Disclaimer

First and foremost, I’m starting with a disclaimer, because I worry that this is going to sound like I’m promoting “cleanliness is next to godliness”. I do not think this is a unilateral spiritual goal or something everyone needs to do. We all have our own stuff to work out in our own ways with our own priorities… especially when those priorities are often not of our making. This is simply my experience with one goddess around cleaning as part of a spiritual practice. I am sharing it with the hope that it might help someone else who’s facing down the same lesson.

How I Got Into This Mess

Some years ago I began experiencing cleaning as a devotional act. While I had always enjoyed the “behind the scenes” work that made religious functions, well, function, I hadn’t really gotten into the cleaning part until I began volunteering at the local Vedanta Center in my early twenties. And enjoying cleaning whatsoever, no matter the reason, was freaking weird.

I had spent my life up until that point with a combination of untreated ADD and chronic physical pain that helped me make the most (or least) of the generations of OCD and hoarding that came before me. To put it bluntly, the way I kept my room as a child was clearly not the choice of a stable person. A dear friend once told me that if I ever did snap and kill someone, the police would take one look at my room and immediately convict me. Even though part of the joke was the idea of my passive tree-hugging self making it onto a short list of murder suspects, we all had to agree with her that the room looked pretty concerning. That disaster area was a way I found shelter from the storm of instability outside my room, as well as comfort inside the storm of my own head. It was a coping mechanism that served a purpose, even if the downsides were easily notable.

But as my delight in cleaning for the Vedanta Center carried over to serving in the home of my spiritual teacher, I found a growing interest in learning how to improve. No longer was this just something I sucked at doing for myself. It was now a skill set that could help others and show them that I cared. When I spent a year homeless and hopping between the couches of generous friends, I began cleaning as a way to give thanks to my hosts and the homes they were opening to me. Cleaning as a loving act began forming into a language of sorts as more and more opportunities came up for me to express it.

I started becoming thankful for my attachment to my mess — it helped me remember that these messes sometimes serve a function, so that even if I offered to clean out of love, it wasn’t always the appropriate thing to offer. Just as not every one of my friends would feel comfortable with me trying to make out with them as a show of gratitude, not all of them were down with me folding their clothes. When the mess surrounding someone is an emotional matter, what one person would view as helping out with a chore can become an act of intimate trust to another.

Eventually my stint of homelessness came to a close and I began renting a room in my spiritual teacher’s home. At first I shared the room with another person and a sewing nook, but as more rooms opened up, it became a combination of my bedroom and a shared craft space. It was during my time in this oddly-shaped room with its slanted ceilings and unfinished wood floors that my experience of cleaning went from “satisfying spiritual practice” to “tool for complete life overhaul”.

Holda, Goddess of Cleaning

After many rounds of cleaning in the kitchen, my teacher introduced me to a deity sitting on a small altar by the wood burning stove. She was Holda, an old Germanic goddess of witches, and I would go on to hear many of Her stories over the following months. She is the one Who taught the secret of processing linen to a humble man. She causes the first snowfall of winter when she beats Her pillows clean. She has a particular fondness for people who work themselves to exhaustion while caring for their home and loved ones. And when the Germanic areas where She was worshiped were Christianized, it was said She cared for the souls of the children who died before their baptisms.

Personally, I began to call Her the Goddess of the Silent Knowing Look. Whenever I collapsed into the rocking chair in the corner for a break from cleaning the kitchen, Her figurine was always staring directly at me. It didn’t matter how I positioned Her idol earlier that day. It also didn’t matter how I rearranged Her altar to help prevent this. I would slump down to rest and look up to meet Her gaze. It became a reminder that She was watching, and that I could do better… or at least work harder. I agreed, so when I was cleaning for my teacher, I also made these efforts an offering to Her. It wasn’t long before another altar to Her was forming in my room.

Fast forward a few years to when I found myself by my bed praying, on my knees and almost in tears. It was directed to Whoever was listening and willing to answer. There was so much chaos happening around me, my depression was helpfully responding by worsening, and I felt entirely lost. I wanted clarity in my confusion as everything I tried changed nothing. That’s when I got my answer from Holda.

