Featured Article: Is it Trash or Treasure? Your Physical Treasure Guidelines

Your treasures provide the most complete picture of who you are right now. They represent the authentic you, the one you may have lost touch with over time. When you are able to separate the "stuff" from the treasures, you are confident that you're moving forward in life knowing you have the best things right along with you.

While some people regard everything as a treasure, and some have little regard for things - identifying treasures from clutter serves an important purpose for your life.

If you feel weighed down by clutter (physical or emotional), taking the time to separate the treasures puts you in the driver's seat to navigate a more complete, healthy transition to a lighter, more connected life - rather than just a temporary fix.

How do you know if it's a treasure?

Your treasures show the authentic you. They don't generate any mixed feelings. They are reminders of life lessons, meaningful memories of people, places, and things or valuable knowledge or insight you've gained.

Your treasures strengthen and empower you. They are a testimonial to what makes you feel good about you. They give you a sense of accomplishment, identity, character or achievement. Sometimes going through clutter can be a moving experience for my clients. Often an attitude of frustration and discouragement turns into an "aha" moment of rediscovering connection and passion just from taking time to visit your clutter with a selective and objective mindset.

Your treasures connect you. In my experience working with the chronically disorganized and hoarding behavior, I have been amazingly blessed to see clients' reconnect with their former passions once they have dug themselves out from beneath their clutter. It can be something as simple as being able to once again have friends and family visit you without guilt or shame. Or re-connecting to a former pastime you once were passionate about that somehow got lost in all the stuff.

As you analyze and select your personal treasures, it may be helpful to ask yourself:

What real (physical or emotional) value does this provide me?

If I disposed of it, what would I REALLY miss about it?

Would I re-create it again if I didn't have it?

Does it resonate to the authentic me? Does it represent me and and inspire me in my life right now?

If you apply these and your own treasure guidelines selectively, you'll be able to differentiate what's truly valuable to you and let go of the things that are no longer serving you and the vision you have for living life lighter.

Making Peace with Order - and Disorder. . .

Last week I learned a little more about myself and my passion for organization. Or is it a little bit of OCD? My mother was here in August for her annual visit. We got to talking about "the old days" and she mentioned off handedly, "Well, you know what your uncle used to say about my mother's side of the family. The best way they could control their lives was to reorder the towels and make sure everthing was in its proper place. We couldn't even go out to eat until your grandmother had walked through the entire house making sure every room was in order."

Later I thought about that conversation and my possible roots of compulsion that lurked beneath my desire for order. Did I inherit my mother's and her family's belief that if our living space wasn't perfect, everything - not just the house - but our lives - would fall apart?

I think my grandmother and her siblings used the rituals of order to combat the powerlessness they may have felt as Italian immigrants struggling to make a life in a new country while their father slowly died of tuberculosis in the upstairs bedroom. Order was their survival kit, their way to stay in control.

Of course the reverse can also be true. Disorganization and holding onto too many things is a different kind of survival kit, a pattern inherited from the past. We can heed these patterns, but don't have to hold onto them.

If your relationship with clutter is a "living survival kit" - maybe passed to you from another generation or another time in your life, can you afford to let it go? If it's an outdated coping mechanism that makes your life difficult or tough for those nearest and dearest, can you afford not to?