Clear the Clutter from Your Life

Your Spacious Self, by Stephanie Bennett Vogt, is the culmination of a ten year journey of self-discovery by the author. Anyone who has ever lived in a cluttered environment knows that it can tie you down and keep you from realizing all that you want and deserve from life.

When you become too attached to things and throwing out an object is like tossing a piece of yourself, you may be living in the past. Your life may be consumed by things so much that you find it difficult to separate yourself from them - in fact, you may sharply identify with them.

As you read through Your Spacious Self, you'll begin to realize how detaching yourself from clutter can be healing and help you bring clarity into your life. Vogt advocates what she terms as "space clearing," a cleansing of the energy ('cobwebs') around you that may have created stress and imbalance in all areas of your life.

Vogt walks you through the clutter in your life, explaining how disorder can manifest itself into a multitude of problems. Health issues, financial problems, depression, fear and a general feeling that you're disconnected or imbalanced can enter your life because of clutter that you've let grow and fester in your environment.

Your Spacious Self reveals the cobwebs in your life that may be the result of clutter in your environment. When you experience the liberating feeling of space clearing, you'll break negative patterns and open yourself to the positive things in life.

Your Spacious Self, Clear the Clutter and Discover Who You Are, by Stephanie Bennett Vogt isn't just another how-to guide about clearing and organizing clutter. In fact, Vogt teaches that clutter itself isn't the real problem - it's holding on to the clutter that can keep you from experiencing life to the fullest.

Vogt wrote Your Spacious Self to express how she took a journey to freedom - freedom to bring her world into balance and ultimately take care of herself. She found meaning in the clutter in her life and when she let go, found an even deeper meaning.

"When you take care of the 'clutter' on the inside, the clutter on the outside takes care of itself," says Vogt. Clutter on the inside may be what's preventing you from succeeding at your life's goals - manifesting itself into clutter around you that you just can't seem to let go of.

Don't worry if you don't know how to go about clearing the clutter from your life. As the teacher she is, Vogt holds your hand as she guides you through an energetic clearing of your space, both inside and out. Your Spacious Self also contains a six-week guide on how to begin and maintain your own support group - the "Clearing Circle," including discussion topics.

Your Spacious Self presents radical new ideas based on ancient teachings. The modern ideas teach you how to bringing order into you home and life by clearing out clutter and ancient wisdom teaches you how simplicity and order bring harmony into our lives.

Stephanie Bennett Vogt, author of "Your Spacious Self, Clear the Clutter and Discover Who You Are," experienced a deep burnout in her life and turned her back on a twenty-year teaching career in Boston. Afterward, she took a journey of self-discovery into a scary place that she named, "not knowing."

Vogt spent the next ten years studying with experts in the field of environmental space clearing, personal clearing, Feng Shui, and clutter clearing - and wrote the book that documents her journey and guides others on how to clear their spaces. Your Spacious Self deals with how the clutter around you can prevent you from your own self-discovery.

Vogt is certified with several renowned practitioners in the subject of space clearing, including Karen Kingston, bestselling author of "Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui." Another certification comes from studying at advanced levels with Eric Dowsett, the master dowser from Australia, who helped Vogt progress to higher levels of elegant simplicity.

Vogt lays it all out in a humorous, yet touching way - explaining through her own experience how to come out of the "not knowing" realm and into a life without clutter -- where you can seize the moment as you never have.

Stephanie Bennett Vogt now helps people find their 'spacious selves' as a Space Clearing Consultant. She also offers an expanded online course that takes you to higher levels of refining a space and simplifying your life. Vogt now lives her life teaching and inspiring others to slow down and follow their passions while tossing out their fears.

If you've ever heard of feng shui, an ancient practice of restoring balance through the art of placement, space clearing is the energetic equivalent. Where feng shui largely works with and is guided by the "visibles" in a space - that is, furniture, mirrors, fabric, color, doorways, etc, space clearing is pure invisible work - at least in the way I experience and teach it.

Space clearing is a specialized practice of energetic clearing that harmonizes and balances the flow of energy in spaces at very deep levels. With a simple dowsing wire, I walk from room to room, tuning into "hot spots" and clearing them as I go. It's a bit like acupuncture, for example, where a needle is inserted to release energy in the human body. In space clearing, I'm the needle.

