Spiritual Spring Cleaning
Sometimes we need to get into some deep cleaning of our inner psyche
by Shane Hennesey

Have you checked in with your happiness quotient lately? Well, yes, you do have to put down that latté, drop the barbell, fold up your Wall Street Journal, release the CD/TV/stereo combo remote, and even the cell phone. Whether it is old ways of surviving or current media hype, we all have a tendency toward a dysfunctional cruise control. Our inner experience has a still small voice that takes a little quiet time to hear, and many people keep just busy enough not to hear it.

Are you suspecting that you might have bought into a myth of our consumer culture? You know the one: "Activity equals Achievement." It’s OK if you have. It’s a common problem as we buy into the message that the more we do, the higher we go, the more stuff we get, the bigger the muscles–the happier we will be. If the myth holds and you’ve been doing all these things and running around all this time, you should have some results. Are you happier?

To answer this, we all need some time to get quiet and check in with our inner experience. It’s the place where our dreams are most easily seen and our personal vision is most clear. If you are not checking in here periodically, you are forever stuck at target practice with a blindfold on. Maybe your life looks OK on the surface, but when you go into that inside place, you feel just shy of fulfilled–time for some spiritual spring cleaning.

Physical Body

How about starting with your physical body? What are you doing with it? What are you putting into it? A good place to look is in the extremes: Are you a couch potato or a gym rat? What kind of food and chemicals are you putting in it? Are you trading short-term pleasures for long-term endurance? Life is about balance, and too much extreme living breaks the body down.

Pay attention to your breathing while setting your intention to sit quietly. As you begin to slow down, slowly repeat the statement, "I am completely happy with my body." What kind of reaction do you get? What areas snap into focus, as if to highlight where you are falling short in your estimation of who you "should" be?

Now focus on that area and its sensations or characteristics. Let it have its own image and/or personality and its own voice. Dialogue with it. Ask of it, "What do you want me to know?" Then listen.

Mental/Emotional Body

Now for your mental/emotional body. What are your beliefs and values? Do they help or hurt you? Move you forward or hold you back? Often, problems in the physical body start at the mental/emotional level. Do you get through life by berating yourself or putting yourself down, only creeping to the next level/phase of your life as a beaten-up husk? Do you get through life by feeling great because you judge everyone around you as so much less than you are? Again, living life in the extremes is painful and harmful to you and those around you. The balance here is a quality called humility. This means you are neither a god nor are you a piece of doo-doo. You are exactly in between, you are exactly human.

How often during the day do you lose your sense of well-being? Have you ever had a sense of well-being? As in the exercise above, set your intention to sit quietly. This time, your phrase to repeat is "I am safe and happy in my world." Repeat this until you notice a reaction in your body, then follow the reaction. Again, let it have human-like qualities, including a voice, and ask it what it wants you to know...and listen.

Your Spiritual Body

Now, for a tougher subject: your spiritual body. Again, take stock here, for it is on this level that you connect to something larger than yourself. Note that I said "something." Not God, or Allah, or anything specific, but something larger than you. Even if you call it "life," it is still bigger than you and you are in relationship with it. This is not the dogma of religion, it is your direct experience of being in the flow of life. It helps to remember that we are spiritual beings having a human experience–not vice versa.

If you are too disconnected from this larger source, you are probably experiencing the extremes of either depression or anxiety. It is difficult to make it too far in life without some appreciation for the fact that there is something holding us all together on this spinning globe in space, regardless of what you call that something or how basic your relationship is with it. The balance here is to find how you are both infinitely unique/special and at the same time infinitely a part of something bigger than all of us.

Here’s an exercise to help you check in with your spiritual body: Sit with the intention to focus your attention only on your breathing. This is a simple exercise of being in the present moment. It is in the moment that you are free of past and future. Anything else is extraneous. The present moment is the cradle in which Spirit holds us. It holds all the comforts of Home. If you have trouble getting or staying there during your meditation, let that distraction have a personality as in the previous exercises and talk with it to clear it.

Please take some time for internal spring cleaning this year. We are moving officially into a new millennium and there is no reason to live in the same old way. You have every opportunity to refresh your life. Do something radically new. Live this next thousand years from the source of who you really are.

Shane Hennesey is a psychologist working in Houston who specializes in psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, and Reiki. He can be reached at ethan@pdq.net.