This post popped up on my Tumblr dashboard:
The Konmari Method can totally be applied to your astral life. Does it bring you joy? No? Then stop that shit and do something that does. [...] That’s called adjusting your approach to your spirit life and people do that shit all the time.
I keep finding myself in a mindset that's dangerously close to scrupulosity. This isn't good for me.
There's a place in her new book where Marie Kondo talks about working with people who don't know what it means to ask if something "sparks joy." I know that feeling myself, but for me it's a facet of depression. I sometimes declutter compulsively when I'm in a bad state, but only things or maybe internet accounts.
Decluttering my spiritual life is a lot harder. A few years ago I did an exercise called Project Protagonist, a whole year spent revisiting the ideas that were important to me and to my ideas about magic, metaphysics and spirituality as a child and teenager, before I got involved with others. I have a tendency to fold myself into interesting shapes to try to please other people, and I wanted to see what I looked like unfolded, if you will.
This was an excellent exercise and I rediscovered a lot of things that were very useful to me, including getting back into fictional reconstruction. Both Project Protagonist and fictional recon as a system, however, lead to a certain amount of... overcrowding. One can only discover what works by trying things, and some of those things don't work. I have a hard time putting things aside.
Keeping going doesn't mean continuing to do everything I start forever. It means actively evaluating what works and what doesn't, as opposed to getting mired down and overwhelmed. It means being willing to move on to the next thing. One of the things I need to put into action this year is to evaluate and be willing to change or even end relationships and practices that aren't working, and to take risks and try new things.
To that end, I'm going to be trying new methods of reaching out, and tracking success or failure. I've seen discussions in some spaces of divining what gods, spirits and ancestors are already around you and interested in you, a kind of personal pantheon. I want to work on that idea, of discovery and on further developing some relationships I already have. I'm working on some divination ideas but haven't moved forward yet. I should.
Nothing is permanent. That's what gets me through panic attacks. This too shall pass. I worry about changing things because I'm afraid everything will fall apart, as if I'm atop a delicate framework with no real support to it. I suspect there's more support than I think, but ultimately the best I can do is build more support. Part of that is doing the construction, putting the work in.
Part of that is the lesson of the Hanged Man: learning to let go. I'm still working on that one.