The Healthy Junk Chronicles: My Journey with Junk (Healthy and Otherwise)

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It’s been a while since I posted on this blog. Heck, I didn’t even wish anyone Happy Holidays on this blog. That sucks.

I’ve been concentrating so much of my Fight dis-ease! blog and on my life, I totally neglected this blog. I must admit that I thought about it a lot – the different topics and posts that I could share with you – but nothing ever came to fruition. I was developing that necessary focus needed to maintain all the things I need to do with excellence.

With that said, let’s get to the junk!

My life, no matter how much it seems I am improving on it, is a junk filled mess. I have clutter out the wazoo, I have clutter in my mind and I’m doing so much, I don’t have time to clear the junk out of my body. (doesn’t this sound familiar?) 2010 was filled with all kinds of ups and downs and I did my best to navigate through it with ease of mind.

Unfortunately for me, my ease of mind came in various forms – clutter, chocolate, carbonated sodas (organic of course! ), wasteful spending (when I get depressed, I don’t eat. I shop) and whatever else ails me that ego doesn’t want to recall – and the second part of last year as spent finding ways to cut down or cut out all this junk!

Last year, I posted about my obsession with chicken wings. I still ate them as well as other forms of chicken (my mind felt better when I paid more for “grass-fed” and “all natural” chicken). Today, it has been 9 days of eating no meat (fish is allowed…for now). I had a lot of clutter in my home at the time of posting to you last year. Today, I have cleared about 70% of my clutter, most of it laundry and a messed up living room. My finances were also in jeopardy and I had goals to reach that seemed impossible because of my finances. Today, I have made steps to put my finances in better order, I have organized myself in a manner where I can now go out and earn in my field and I have reached my goals of finishing Intermediate Teacher Training (Yoga).

This year is a time of renewal, all of the plans that were laid and hammered over. All the vision boards that were created that seemed impossible at the time will now come to fruition. Small steps must be taken to reach larger goals. Junk is all encompassing, much like stress. You have to clear a little bit of junk here and there to make space on a larger scale. The trick is that you must have a plan on what you are clearing and how you will clear it. The clearer you are about that, the more conviction you will have in executing that plan. These two traits then lead to the confidence needed to finish the task, without attaching to the expectations that were formed while reaching that goal.

This journey we are on to get rid of our junk is laid with expectations.  “I want to get rid of this first and then all of this and the other thing and it will look this way and people will treat me like this and I will reach my goal.” That’s not a plan…those are EXPECTATIONS and they don’t work when mapping out your journeys. A plan make sense. It is an affirmation of your goals and a clear intention on how you will do that. A plan looks more like this:

I’ll spend 10 minutes every day clearing some part of my house. The room doesn’t matter. I’ll do this for one week. If I skip a day, I won’t worry about it. I’ll keep at it until I do it for 10 days. Then I can decide whether I’ll spend a longer part of time clearing some part of the house or if I will start to concentrate on a specific part of the home for a period of time.

I had to do this for myself. I got a piece of paper and tracked when I did this and made sure it was for 10 days. By the 7th day, I didn’t need the piece of paper anymore. I started cleaning certain parts of my home on my own. I would spend 10, 20, 40 minutes in one area or spend 5 minutes in different areas. I concentrated on creating small pools of open space in different parts of a room, which would then form ponds, streams, and then lakes of clear space. The lakes represent massive areas of space.

It’s not like I’m done either – clearing out my junk. I still have a long way to go and a lot to do. But it takes time. doesn’t everything?

So what’s this got to do with this blog…pretty much everything. I did say that I was going to talk about all forms of junk. It’s easiest to begin with me. Where is the junk in your life and what steps are you making to bring it down or get it out? Leave a comment and I’ll be sure to get back to you.

In the meantime, if you’re gonna consume junk, it might as well be healthy junk!