SKYE stephenson

Feng Shui is the ancient East Asian practice of understanding the connection between energy flow and how things are placed upon the Earth and in our living spaces. Like any ancient practice, there are varying schools and different focus of attention within Feng Shui. But one area all seem to agree with is that clutter and junk is not good news. It can, in a word, create negative Chi – or energy flow.

Feng Shui had been applied to houses, work spaces and offices, businesses, and even entire communities. But in this day and age of the computer, another possible place of junk accumulation and clutter can be in our own computers and soft drives, and in our own emails and other social media systems. And this clutter may also – in its own way – hinder a smooth flow of energy for us.

Why not?

I have been contemplating such a possibility of late. Ever since I discovered that in my Gmail account, under promotions, I had more than fifteen thousand emails accumulated. And every day, without my even realizing it, I was receiving anywhere from twenty to forty new ones.  Wow!

As some of you may know, I have been doing my darndest to write a book, for a few years now. And trying to squeeze as much time as I can in my busy days towards this project. But lately, I was finding it hard to concentrate and focus. And I would find my mind wandering to websites with sales of products I did not even need or want, and looking for a “great deal.” And, as often happens with the internet, one thing leads to another and suddenly you are looking at a topic far different than what you had started with. Well, this was happening with me, big time.

One fine day, as I was checking my personal Gmail account, I wandered over to the Promotions tab and clicked.  I usually didn’t check this area often. But that day, I began to really look at it, with a critical eye. My goodness – so many offers and promotions from places I did not even recognize, or have any interest in. Or had lost interest several years ago. Like I said above, I had thousands and thousands of these offers and promotions, just sitting there, cluttering up my Gmail account.

Well, you might say, all this is residing somewhere in the cloud, which can hold so much information I need not worry. And this information is stored without any apparent physicality. It is not, like a book or an old fashioned letter or any advertisement you receive in the mail, something you can touch with your hands. But perhaps that does not mean it is not vibrating somehow, someway, at some resonance. Of course it is, for everything in the cosmos is ultimately energy – and everything (whether we can see it with our human eyes or not) has its energetic footprint.

This may be especially so for anything transmitted or stored with the help of quartz crystals, which is – of course – how our computers and other electronic devices function. Among quartz’s many amazing properties is that of retention. Each particle of quartz crystal has within its structure any empty space that can be filled with inputted matter.

My favorite Feng Shui blog that I avidly follow always recommends, above anything else, to clean out clutter and junk in order to bring about positive shifts in your life. You can’t create something new, until you clear out all that stuff in your house, workplace, or mind that you no longer want or need.

So following this principle, I decided to clear up and clean up my Promotions emails. I did not want them any more in my space – even if it be only an email account.

It took me some time to do this. Google, I learned, does not really want you to get rid of any of those promotion emails. That is, after all, a big way they make money.

At first, I tried clicking one at a time – carefully choosing which emails I wanted to block in the future. There were a lot. Like a car rental agency in Scotland, that somehow I got connected with when I visited Scotland five years ago. Or like a store that sold house decorations that I had never even bought anything from. But after a few days of doing this, I had barely made a dent in my promotions box.

So I found out a way to delete at least fifty emails at a time. And I set myself the task of every day, deleting one full month of promotion emails.  This could take a quarter to half an hour.

Coincidently or not, as I plodded through this task, which was by no means fun, I began to feel lighter and lighter – like a load had been lifted off my shoulders, or maybe my mind. This feeling was similar to that of doing a deep cleaning of your house, like a spring cleaning.

Then one day, as I was sending promotion emails to the trash, I all of the sudden came to the end. In the year 2018. I had done it. Now I have no more than ten or so emails in my Promotions bin.

Maybe this was an unnecessary waste of time, but maybe not. I will say that I find my writing flowing more easily now, and my mind feels clearer. It could be that cleaning out unnecessary junk anywhere: in our houses, on the land, or even in our computers, can be an enlivening and invigorating process that can help facilitate the arrival of the beautiful new you are anticipating with joy.