Hoarding Workshop - Now that's Some Real "Living Yoga"

So this is maybe a longer story than just a blogpost but here's where I'm at. I'm in the middle of an 8-week "De-Cluttering Workshop" as the "guest" of someone who has identified themselves as someone who perhaps lives in what some people might call a "hoarded environment."

(My boyfriend is a hoarder. Or has been, up until recently.)

Okay, I have to fill you in a bit more so here goes. When I met Steve two and a half years ago we connected instantly and can remember the moment we first saw each other. We spent lots of time together and he started coming over to my place and hanging out. My sister said what's his place like and I said I didn't know I hadn't ever been inside and she threw out the phrase that hadn't even crossed my mind, "maybe he's a hoarder."

"Hey Steve, I was talking to my sister and she said maybe the reason I haven't ever been over to your place is because your a hoarder, ha ha ha." Silence. And to this day he recalls how he knew me well enough by then to know that a deal breaker would be lying, so he said something like, "yea, well, that's maybe one way to describe it, she has a point, heh, heh."

So we broke up. And obviously things happened to bring us closer together and there's more to the story...

Without going into the gory details, we have had a great relationship but how we did it was we had most of our relationship at my house and he kept his place mainly to himself until he was ready to do something about it.

That time came two months ago. Steve gave notice to his landlord and said he wanted to move out at the end of May. The pressure was on. I asked him if he was sure, could he do this, did he need to rent some space because he could see those things he'd been saving were not going to have room at my little place.

We had already established that it was probably better for our relationship for me to not be the one to help him sort through his stuff. Over the past couple of years when I went over there it was not good. Recently, he had an amazing friend help him do the daunting task of actually going through the stuff a bit at a time over eight weeks and making progress rather than tossing everything out, which we learned would be dangerous. I found I could be supportive from home and not have to go in and get upset by the space, because it was upsetting to me almost every time I went over.

In the meantime, I saw an ad for a Hoarding Support Group in the paper. I let Elaine Birchall know that Steve had already given notice so we were maybe a bit further along but she said it would still be helpful and we signed up. The Hoarding Support Group consists of a dozen or so people who have identified themselves as having a clutter problem and if they have someone who can be of help to them, those people are there too, for no extra charge.

We started a month ago and every week I want to jump up and down and say "do you guys know you're doing yoga?!?" To take a look at our lives and to take steps to create alignment that will allow the flow of energy and bring people into our space - there's yoga there. Taking a look at our objects and our attachment to them - that's yoga. Seeing how the false sense of comfort we get from our belongings that will deteriorate over time is holding us back in living our lives fully - that's yoga!

Sometimes I meet people who ask me if my boyfriend does yoga. He doesn't do yoga postures so much, but is he a yogi? Has he walked the path of looking at his life and bringing himself into greater alignment? Absolutely.

May 31st has come and gone and Steve's place is empty. Value Village has loads more things to sell and there's a lovely apartment for rent along the canal in Ottawa. A quiet miracle has happened to a special man in my life and I'm thrilled for him and inspired by the massive change that has come about through his transformation (he read Anthony De Mello's The Way to Love daily throughout all of this).

I love it when people take a look at their lives and see what's there. Every time, something good comes from it. I've never seen people take a look at their lives and have bad things happen from it. So whether it's Landmark Education workshops or Makata Living Yoga programs or Hoarding Support groups, I find yoga in wonderful, messy, human places and it lifts me up, inspiring me to keep looking at my life and shed light on the dusty, dark places in my own world.

(The images are from a sheet Elaine passed around at one of our last workshop sessions. It was used to rate your spaces. She has lots of tools!)

My Dad's Stuff

My dad died quite in the middle of doing things. He was not planning on going.

I've realized that it's in death that we drop our masks. What we've been hiding remains, unless we've been cleaning up all along. When we match our inner worlds with our outer worlds, there won't be so many messes when we're gone. My dad was a great guy but he kept things that didn't need keeping.

This past weekend in the Yoga Teacher Training I was teaching a bit about Saucha, or purity, and I was reminded of an event that had happened exactly a year ago...

We had heard that things had turned in my dad's health - he had cancer - and we should come right away. I spoke to him and told him I was on the way. I'd be there in two days. My father died while my sister and I were en route to visit him. So we got to Texas and our trip was different than we had been planning. Instead of a visit with him we were left with his stuff and dealing with what you have to deal with when someone close to you dies.

One of the days while we were down there was a holiday, so most things were closed and we didn't really have much to do so we thought we'd go open his storage locker we were told he had. My dad used to wear a fanny-pack and his keys were all attached to that. All of his keys. His friend told us he knew were the storage locker was and could take us there.

We drove out to the edge of town where he thought the storage place was, and sure enough, there was the slightly hidden driveway. When we got to the entrance, our father's friend left us. He only knew which place the storage locker was at because he drove my dad there every once in a while to drop off his checks to pay for it. He had no idea which locker it was. "Which way did he walk when he went to the locker?" we asked him. He didn't go to the locker - he just went to the office and dropped off the check.

