Transcription
What if you just started getting rid of stuff? All the stuff from the past, even the stuff that you thought you would never get rid of. But imagine a life. Imagine a life that feels relaxed, that feels manageable, that feels doable, where you can actually thrive. Guess what? You can create a life like that. And you can do it right now. You don't need anyone's permission. You just have to get brave enough to go in the opposite direction of our consumer culture. You have to start getting rid of stuff. You have to confront your survival instinct that's going to tell you, "Don't let go. You might need this someday."
If you're new here, I'm Madison Gray and I love talking to women about intentional living. It's so simple that everyone overlooks it. But making your home a more calm and simple place is such a catalyst for self-rowth. I literally never get tired of talking to women about their goals and dreams. And if you want to go deeper, then check out wholehearted in the description box below.
Our homes are often a direct reflection of how we feel about ourselves. How our inner world is looking is often exactly how our external world is presenting itself to us. Especially as women, the physical items in our home affect our hormones, our cortisol levels in our bodies. Isn't that crazy? So when you start to unclutter, make your home more relaxed. Like I picture myself being a little tea bag swimming in a little pot of water that's just a vibration of love. When my home is calm and clear, it truly makes me effortlessly more relaxed. I have better ideas. I want to have more fun. I don't get so stuck in like a habitual thought pattern of like stress and what if the worst thing happens? It just feels like the good life when my home is calm and clear and uncluttered.
And I know that it's not just me because I have now worked with hundreds and hundreds of women to unclutter intentionally their homes and therefore create fertile ground for their lives to kind of get either back on track or pointed in the correct direction for the next chapter of their lives. And it truly is mindblowing. I think of our homes as our third skin. I think we've been sold this idea. The the way we solve problems as modern women is we buy solutions. But the more you do that, and trust me, I've been there too. I've done this, decluttered and recluttered my life. But what actually happens is that you create for yourself this giant problem that eventually you start to notice because you feel like you're just perpetually stressed, drowning. Maybe the things that really matter to you, you start to get kind of diluted and confused.
This is like one of the main things that I feel like I am here on YouTube to tell you is that you're not broken. You know exactly what you need. And those questions that are coming up in your mind like, you know, I feel like there's too much on my plate. You're not wrong. It's actually the little sneaky things, all the little tabs open we have in our in our minds because our homes are oversted and overcluttered. I have read recently the average American home has over 300,000 physical possessions. If you think about like even on a computer, having that many tabs open at one time, the computer would die. It would shut down. So, how then do we write our homes? How do we create without buying more a cozy nest where we can start to steep in some good energy? Like where we can regenerate ourselves and feel more alive again. You know, we can like start to actually heal and not come home and have that be a place that feels just as overwhelming as when we're out in the world. I think until we start to clean up our homes, when we start to create calm in our homes, that no matter where we move or what we upgrade to, that will always dissatisfy us.
If some of this sounds overly simple, I just want to challenge you and be like, but have you tried it? Have you tried it? Sometimes we just have to come to a place where we're willing to try something simple. We're so used to being sold elaborate solutions that we've often stopped hearing that little voice in our head or just the common sense solutions that actually work.
My husband and I have moved a lot. And if I'm being totally honest, when I look back, I can see that I totally expected that each move would kind of wash away all my problems and keep me perpetually happy. I know that's not reasonable or logical, but that is a belief that I think I've operated from regardless of logic. Spoiler, the chaos and all the like dissatisfaction followed me. It followed me from that house to the next house, back to San Diego, all the way to Hawaii, all the way back again. I started noticing like as we'd move all of our stuff into a U-Haul that my stuff is only valuable to me because it's mine. I've attached value and sentiment and story and all these reasons why, you know, this thing is more valuable than it actually is. It's worth now my time in packing and moving all these different times to take with me. What is that? And I started picking up things and looking at them a little bit differently. I remember I picked up a picture like I had this uh stack of picture frames and I realized I don't have a wall like we did in this house that we're moving into a 480 ft little beach cottage from our home in Arizona. And I was like I don't actually have a place for all these photographs. And so I took the box of the photographs out of the U-Haul because we had a vision at that point of exactly where we were heading. We started to filter our stuff through that filter and it was a huge breakthrough. We were able to get rid of like 90% of our stuff. We actually didn't even move with a U-Haul. We ended up just driving our cars and starting our new life in our little tiny beach cottage with our daughter. And one of the best chapters of my life actually started my YouTube channel was in that house. And you can tour it. I have like videos about our minimalist beach cottage and such a fun chapter of my life. We actually live now only like a few streets over from that house. And I don't know, I just love all the synchronicities of like what that house and that uncluttered life has like led to in our family.
