Clutter Busting Author: Brooks Palmer | Language: English | ISBN:
B002361MK6 | Format: PDF
Clutter Busting Description
Piles of junk in garages and closets, overflowing papers on desks, items unused for years, masses of unanswered email, clothing never worn, useless gifts that collect dust — all these things, says Brooks Palmer, come weighted with shame and guilt and have a suffocating effect on spirit and soul. In this insightful book, Palmer shows how to get rid of the things in our lives that no longer serve us. By tossing out these unneeded items, we are also eliminating their negative influences, freeing up energy, and unlocking our potential.
Loaded with inspiring anecdotes and practical tips, Clutter Busting is based on the premise that your things are not sacred, but you are. The book explores such fundamental topics as the false identities we assume through clutter, the fear of change those junk piles represent, the addictive nature of holding on to objects, how clearing clutter makes room for clarity and sweeps away confusion and stasis, and much more. With Brooks’s upbeat and compassionate guidance, you’ll find yourself clearing the way for new and exciting things to come into your life.
- File Size: 199 KB
- Print Length: 234 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1577316592
- Publisher: New World Library (March 25, 2009)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B002361MK6
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #153,378 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
Brooks Palmer tells the reader more than once his purpose in writing his book is to inspire you to get rid of your clutter. I am writing this review to let the reader know the author's inspiration is not mere self-help inspiration based in some kind of Eastern wisdom but is wholly domestically practical, and the psychological aspects of his approach are pragmatic: it works!
I've been a big fan of Don Aslett and in particular his book "Clutter's Last Stand." In Aslett's book, the writing is as clear as a red fire truck and the advice is as strong as the blare of the fire truck's siren. You can readily see what needs to be thrown out and then you just do it.
With Palmer's book, the path is more indirect but no less powerful and no less clear. Palmer tells stories about his former clients and their issues with clutter. In one tale,the reader finds him accepting a client based on trading a full body massage for clutter advice; in another, he assists a young lady who works as a [...] model. His stories range from the middle-class yuppie who cannot throw out the expensive electronics he never uses stored in his garage to the weirdly intimate and bizarre clutter of women lost in past romances and previous identities. Through these often astonishing tales, the reader begins to identify hidden and often subconscious areas of clutter, some quite small and others quite embarrassingly obvious. One quickly discovers that no story is completely without some practical and beneficial relation to the reader and his or her clutter, no matter the gender, age or circumstance.
The goal of this book is to reconnect people with the true purpose of things.
Here's a quote from the book:
-- "Things are functional. Their job is to make your life easier or to increase your level of fun. Things become clutter when they no longer achieve either of these results."
It doesn't matter if these things are worn out or brand new. If they're no longer useful to you, then they're taking up precious physical and psychological space.
Instead of adding to your life, clutter ends up subtracting from it.
And it also contributes to why people don't enjoy their homes more, why they feel overwhelmed, why they can't get motivated and why they can't get organized.
The author explains that things are purchased from a place of hope...the hope being that this object will give meaning to your life, but it doesn't work. It never feels like enough and you end up needing more and more to get that high back.
To reverse this belief, he begins by creating a high level of discomfort from having too much stuff in your life...to the point where you can't wait to relieve yourself of this burden.
He explains how clutter creates friction between couples and how clutter keeps you stuck living in the past.
He also explains how advertising strongly influences us to purchase things we don't need.
Clutter competes for your attention and people try to handle this stress by putting it away in storage (the out of sight, out of mind mentality)...but he explains that it's not truly out of mind because, in the back of your mind, you still know the stuff is there...waiting to be dealt with.
The author compares stored away clutter to someone baking lasagna in the kitchen. Even though you're in the other room and can't see it, you can still smell it.
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