We called the number on the closed office door to see if someone could let us know which locker of the hundreds on the site were our father's. They couldn't help us for one thing because they don't give out that kind of information to just anyone and second thing, the computer was in the office, not where we were calling.

We didn't have much else to do and it was just my sister and me with our little rental car and a whack of keys so we decided we'd hunt for it. "Do you think he'd have a big one or a little one?" "Which kind of lock do you think he used?" No clue. So we proceeded to go to each locker and try each key. Maybe this wasn't even the right place. Maybe he didn't have a locker or it was inside. Who knows.

As we went up and down the gravel roads of lockers trying each rusty lock a few times with different keys we started to imagine what could be so important that he'd have a locker even though he had a home with plenty of space. Maybe this would be our inheritance. Maybe he's got something really interesting to leave us. Maybe he'd been secretly stashing collections that would have value. Maybe it's full of good things we can sell or use.

Finally, at practically the last locker, at the last corner we turned, my sister yelled out that she'd found it. This is the one. We took a big breath. This was it. My dad's treasures. His secrets for us.

So you can already imagine or scroll down and see the pictures of what we found. A big bag of nothing. Old computer parts. Old ones. Dusty photo albums that were damaged from water and rodent excrement. A bar stool. Broken fishing rods that hadn't been used in years. That was my dad. It couldn't have been any other way, of course. It had to be that way. That's just how we was and we loved him.

But really? Come on, Dad. You spent money you didn't have every month to keep this pile you couldn't confront and sort through. Maybe if we had visited Texas a year earlier we could have helped clean it out when he could tell us what was special about each thing. But we didn't do that.

So I came home to my mom and family here saying please clean out your stuff now - tell us what's important so we can know why you kept what you did. Where are the keys to the motorcycle and the house and where is the important stuff? Do you have insurance? Where are the papers we need? I want to make sure I leave a trail so my loved ones can know what I meant and was up to.

In the end of course it doesn't matter. Clean up or don't. But if you clean up while you can, you may get to experience the satisfaction that comes when you align yourself, the energy that's freed up when you know where things go. When you know what you have and you don't keep more than you can handle.

After the trip out to Texas to attend my father's funeral and handle some of his affairs, I came home with a strong message for everyone in my family - Please Clean Up Your Stuff So We Don't Have To Do It When You're Dead. It's a drag.

It's been a year exactly since we were down there saying goodbye to my dad. Since that time I notice him all over the place. In the newspaper Sudoko puzzles, in the spider plant like he used to keep in all his houses, in my memories of crazy experiences like the ones I just shared here. He's not gone, he's been converted, but shit, it would have been nice not to have had to clean up his big mess.

Yoga and Hoarding

I have recently found out that I'm close to some people who hoard. Without going into detail about who they are and the fascinating details about what's like to hoard I'll just post my thoughts about hoarding and how we all do it some ways and how yoga can be used to approach hoarding.

Yoga is the process of letting go of what's not you. In yoga, we let go of extra weight in some cases, but really the letting go is of old habit patterns and ways of thinking and acting that are not in alignment with who we really are. When we practise the yamas and niyamas for instance, we can go through a process of witnessing ourselves in our lives, waking up from habitual ways of being so we can live more consciously.

Some of us hoard weight. We started off thin as youngsters and then over the years, we kept adding and adding and not being able to shed what we didn't need anymore and eventually it can weigh us down so that we're carrying extra weight and it damages our health. Hoarders are like this with stuff. Some of us can relate because maybe we've held on to some things that are no longer needed or used and we can't really store those things anymore but we try. I've written a few posts over the years of my own personal struggles with letting things go.

Yoga also works like a digestive system. It can help us to integrate the things that have come before so we can take on more of life. Not just food that we take in, but experiences. Yoga helps us to get current in our lives, so we're not bringing along a bunch of stored up feelings or things to deal with.

People who collect stuff often don't have a way to get rid of it. I found that in my own experience. There was a system that brought stuff the house, but the system that recycled or donated stuff wasn't as efficient. When we see potential value in items, that can outweigh the cost it takes to keep the items around, and we'll keep on keeping things that have potential use, but not actual use. Those projects we meant to finish. The scrapbooks we mean to put together. The books we will read. It can really expand from there.

Letting go of bad habits whether they're destructive to our health - both physical and emotional/mental - or just displeasing to others, is often a really difficult process. We often keep these bad habits in place for a variety of different reasons, however, they often bring about very similar results: isolation, shame, loneliness, lack of vitality and many other symptoms.

I think that the teachings of yoga have helped me witness myself and my patterns in my own life and it has helped me have a lot of empathy for the people in my life who are uncovering their own patterns. Yoga for hoarders will be coming in the future!

(The picture is from a Google image search for hoarding. I'll see if I can get my own shots for future posts.)