Now, as I reflect on just the unlock that seeing my stuff differently as an external reflection of like what's going on in me has done, it's allowed me to actually just like take myself through all the therapy I've ever needed. Ask myself the questions that I've needed answers to like my whole life to this point and then like open those prison doors and walk out, feel free, feel 10 years younger, feel alive again. I don't think it's an accident that my YouTube channel finally started this thing I want to do for so long in a tiny uncluttered living space. It was only after I had ruthlessly decluttered my life that I had space. All that stuff, all the things that were weighing on me, all the emotions tied up in all that stuff that I've been hauling physically with me to all those different places, all literally across the country and back. I was set free and I now had space in my mind for more. I felt at ease.
And if you're like trying to create anything, even if you're pregnant, the best thing you can do for your pregnancy or for your life as like a creative to like get through writer's block is just put yourself at ease to not have your head spinning and your world spinning and be going down rabbit holes of fear and back to just make your space calm. And we don't get there by buying more. I have gotten there by literally letting it all go. And that includes, I hope you don't miss this, the guilt and shame that often we cling to even after we've let go of the things just for letting go of the things. Shame that we bought it in the first place maybe or guilt that we didn't get like the money, the waste of money. We didn't get that money back and we had to let it go because at some point I came to this realization that I am actually my best investment. Investing in my own inner work, creating for my family a relaxed woman is the best investment I can make in my life and in theirs. I don't need to buy more solutions. I don't need to make my aesthetic look a certain way. I just need to be that person. Be that woman. that calm, clearheaded, grounded, relaxed, at ease woman. And then my creativity, my business, even my fertility just effortlessly grows and flows from there.
You get to decide. You get to start deciding what is good for me in my life. What type of energy do I want to be steeping myself and my kids? If you have kids or your husband in, it's not about what things you own. I think nowadays it's way more about how much space can you create.
Now, if you're anything like I used to be, and 99% of Americans, then your home is anything but peaceful, spacious, and uncluttered. More likely than not, your home right now feels and vibes more like a storage unit filled with thousands upon thousands of things that you bought or were given over the course of life and now you have it. And most of what I notice we keep and we struggle to get rid of, whether that's me or women that are in my courses, it's stuff that we're hanging on to just in case. And isn't that true of our inner world, too? It's like I'm hanging on to this little quirk about myself, this little habit, this um way of being that I know isn't good for me, this person that I know isn't good for me because I'm worried that nothing better is going to come along. What if it doesn't? What if this is, you know, all the money I ever make and there's no more? And so I need to hang on to those extra pens. I really need to have those extra wires in my garage just in case because I don't want to waste the money because I live in this way of survival thinking that this is all there is.
Now here, if you made it to this point in this video, this is for you. You find what you need, especially as women. And so here it is. Living a cluttered life is deciding to live in survival mode. and we can just click that off one day in your ordinary house in your, you know, a regular day like today. You can decide to exit that without complicated therapy. You can just decide to do that right now by letting go of your stuff by not buying in a c high cortisol state solutions to your problems anymore. By not getting like wrapped up in this frenzy of over stuffing our lives to the gills. We do this with our schedules, too. And you can just decide.
Sometimes I think I make videos and I feel like the reason I do it is just so that you can see that this exists, that I'm a mom to three kids and I don't like I'm thriving without all the stuff that's marketed to me as being necessary. I mean, you can go back and watch my videos about how many toys my kids have. Like, they have a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the toys that I think average American kids have. And I think a lot of us are so afraid to not have the same stuff as everyone and not be as busy as everyone else. Like we wear busy as a badge of honor. This is going to be difficult because it goes in the exact opposite direction of our human instinct. Survival mode is like what's gotten us this far. But if you want to take your life to a place that like most people don't experience, then you kind of have to get used to like doing things that most people don't do. And for me being a little bit extreme about how minimal our life is, whether that's our schedule, the amount of activity we do, and definitely our physical home, our third skin, it's a place of our soul, and it affects our our our thought life, our spiritual life, our even our physical health. For me, it definitely does. My hormones have come into balance just by making this switch of living in a oversted and overcluttered home into a just super uncluttered, calm, clear space. It was so funny actually. I saw a shirt the other day that literally said chaos manager on it and I wanted to look at her and be like, there's another way. We wear that as a badge of honor now, I guess.
