Have you ever thought about how much time, money and effort we invest in keeping ourselves and our environment clean?

Cleansing our body of toxins and the release of muscle tension are parts of what we now know as holistic medicine. A whole industry worth billions of dollars exists helping people become fit and appear beautiful and handsome. We as a society have become obsessed with putting on a show. We want to appear well and present ourselves in the most pristine of shapes in front of others. We use the best tooth brushes (now even electric), the most expensive toothpaste claiming miraculous effects on your smile, use the best of detergents to clean our clothes, kitchen counters, baths; buy designer dresses to look good and spend lots of money in health club membership; all these to look good to others and feel good (is what we assume) for oneself. I see that we like to carry purified water, hand wash liquids and have air purifiers at home and are so much concerned about keeping our environment pristine in order to keep our body and energy levels in top shape.

It’s indeed a curious case that with so much preoccupation on cleansing our body and environment we feel no real need to cleanse our mind from those aspects which can sour attitudes, block our intuitions, tear apart relationships and make us go into a downward spiral of darkness and misery.

What is the use of having a pristine physical environment which is sparkling clean of all dirt and grime but which is filled with garbage internally?

We throw out physical garbage from our homes daily but do we do that with our minds?

Most of us seem to carry our daily mental garbage to the next day and beyond, not to speak of debris which we have been carrying over of a lifetime. We seem to be carrying garbage bins on every dimension of our life; on self, society, relationships, family, work, money, health, and even nation. We do not spend enough time everyday sifting through the mental notes and throwing out the unwanted on a daily basis.

The outcome then will be very similar to what would happen when you accumulate physical garbage over long periods (garbage dump); it will start to stink. You will have stench emanating in all aspects of your life and then it will start to effect your external appearance as well.

While it is easy to clear of physical garbage, it takes a lot more time and effort to remove the accumulated garbage of the mind. More so if you have been accumulating it over long periods. Our life might be like the overstuffed refrigerator containing many unused items of the previous months to our wallet which has bills and papers of the past several months.

Why not start to cleanse our mind of the garbage on a daily basis? Starting today?

Make a list of the garbage you are carrying right now. Typically those would be your worries, feedback to someone which you have not given, fears which arose today and so on. Now look at which ones you can control and the one’s which you can’t. The one’s you cannot control just strike them off the list (for example; someone’s behavior) and the one’s you can control (like the feedback to be given) – do something about it and do not accumulate it to turn into resentment or anger. Be done with them on a daily basis. Start the next day with a clean slate and keep reminding yourselves that you will dump your daily mental garbage at the end of the day. Remember there are a few which are bio-degradable and few which are not. Learn to understand the difference.

Don’t end up becoming a walking talking trash can full of garbage inside. There is no fun in looking sparkling clean from the outside and stinking from within.

What garbage are you carrying today? Are the bio-degradable? What do you want to do?

Throw them at least by mentioning in the comments. It will lighten you up a little…