Spring Cleaning You

September 1, 2021

Spring cleaning is a time-honoured way to banish the winter blues and revitalise our homes and it would be a great time to consider spring cleaning ourselves as well. It has not been the best winter for most of us with all that is going on around us, but today is the first day of spring here in the southern hemisphere. Spring is a time of new and fresh beginnings, of letting go of old habits and making room for new. This is an opportunity to reset the way we feel about ourselves and life and bring a bit of sparkle back into our eyes, a spring into our step and some light into our lives. So here are our top tips for personal spring cleaning.

Top tips for spring cleaning

Love our home

While destinations other than home are not really an option for most of us at present, why not love where we are at? This is a great time to actually spring clean our homes, attending to all those jobs we usually never get around to, sorting things out, organising what we want to keep and letting go of stuff that we no longer want or need, not in a just-another-chore kind of way, but taking our time and enjoying the process. This can help us feel like we have accomplished something worthwhile, makes us feel lighter and creates a lovelier space for us to live in. And why not add some fresh life and colour to your home with fresh flowers, fruit and herbs, or get out in the garden, if you have one!

Spring clean our bodies

We can spring clean our bodies too. The way we treat our bodies affects the way we feel about ourselves, each other and the world around us. So whatever we have used to help us get through the winter blues, we may need to review in the light of springtime sunshine. We don’t have to go on long fasts or juice cleanses or anything extreme, just consider what we put into our bodies and whether it truly nourishes us or not. We know what supports our bodies and what does not and being honest about how our bodies feel after eating certain foods or drinking certain drinks helps us to refine what we put into them and pave the way for fresh and healthy habits.

Food for thought

Nourishing ourselves includes our thoughts. The more loving and caring we are with our bodies, the more loving our thoughts are. And what we feed ourselves in terms of what we see and hear in the media, and even our conversations, can influence our thoughts. So if we find we are thinking negative thoughts about ourselves or about the world, we can shift our focus towards nourishing our body, mind and Soul. The simplest way to change our thoughts is to change our movements – if we feel stuck in our heads, we can just get up and move our bodies.

Move

Exercise is a great way to lift our mood and love our bodies. It does not have to be long or hard, just going for a gentle walk out in the fresh air is a great start and we can build from there. It is not so much what we do that matters, but the way we move. If we push our bodies too hard to try and make them fit a picture of what we think they should look like, we can end up hurting ourselves. If we move our bodies in a way that is loving and caring of them, and honours where they are at, it builds more love in the body and supports us to love it in other ways as well.

Sleep is the best medicine

It is vital to build a healthy sleep rhythm to sustain our bodies and to rest our busy minds. The single most important sleep tip we can offer is to go to bed early, when we can. The hours of sleep between 9pm and 1am are those which rest and restore us the most, and if we miss that sleep boat, no amount of sleep seems enough. We usually tire around that time anyway, and have to stimulate ourselves with food, drink, and media to stay awake later, all of which can interfere with our sleep when we finally go to bed. But when we honour how we are feeling and go to bed early, we tend to sleep more soundly and then can wake feeling rested, refreshed and ready for another day. Sleep is such a vital part of our day, and it serves us to honour our night rhythm as much as our day.

Connect with people

Connecting with people we love and who love us is the most nourishing thing we can do. Even if we are limited in our physical contact with each other, we can always connect with each other via email, text, phone or face-to-face video calls. If you feel like you need a pick-me-up, pick up the phone to someone you love. We are not designed to live life alone, and feeling that people love and care for us is vital for our health and wellbeing. If you are feeling lonely or alone, there is always someone on the end of a phone who is willing to talk, so please resource them, and some of those resources are listed below. And when we do reach out to others, let’s bring our all to the conversation and truly connect in a heartfelt way.