“Cleaning the Pantry of Your Mind”

I started cleaning our kitchen pantry this morning. And it came to me, just how much cleaning the kitchen pantry is like cleaning our mind. There are lots of things we need to get rid of.

Getting Rid of Old Stuff

When we clean our pantry in our kitchen we throw things out that have spoiled. We look through everything and notice the dates on them and see if they are still good. If not they are tossed in order to keep people from getting sick.

The same goes for our mind. It’s important to look at all the old stuff we hang onto and see if it still serves us. It might not and thus may be holding us back in life. Or it might be great and could be helping us to move forward in life. But most of what we hold onto in our mind doesn’t serve any purpose. So it’s very important to forgive, forget, and move on with life thus we create more space and we have freedom.

Bundle Things Together

Sometimes we have lots of beans in the pantry but one bag is here, and another there, and still another on a different shelf. Making it hard to find anything.
The same goes for our mind, it’s important to look at all the things we keep as memories and file them away until needed. This is where meditation comes in, meditation has the ability to file away things that don’t need to be on our mind. They get categorized and put away for safekeeping. So they don’t clutter up our mind and create anxiety.

Giving Stuff Away

Sometimes we end up with 24 bags of pinto beans for some reason. And there is no way we could ever eat that many beans so we decide to give a few bags to our neighbors and relatives.

The same goes for our mind. We might have lots of redundant thoughts that come and go and clutter up our mind. And those redundant thoughts keep us trapped in certain types of emotion. It could be anger about something, and when we have these redundant thoughts it is important to let them go and allow ourselves to be free.

We know when we have incessant thinking. Incessant thoughts are thoughts that nag us all the time. And the best way to get rid of those thoughts is to tell ourselves we live in the here-and-now and let go of those nagging thoughts. And thus those incessant thoughts sooner or later disappear.

Perhaps it’s time to clean that old pantry upstairs.

Many Blessings to Everyone!

Dr. Paul Haider