Sometimes I get to experience the sensation of a response to a prayer as if it were settling in my heart, much like the emotions that come with a sentiment rather than the words of the sentiment itself. That works its way through my personal filter to become an “answer”… with a large allowance for human error. To date, the response that comes through the most is an unsatisfying reminder that I have an anxiety disorder and could probably use a nap. With Holda, I had never experienced more than that Silent, Knowing Look, the one that meant we both knew perfectly well what I should be doing, and that I wasn’t doing it. But while this answer was a change of style for Her, it really wasn’t that different from the usual practical advice I got.

“Have you tried cleaning your room?”

I was somewhat taken aback. Not only by the Who, but because seriously, what kind of answer was that? I was having a crisis! If I cleaned my room, what good would that do for all of the emotional crap happening both inside and outside of it? My spiritual path wouldn’t suddenly have direction because I folded my socks! I put my head back down and clarified my interest in a slightly more existential answer. She let Her opinion on that be summarized by a resounding silence.

Then I took a good look around myself at my living space… and found it to be an obnoxiously accurate mirror for my mental state. It showed as many signs of depression as my behaviors did. It was just as cluttered, confused, and stagnant as my mind and actions, with an overwhelming theme of being so clogged that nothing had space to move forward.

The room was still an improvement from what I was used to. I had been building systems to better cope with my ADD, including my beloved “things I most commonly forget when walking out the door then have to come back for” drawer and countless rounds of dealing with the backlog of my hoarding habits. That book “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up” stalked me in a distressingly persistent way for a few years until I compromised and got its sequel “Spark Joy”. (It had a lot more pictures, so was far less overwhelming.) I had been reading that and pacing myself through creating a more tidy situation. The improvement had been remarkable… until only a couple months before I had found myself kneeling to pray in the pile of dirty laundry by my bed.

Being there on the floor among it all, that’s when I could see what to do. Many people who are familiar with magic know the phrase “as above, so below”, but Holda seemed much more focused on the inverse, “as below, so above”. So I decided to start working some magic on the “below”, with the intent of my mind becoming as orderly as my room. It was many weeks of dicking around and trying to make it past unhelpful neurology, pain, and the continuing depression until I finally reached the milestone I had been envisioning for years. There were still projects left incomplete, boxes of stuff in the extension waiting to leave, and the storage portion of my closet was left in its semi-sorted state, but my space was tidied and easily accessible. Clothes were all folded and put away. Every item shoved in a corner had found a proper place. The drawers and shelves of craft supplies were not only functional, but sorted. It was no longer the refuge of a younger me, but a space for who I was and needed to be now.

A few weeks later I was chatting with a childhood friend who has similar cleaning struggles to myself, so I offered to show her some of the sorting tricks I had learned or figured out that kept the act from entirely wrecking me. These were mostly small tidbits of advice paired with much pointless enthusing. (Did I mention I have ADD?) I started trying to explain how it had helped me improve parts of my life on a more spiritual level, but I couldn’t quite get all my thoughts in order. And this annoyed me. So the next day I jotted down a few bullet points. Then as more popped up I would add those to the list, until it was much longer than I had expected. What had come out as a few disorganized ideas the night previous was now a massive jumble of half-formed sentences.

Later while reading (or trying to read) what I had scribbled down so I could translate it for people outside of my head, I noticed something weirdly familiar. One part of the cleaning practice looked like a technique I had been struggling with in Buddhist-style meditation for quite a while. (Well, less like “struggling with” and more like “avoiding entirely”.) Then as I reread the rest of the notes through this new lens, more similarities started popping up. Every coping mechanism I had used to deal with cleaning that space had in turn honed a skill I could begin to use on my own mind, the very mind that had manifested in that clutter with a painful amount of accuracy. The “full circle” of it all was very satisfying.

I went to work turning those scribbles into full sentences, hoping I could express this skill set that had literally made the ephemeral into something tangible; that had made the “above” a bit more “below”. And in turn, maybe I could figure out how to go back the other way, using the tangible to work on those ephemeral bits that I wasn’t great at. And if there’s anything I’m not great at, it’s meditation.

The List

The first step often given for Buddhist meditation is to simply practice. Sit silently. Focus on the breath. Power through, but without powering through. This can be miserable for a beginner; I know that it certainly has been for me. My dad used to make me meditate at times when I was younger, but I would often just sit there and try to distract myself from the hallucinatory voices who lived in my head at that time. While that’s no longer as much of a concern, I’ve now hit other health-related stumbling blocks while trying to find that stillness. Since any possible benefits of quietly sitting were being promised in the long term, I was not finding the motivation to stick through the physical discomfort and neurological restlessness.

