house and garden in accordance with the principles of Feng Shui and it made a significant difference with regard to the flow of energy. The changes made it much easier to feel peaceful and connected to the environment.

When the places we need to rest or be productive are cluttered or out of flow with natural energies, they actually add stress to our lives.

When your home or work environment are out of order, they tend to create disorder because just as a beautiful smelling woman’s perfume enters your being and develops a relationship that moves you, so to do the environmental energies.

Remember, a cluttered office or home has much more mass than you do.

Mass has inertia – it exerts a pull. For example, if you place a quarter, a nickel and a penny on a table in a triangular relationship and hang a pendulum directly in the middle of them, it will begin swinging. You will notice that it swings oblong, with greater movement toward the quarter, and still greater movement toward the nickel than the penny.

This little experiment shows you that by mass-action alone, if you are in a cluttered room, office or garden, the pull of the mass-energy is likely to be many times greater than the pull your body exerts on the environment.

Therefore, if you are a well-tuned, organized person who walks into an office like the one above, you may well feel the spirits of the room excited to see you; you may feel a pull coming from many directions.

The plants or even the things in the room may be calling out to you to enter into relationship with you, because to them, you are like lovely perfume.

This pull can be very nagging and distracting, even though most people have no idea why they can’t relax in certain places.

Sometimes, when my houseplants don’t like where they are, they will tug on me. They want me to move them to a place more appropriate for their needs. Once I do, then I too feel more relaxed inside and can channel my energy freely into what I’m doing.

Now is a great time for spring-cleaning.

Let me know what you experience when you clean up your work and home environments.The worst thing that will happen is that you will feel better inside, create more effectively, and have more energy for making love in relationships!

Love and chi,
Paul Chek