So, here's the juicy bit. All right. It is easier to buy solutions now to our problems than it is to sit with them than it is to use our intuition to use our own life experience to solve our problems in the way that uh you know adds to growth in our life. The upward spiral of success. We don't accomplish that. We don't get to like tap into that if we're constantly buying solutions to our problems. This problem of too much stuff is literally weighing on us. It's weighing on us so hard that I believe it's the root cause of one in every two women being on an anti-depressant. I think it's the root cause of a lot of the just unwellness. For me, it was the root cause of my hormonal imbalance and therefore like fertility issues that were coming up. And I think that the craziest thing that I just love to call out on the internet about this is that when we keep buying more solution to our problems, the the buying of more stuff is literally the tip of such a much bigger iceberg. So as we acrew more stuff down here because we bought a solution to a problem up here, we also end up having this much bigger problem of now the only solution to actually managing all of that is buying a bigger house, getting even more stuff, and then having enough money to hire help because this is a job for like a whole team at Target.
So let's just play with a hypothetical alternative. Let's just say that instead of all of this, what if you just started getting rid of stuff? All the stuff from the past, even the stuff that you thought you would never get rid of, stuff that is sentimental, stuff that you're saving just in case, you keep just lightening your load off of your house and off of yourself. You just keep going until it's at a place you can manage. Just keep getting rid of stuff until your life is at a place where you're like, I can do this. Maybe it's not kids that are super intense and overwhelming. Maybe it's the amount of stuff that you've bought to go with your kids and that you've convinced yourself that you need to do with your kids. I know, I know. But imagine a life. Imagine a life with you in it that feels relaxed, that feels manageable, that feels doable. a life that's not maybe even beyond dual like where you can actually thrive where you can like have time to pamper yourself. There are moments where you're not just running around doing things real quick. Guess what? You can create a life like that and you can do it right now. You don't need anyone's permission. You just have to get brave enough to go in the opposite direction of our consumer culture. You have to start getting rid of stuff. You have to confront your survival instinct that's going to tell you, "Don't let go. You might need this someday." This is you literally deciding to quit survival mode just by getting rid of stuff in a way that's intentional.
So, let me tell you how to do that. I have talked before about how I've, you know, decluttered and recluttered my life. Here is the secret to not recluttering your life. Okay? It's really simple. the thing you have to have that changes everything with decluttering that takes it from just like an organization thing to like, no, I'm doing this as a catalyst for my self-growth. I'm becoming the type of woman I've always wanted to be. You have to have a vision first. You have to be able to see into the future about what type of life you're like getting unshackled from these chains and then you're going to head for. I think moving is such an easy example of this because when I talked about like moving into my little yellow house that was 480 square feet, it was really easy to look around our U-Haul and be like that literally won't even fit in my house. But you can do this and create this quantum collapse in your life today too just by deciding like making it so real in your mind. Whatever that goal or dream is that you have and I would recommend you pick one. Okay, let's let's get specific about just one. And then you start decluttering like it's happening tomorrow. Like you're that is going to occur right when you wake up tomorrow. So will you need this extra pen when that happens? When you start step into that reality, what of this stuff is just in the way?
It's so crazy powerful. Those of you that have done this or have taken my course, I want you to comment down below and just encourage people because I think that would be so powerful to just hear from you and be like, "No, this actually does work. I've seen it in my life. I've seen it in the lives of hundreds of other women." And I'm so excited that you're right here right now watching this video. Because it's available to all of us all the time. The power is in you. You know, we've just kind of given our power away in so many different ways. And I hope this video encourages you to just like, "Oh, that's right. I have all the power in me right now to feel happy. I can decide that for myself right now and exit survival mode and orient my life in the direction I want to go." Start feeling swimming in that energy is something we talk about so much in wholehearted. It's such a powerful unlock and you can do it in your home. Just like anything else in your life, you can make you healthy again. And one of the powerful really just like untapped ways that you can do that is by making your third skin healthy again. Your home. Think about it. The things that often make us feel really good in a space are very, very simple. When homes are uncluttered, it puts us at ease. Candle light, windows being open. Start thinking about what makes you feel good in homes, in living spaces. Because what often feels good for us, what feels good for our souls, it actually is good for us. It's good for our bodies, it's good for our minds.
I hope that this video marks day one of the start of a totally new chapter of your life. One that's not just like being pulled in a million different directions, but that is oriented towards something specific. a vision for your life that you're going to make real, even if it's just in your mind and in your home, starting today. If you enjoyed this video, it would mean the world to me if you subscribed.