Spring time is well under way. With it comes the vital refreshment of new beginnings and, of course, the urge to clean.

As nature displays the triumphant beauty of a fresh start all around us in this glorious spring season, many feel inspired to clean house. To clean house, to dust, to remove what is stagnant and not part of the new trying to bloom, to make way and make space for fresh life.

From the ritual ’shaking of the house’ — a time of cleaning, polishing, celebration and a new clothing — in ancient Iran, to Celtic, Northern, and religious traditions, the spring season is a time of cleaning and new starts. It is the preparation and making way for the new. If you really want to trace back its origins, you have to look back into the deep roots of the rhythms of nature itself, and our interaction with it.

This seemingly timeless drive is not just a cultural human made idea. It’s in our ‘bone memory’ so to speak. A biological, mental, emotional and spiritual imperative.

Shaking Off The Season PastIn winter we are generally less active, less motivated, and for good reason. For 99.9% of our specie’s time frame, our biology was directly wrapped up with the changing seasons. With less light, with less to harvest, with the onset of the cold, we naturally gravitated more indoors, producing more melatonin, becoming sleepier overall; conserving heat, storing energy within, as the trees do in their roots. Containing, preserving, slumbering, dreaming.

Dust, fat cells, ‘stuff’, and lethargy are more likely to gather and make a home with us for the winter season.

Come spring time, it’s time to shake that all off, make space for the new growth, get outside more and feel less sleepy.

New energy in mind and body surge, and space is needed to not stagnate, stifle or frustrate that energy’s growth. For any fresh start, the old has to go. Autumn leaves fell, making rich the soil for new life to thrive. If that old form and shape hadn’t fallen, if it didn’t decompose and feed the soil, how could the new sprouts arise?

Ritually ShiftingHow do we make this transition a smooth one and avoid the potential frustrations or awkwardness of this seasonal shift can come with? As humans always have — harmonizing with the energies of spring, through ritual engagement.

Get out there in nature. Look at the new growth, hear the birds, attune to the beauty and energies of spring. Let it awaken the ‘bone memory’ within you. Truly take it in. The experience you have in nature is actually within you.

The same sense of renewal, and rebirth, of excitement and newness, the same life force that shoots up as sprouts breaking through the ground, and spring flowers blooming, is the same source of renewal ready to bubble forth in you as fresh thoughts, feelings, ideas, perceptions and wonders. As the taoists say — reality is like an eternal spring, an ever outflowing abundance. We just need to simplify, remove what’s in the way, and get in harmony with that outflowing.

So when spring cleaning your home, you are — on one level — simply cleaning up; but you’re also enacting a ritual done for thousands, and thousands of years. A ritual that runs in the ancestral cellular memory from ancestor to ancestor. An energy in tune with the trees, and the land, flowers and birds, and the movement of the sun, harmonizing you with the energies of the season.

It also removes dust particles from the air that agitates sinuses, lungs, and exasperates allergies. If you want to further support the changes on a physical level, reduce inflammation — which effects seasonal allergies — with high quality curcumin; and keep immunity high in this unpredictable season where sun, rain and wind can show up together in a matter of minutes.

It’s also true what they say — spring cleaning our home and work space is straight therapeutic. Stress relieving and clarifying. As you declutter, quite literally, you reduce the amount of ‘over stimulation’ on your mind leaving more space to focus on what is more important, what carries deep value and delight. No doubt, this also inspires productivity, helping the creativity and all the new births of the season take flight.

Engaging SpringRooted in our biology, our mammalian and cultural past, in the cycles of nature and the rhythms of life — the impulse and benefits of spring cleaning are, in a way, timeless, and still very much alive in the present.

If we don’t engage the energies of spring, it can make for an awkward and frustrating time. The new energy and excitement grows but we’re not quite out of that winter sleepiness yet. It’s kind of like starting a new school or job, while still ending the last one. Engaging with this timeless energy through ritual cleaning harmonizes inner and outer, mind and body, allowing the force of life that is always bubbling and flowing from the heart centre of existence to flow through us unimpeded.

Inspired to clean house yet?

If you haven’t already, now is the time.

Now is the time of growth.

(And, if allergies are really bad, it’s a great excuse to stay inside and attune to the season through cleaning our home, cleaning body, cleaning mind.)

Happy spring everyone.

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