3 simple ways to clean up your life

Photo credit: mbc from Flickr

1. Make a sincere commitment to do so.

This is the bedrock, the foundation of it all. Its importance can't be overstated.

If your life is a mess, on the one hand, you can blame it on ignorance of not knowing what to do and what your alternatives are, this is particularly true if you are younger. That's fair. On the other hand, if you know there is a better way and what your alternatives are ... and your life is still a mess, the bad news is that some part of you wants it that way.

In either case, usually, you will have to suffer (accidents or dramas of various degrees of magnitude) to the point of change, where then you will have the clear realization that your current ways must shift and so you make a sincere commitment to alter your trajectory. And so you do.

It's incredible that once you make this commitment, the path opens up and becomes clear. Everything that you need to do becomes obvious. People, places, and resources show up to assist you.

2. Spend a week in solitude.

Do you spend your days in perpetual motion? Working 9 to 5, going out to parties or dinner gatherings afterwards, constantly around friends, constantly doing stuff, always preoccupied with something?

Since you are not taking time for yourself, it's as if you are not taking out the trash in your home and so it begins to pile up and make a stink.

If you are serious about cleaning up your life, take a week off from your social life, from people, from going out, etc. Whatever your distractions are.

If you have to work, that's alright. Just go home afterwards, don't accept anything but emergency calls, deal with non-essential email later (perhaps using an auto-responder to let people know you won't be replying for a week), don't look at news, blogs, Facebook or Twitter.

Relax instead. Read books. Try yoga or meditation. Think about your life (while taking a walk alone perhaps), think about your goals, do some writing. Spend time with yourself, in whatever way seems best.

The important part here is to just be alone, which is a form of unplugging. This can help dust to settle in your life and give opportunity for new insights to arise.

3. Spend some time in Nature.

Spending time in Nature is deeply restoring and vivifying and can even inspire you to kick bad habits. Ever spend several hours on the beach and go home in a better mental state than when you began? Or taken a long hike and felt cleansed after? For city dwellers, just escaping to the park for a few hours can do the trick.

Being in Nature is natural and has a powerful physical effect on our biology that we miss out in our mostly indoor world.

Take your pick. Any one will do.