If you thought it was just you, your family and your pets that occupied your space, think again. There is way more going on in our homes than meets the eye.

Consider what happens when you're gazing at the ocean from the beach. A few birds, waves crashing, people playing and walking their dogs. Not much happening you might say. Most people are rarely conscious of the fact that there's this whole universe of activity deep below the surface of the water.

Our homes and workplaces are like a deep-sea experience: they are organic and alive places with a life force of their own. Though mostly invisible to us, our spaces are teeming and swirling with information all the time; energies that may or not feel friendly depending on who we are and how we relate to them.

Like those weather maps you see on the evening news, these patterns of energy might register as calm and peaceful in certain areas in your home or workplace, while other spots might reveal more agitated and unsettled "low pressure" systems. Some areas can feel highly charged, while others more smooth and coherent--all within a few feet of each other. They can feel spacious or contracted, peaceful or disturbed, depending on how well all of us energies "get along."

So what do some of these patterns look like? Who are these other "occupants" you might ask? As Butch Cassidy and Sundance queried as they were being followed in the Bolivian Andes: "Who are those guys?"

Besides you, the flesh and blood human being who hires me to clear your space, I consider all these other "guys" my clients as well--all potential beneficiaries of this work. The key is in bringing all these energies into balance with each other:

**Current occupants: You and every member of your family, your pets, animals in the wild that live in and around the property are the most obvious clients of course.

**Physical structures and objects: These are the containers that hold you and your stuff: your physical body, house, office, car, garage, driveway, furniture, grandma's china teacups, ritual masks, antique rugs, jewelry, clothing and so on. To the extent that the neighboring houses or properties are affecting yours, they are clients as well.

**Previous occupants and unseen beings: All those who occupied the space before you can leave behind a residue or a memory signature. These patterns include thoughts, emotions, ley lines, spirits, ghosts, trauma, and so on. The more charged the memory pattern, the more uncomfortable and negative they can feel or appear, and the greater the drain to the environment. I call these negative patterns the "strings and droppings" of human unconsciousness that are mostly born out of and based on fear.

**Forces of nature: To the extent that these might benefit from being allowed to express naturally and not be contaminated, polarized or stressed by human fears and judgments, naturally-occurring underground water, geomagnetic fields and geological fault lines are "clients" too. When we learn how to cooperate with these naturally-occurring energies, they are harmless to people and extremely friendly energies for cats, bees, ants, oak trees, ivy, and the like.

**Electromagnetic energy patterns: AC (alternating current) EMFs generated by electronics, appliances, cell phones, cell towers, power stations are the newest members of the party. Mostly welcome guests as time savers, they are not so friendly and easy to process with our DC (direct current) bodies. To the extent that we are aware and do not resist EMF information (by fearing or judging it as bad), is the degree to which these energies can serve and support us without harming our system.

Space clearing invites and challenges us to move beyond the thinking, heavily attached mind, and into the yummy spaciousness of the heart. Stress patterns that keep our homes, workplaces, and lives in a constant state of imbalance have a way of vaporizing in the presence of pure, elegant compassion. Held in compassion, feelings of grief or shame or fear, for example, will lose their charge and reorganize naturally into something more spacious, more coherent. Watch a mother hold her disconsolate child without conditions, or an agenda, or a need to fix or "do" anything, and you get the idea. The child walks away feeling all better because his mom simply held a space for him.

Similarly, really good space clearing practitioners clear spaces by simply showing up and feeling the energetic stress patterns that the client cannot, for many reasons, feel for him or herself. The practitioner can unlock (by feeling) years of trauma (suffering, toxicity, contraction, pain) held by a person or place to the extent she's not attached, either to the pattern or the outcome. In effect, it is a practitioner's ability to detach from the weather patterns of the client and the home--essentially becoming bigger than the pattern--that results in its ultimate release.

At its essence, space clearing is pure heart in action--infinitely simple, portable, mysterious, refined, and intelligent.

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Stephanie Bennett Vogt, MA., is the author of Your Spacious Self: Clear Your Clutter and Discover Who You Are and a leading expert in the field of space clearing. To learn more about her award-winning book, and her teaching and consulting practice based in New England, please visit: www.spaceclear.com.