With Earth Day coming up on Monday it has got me thinking about how much space we take on the planet and how much waste we put out into the environment. Waste doesn’t have to be ‘stuff’ - sometimes its thoughts that need recycling.
We have all seen those shows on Television and heard stories about people who collect and hoard their ‘stuff’ for years. As the years go by, the cupboards get full and then before you know it, a whole room is over flowing with ‘stuff’. We are all hoarders in some way, but not necessarily of ‘stuff’ but sometimes feelings, emotions and thoughts. We get blocked spiritually and psychologically and our minds end up looking like a hoarders paradise. Negative thoughts flood our consciousness; over time they build up and can reach a critical level, which can turn into a disease in our body.
When we experience emotional upset, it’s often hard to process, negative energy that stems from those situations can consume us until it saturates us. Feelings such as shame, guilt, bitterness, resentment, insecurity, can get incorporated into our personalities.
To avoid this happening, the first step is to cleanse our minds. When we learn how to handle negativity, we feel energised, healthy and a sense of wellbeing.
Things come up in our lives all the time. We have drama at the office; we have friendship breakdowns or lose loved ones. The most powerful way to release negative emotions is to write them out of our system. This can work well, just keep writing and writing and don’t think too hard about what you will write next. Get a note pad and a pen, sit in a quiet place, and start writing about whatever is disturbing your peace. After 10 minutes, stop writing, take the pieces of paper somewhere safe and non-flammable and burn them. Fire is transformative and cleansing. The objective here is to neutralise the negative energy. Fire does that by changing paper to ash.
Get back to nature, spend time walking, a trip to the beach, lie on the on the sand. Get outside while you still have the chance before it gets too hot in Qatar. Creating a space in your home that’s just for you is a perfect way to process emotions. It could be as simple as finding a chair you love and placing it in a corner of the house, where you go to read or meditate. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s a place where you won’t be disturbed for at least 10 minutes. It’s so important to serve yourself. Spending sometime on yourself everyday will make you a better person, friend and co-worker. It’s like taking time to feed your soul; I like to think of it as emotional hygiene.
* The author is a consultant and coach. Instagram handle: @miss_shefa, Website: missshefa.com
Shefa Ali
