The signs of a cluttered mind, cluttered psyche, are the feelings of being
- unfocused,
- unclear,
- anxious,
- exhausted,
- overwhelmed,
- lost,
- depressed.
In a balanced state our minds are clear, calm and focused. If this is not your experience you may have lots of cyclical thoughts, ruminations, painful emotions that you do not want to deal with and any other unfinished business floating through you and slowing you down. Our minds are like computers and if computers have too many unfinished processes running, too many corrupt files, they slow down and sometimes even freeze if it gets too much.
To have a healthy and vibrant life, we must keep our minds clear. For that to happen we need to allocate time for their “maintenance”. If a house is not kept, not cleaned, not maintained it becomes cluttered, dirty and starts falling apart. The same happens to our minds when we do not tend to them. Our nervous system never stops processing stimuli from our environment so if we don’t actively help this process, our nervous system can become cluttered and overwhelmed.
What can we do to declutter our minds?
I believe a great way to help our minds is to have daily processing sessions where we take time to go inside and check what is happening with us. This is a time where you check in with yourself and see how you feel. Is something bothering you? Has something upset you? Are you angry or worried about something?
I think the best way to benefit from these processing sessions is to write. You can write about everything and anything that is on your mind right now. No censoring, no avoiding, no judging. Take it as is and put it on paper. This way you create more awareness of yourself, your life, what is happening within you and around you. You’ll start learning more about yourself and improving your connection with yourself. This in turn will help make your trust and confidence in yourself stronger.
When you put what’s floating around your mind on paper, you get to see it more clearly. You can then process it more efficiently, either deciding to let go of it or deal with it.
To make this process even more therapeutic, consider practising acceptance as you write. Write everything that comes up as is. It could be the most horrific or vile thoughts, it is OK. This is your safe space where you express, where you let go, where you clean yourself from darker energies. It may be painful and shocking to see this darkness in you at first but please know we are all human beings and that implies that we ALL have our light and our dark sides. It is a fact of life and there is no point in fighting that. What you do with your dark energy, how you process it is what’s most important.
Processing the inner energies of needs, desires, impulses, instincts, memories, traumas and so on with acceptance through writing is vital for our health and wellbeing. Through writing about our inner experiences we can release any confusion, pain or darkness onto the paper and not carry it around with us.