Benches I Love from Chloe on Vimeo.

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/early-in-morning-special-edition/id497370215

“The Buddhist doctrine of the oneness of life and its environment (Jpn. esho-funi) focuses on the human being as part of the vast physical universe. Mutually interrelated, the subjective life entity and its environment operate together in a creative way. They are one, or as the original Chinese characters indicate, they are two without being two.” Daisaku Ikeda

This summer and the beginning of autumn have been very busy and all of a sudden I was finding it very difficult to concentrate. I thought about this quote and the spirit of this blog and realised that, despite the fact that I have been a Feng Shui practitioner for over 20 years, my working space and wardrobe were a mess. A friend of mine, Cilla Cerredo, has started a declutter programme and people have found it really useful. She  now has a great website www.clutterconqueror.com and a new 30 day e-course about to start.. You will see she has a great sense of fun which makes it easier and her story of how she started is very moving. Just receiving her free plan has given me the motivation I needed (work in progress). Decluttering is the first step and the most important one in starting to Feng Shui your environment – a great gift is very often finding precious things we thought we had lost and beginning to breathe better as we clear space. Gratitude comes back for what we have and, as well as throwing things away, we can also pass things on to others. A great way to start a Feng Shui programme..

Not only do we need to declutter our physical environment but we also need to declutter our minds and different kinds of meditations can help with this. There are all sorts of meditations on www.tiegsolus.moonfruit.com but I also like using other people’s work  and one of my favourites is Stephanie Harrison’s  www.lifeguidanceandinspiration.com  The other day I got the “Gratitude” card and there was this lovely exercise of sitting for 20 minutes thinking about all the things we are grateful for and doing it for 7 days. I often start with small simple things and from there the list grows. It has made a huge difference to my cluttered brain and I have passed it on to all my clients.

Then this morning I remembered  the photos I had taken during the summer of all the great benches I had seen and sat on. I realised how much I had enjoyed exploring and finding new ones. Finally, I had the extra creative energy to put a video together. I am also so grateful to having been given permission to use  Vincent McMorrow’s Early in the Morning which always makes me smile! I love the fact that birds and nature have enjoyed these benches just as much as I have. Doing projects we have been putting off is another form of decluttering and, yes,  I feel grateful again to the people who put the benches there in the first place. They start to tweak my imagination too and I start to wonder who the people were and why that was their favourite place…

A lot of my energy has gone into launching We Are All Cranes of Peace and it is now a separate page on this blog – please visit it as it is very close to my heart. Again I am incredibly grateful for all the support and social media help I have had as I am still wearing L plates! Once I have gratitude firmly in my heart again, I feel connected, contented, energised and motivated.

Happy decluttering…