Cleaning Our Actual Home

I love it when my house is clean and organized. Everything feels light and fresh. But since both my husband and I run businesses, have teenagers, and a hairy dog, I have to tell the truth: my house is not clean and organized all the time.

After a busy week, or sometimes several, I often feel like my home has been neglected and the laundry and clutter start to pile up. Then I enjoy taking a quiet weekend to focus on decluttering and cleaning, complemented by rest and long walks with the dog.

What I notice after intense weeks, when the projects seem endless and the clients demanding, is that it’s not only my house that has become messy, my mind has become messy too.

Every day we all experience a lot: conversations with others, the news, frustrations—our own or those of others—obligations, and stress. All of this needs to be processed.

Before I started meditating, I often felt overwhelmed. I didn’t have a “button” to switch off from the day, so I pushed my thoughts down, which only made them accumulate instead of disappear.

The same thing still happens today if I become too busy to meditate. Day after day I gain new experiences and information, but I don’t give myself time to sit down, process them, and release them.

With just one meditation session, I can process and release many of the thoughts I have accumulated. Afterwards I feel lighter and my anxiety fades away. Sometimes it feels like a heavy rock has been lifted from my chest. Other times it feels as if my everyday problems simply dissolve into thin air.

There is a reason why meditation can be so effective, and a great deal of research has been done on the subject.

Meditation effectively “quiets” the brain by calming the brain waves linked to stress and overthinking. Studies* have found that regular practice increases neural patterns associated with relaxed alertness and deep tranquility.

This shift does not just feel peaceful; it also creates a state of neural synchrony, allowing different parts of the brain to work together in harmony rather than in a state of scattered noise.

In other words, the different “rooms” of your mind can begin to work together.

So let’s not forget, as we move through life, to clean our minds just as we clean our clothes and our homes. After all, our mind is our actual home. It is where we live day and night, no matter where we are on the planet.

Hildur

*A 2022 study published in Psych Central and research from the International Journal of Psychophysiology.