Cleaning Your (Inner) House
No, this post isn’t about literally cleaning your physical house. Nope, it’s much better than that. It’s about cleaning the most important house, your innermost house, aka your mind (especially the subconscious mind, which is where the majority of our innermost beliefs and behaviors come from).
And this isn’t easy work. In fact, most people would rather just stay the same and keep doing the same things, repeating the same lessons over and over in life, than to take a hard look inside and to actually admit, let alone work on, their issues (and trust me, we ALL have issues – but that’s another topic).
A lot of times, I find myself explaining the inner healing process to others as compared to cleaning a house. This isn’t a new concept; others have used this analogy before (e.g., self-help gurus: Louise Hay and Iyanla Vanzant) and perhaps they have described it much better than I do.
But whichever “version” you prefer, I find it very helpful, for myself and for others, to think of the inner healing journey in this way.
Our mind, and especially our subconscious mind, is like a big ol’ house. It has many different rooms and levels. In those rooms is everything we’ve ever experienced in our lives. Every experience, every feeling, every emotion, every sense: every smell, touch, taste, sight, and sound that we’ve ever experienced is stored somewhere in this house.
Now some of this stuff is in plain sight and some stuff is hidden deep within the walls. Some of these rooms get really cluttered and messy and filled with junk (aka years of emotional baggage, mostly from childhood, but also from adulthood).
In the closets, some of the most hidden stuff is stored away, tucked away…out of sight out of mind, literally (well not quite).
Things are there that we don’t even want to see, let alone want anyone else to see. Many times there are years of repressed feelings (anger, sadness, grief, pain, hurt, loneliness, unworthiness, etc) and pent up emotions stored in these closets. The deepest hurts, pains, traumatic events, and limiting beliefs reside in these closets, in the recesses of the house (or mind). So much so, that we don’t even know they’re there sometimes.
These closets are often filled to the brim with crap just packed away…just waiting for when we’re ready to deal with them and to clear/ heal them. And we all know that if we keep stuffing a closet with stuff on top of stuff, pretty soon the door won’t even close and things just start spilling over and falling out spontaneously.
In order to clean a messy/cluttered house, we can’t just go and do a little sweeping, mopping, and shuffling of items and expect the house to be “clean.” And we certainly can’t just go straight into the closets if we can’t even get through the room or the walkway, due to excessive clutter and junk blocking us. No, we have to clear the clutter in layers.
We have to clear the pathways and the rooms first. Then we reach the closets.
In order to properly clean a closet, we really need to dump everything out onto the floor in order to see what all is even in there. We need to clean the corners and the cobwebs. Sweep out the dust.
And at first it may appear to be an even bigger mess than when everything was stuffed into the closet with the door closed. But that is only an illusion. Deep down we know that this crap needs to be cleared out. And as Louise Hay says, “You have to see the dirt to clean the dirt.”
This is the only way to truly and thoroughly clean out the closets. Remove everything in there, get it out into the open, and begin to sift through it. Sort out what needs to go and what can stay. We can place back into the closet anything we want to keep (any good memories/feelings/emotions) and release and let go of anything we want to get rid of (any negative/false beliefs and negative behaviors we’ve held onto for so long – sometimes out of sheer survival). These are things that no longer serve us and that actually hinder us from being our truest selves and from living more authentically.
And we certainly can’t clean all the closets at once. We would be utterly overwhelmed, as clearing just one closet can be an exhausting and monumental task. No, we have to clear them one by one, at our own pace, and only when we’re ready.
So if you’re in the process of cleaning your own inner house, first of all: Kudos to you for having the courage to brave the mess! Congratulate yourself. Be gentle with yourself.
Secondly: Hold on and know that you’re making progress: one room, one level, and one closet at a time. Just because it’s not all cleaned at once, doesn’t mean it’s not getting cleaned! Quite the opposite: it’s actually getting a deep and thorough cleaning like it’s never received before. Keep up the good work!
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Liz Burkholder, FNP, CHT
Family Nurse Practitioner
Clinical Hypnotherapist