On my morning walk, I noticed garbage, lots of garbage, and then I came across Imelda Marcos’s pearl, “People say I’m extravagant because I want to be surrounded by beauty, but tell me, who wants to be surrounded by garbage?"
Some mornings, I notice the light, other times the green stems cropping up from the ground and flowers bursting into the air, but on this particular morning, there laid the empty coffee cup, rows of trash bags, a really screwed up lawn chair decades past its prime on the sidewalk and a soda can. My block is usually quite pristine, so what gives?
Trash It
As I walked over to help an elderly neighbor bring her trash to the curb, I was struck at how we are always taking out the trash. Really, it just never ends, we take in stuff, unwrap it, consume it and toss it. It’s a daily ritual we practice well into our old age
Taking out the trash is a necessity in as much the same way as our need to cleanse ourselves. Gabrielle Bernstein recently said in her "Crazy, Sexy Miracles lecture that we "need to clear out our faucets." If we do not, the residue builds up.
Step It Up A Level
When we build up, we become blocked. When we are blocked, we cannot reach our potential. Spiritual healer Pauline Esposito puts it this way, “as we evolve, we reach certain plateaus and then work to clear out so we can shift up a level and work from the vibration of the new level until we plateau and need to shift again.”
Before we reach the plateau usually an event keys off whether we are truly ready to make the next leap and we need to clear house to make way. Perhaps you’ve stayed in one place too long and your trash has piled up.
Not Worth The Struggle
When something has passed its expiration date, do you eat it? Admittedly, I’ve gambled a bit here and there even when the item is saying in black and white that it’s time to toss it. Yet, you are so much clearer after you’ve released the struggle. Once you trash the moldy items you can fill it with fresh goods.
Clearing our fields is an opportunity to honor where you are while releasing who you no longer are, which may be bound with resentments and wounds that you’ve carried for lifetimes. When you unload, you begin to breathe deeper, walk a bit taller and leave your trash on the curb.
Tools To Release & Re-Charge
Meditation is a way for you to listen, scan and cleanse your body, energy field and mind. In other words, for your "spiritual faucet" meditation is the perfect plumber. When you begin, you may spot the trash resting within, usually because you can’t move past it, like, if you set your garbage pail in the middle of the driveway, it blocks your car from leaving. You need to move it over so you can pass or another rather unfortunate option, just run it over.
We need to recognize the block, learn from it, then pack it up, and release it back to spirit or as my dear friend Macha Einbender says from A Course In Miracles, “return it to love.” When you clear out and open up, Pauline says, “creation becomes easy and everything will fall into place.”
Natural Cycle
Learning to release and recharge is respecting our natural order. Parts of us are recycled everyday, our thoughts, blood, air, excrement and one day our bodies will be recycled to the earth and our spirit to source. When any part of our being backs up, our physical, spiritual and emotional bodies will usually set off cues we’re in trouble. Those cues, like litter, are asking to be noticed and picked up and dropped in the proper receptacle.
Once you clear out and dump Oscar The Grouch, then spirit will step in and help tidy up.
For all you April Fools, that’s a truly sacred green spring cleaning!