Moving meditations were offered as alternatives, especially walking meditations. I actually enjoy these a great deal and have had much success in pursuing them, but I felt like I was developing a different set of skills. It helped me reach good states of mind while on the move, but when it came to being at peace with where I was, it just didn’t seem to translate. And when movement isn’t always an option in a very literal way, that matters. There was still a huge existential ball of I-don’t-know-what that kept getting in my way. Then at some point, cleaning with Holda became what I needed to bridge the gap between movement and stillness. The quieting of the chaos of my room quieted the swirling inside me, too. Using that lovely power of 20/20 hindsight, here’s a bit of what I think was happening.

• Making It Tangible

Organizing my room was (and is) a significantly more straightforward experience for me than doing the same for the amorphous blob that was (and is) my mind. This simple concept is a connecting thread through every part of this practice. I already mentioned how Holda flipped the saying into “as below, so above”, and these practices take shape in that “below”. While cleaning and organizing is still a struggle, I have enough experience with my physical body to make starting out here easier than when working in the “above”. I understand how to use my eyes to look at my room, even if it took me time to learn how to process what I was looking at. The same goes for my hands, that I only had to worry about what to pick up and where it should be put down, and I already knew how to handle the limitations of my grip. The tools of this type of magic are far more familiar to me.

In addition, even small improvements from my efforts were easily noticeable, as were changes in the flow of day-to-day life. Being able to easily grab my wallet on the way out the door or knowing where to find my nail clippers sounds unremarkable in the Grand Scheme of Spirituality, yet seeing once unattainable goals in my life become commonplace has given me the hope needed to spark motivation around this other unattainable practice. (It also reduces stress quite a bit to lose things less often, and that just helps everything.)

Now I have a hold on what the anxiety and frustration that comes before this kind of success can feel like, and view it as a step rather than immediately as a sign that I’m doing something wrong or impossible in my meditation. That also goes for when I simply have one of those bad days where all the systems I created aren’t working and it feels like I haven’t made any progress at all. Being able to note my stress responses on these low-functioning days creates a framework for the days that meditation is more difficult. Just because the back pain this week results in me putting off laundry doesn’t mean every improvement in hamper management is lost, and just because the same back pain also means I can’t sit quietly for more than thirty seconds doesn’t mean I won’t be back to longer meditation in a few days. The same concept applies when the inside of my head is a screaming blender. The results of making some peace with my physical world have become both a literal and figurative example of how I can view the struggles of my meditative life.

• Being Willing to Face My Bullshit

But to do any practice, one has to have a good idea of what they’re working with. This means getting at least some grasp of one’s current state before any steps can be made towards change. It’s like that saying about leading a horse to water… except when I ended up at the water I would always get distracted by how distasteful I found my own reflection on the surface. To be able to drink, I was going to have to give that face a kiss.

This has to be paired with initiative, because looking at this stuff sucks. There was a reason this mess was happening in the first place. The pitfalls of doing nothing had to outweigh the coping mechanism enough that I would be able to stare myself in the eye. I also had to accept that sometimes the desire to strive towards a goal wasn’t going to be enough to push me through my depression and discomfort. So as I once read it summarized quite beautifully: “True change only happens when I’m tired of my own bullshit.” And I had become really, really tired. Letting myself acknowledge fully how done I was with the way I was existing gave me something to fill in for the times I didn’t feel worthy of the goals I wanted to reach, or when the whole thing just felt too overwhelming.

To be able to truly create change in my living space, I had to face down the shame I held about being the type of person who would let things reach this point. Instead of turning away from every now-grimy food container or stack of stressfully unsorted belongings, I had to see them and own that I had done that. And not just own it, but give space for it, which is where practicing “non-judgement” of myself often broke down. But the initiative and bullshit-exhaustion pushed me through, and eventually I found tricks for my own mental barriers that helped calm the internal swirl enough to make decisions. I did a lot of facing down my anxiety, reclaiming the opinions of myself that I found there, then breaking down the illogical thought patterns that kept me frozen. From the cracks created by that sprouted the opportunities for realistic troubleshooting.

A good starting point was my habits around clothing. When I find myself free to strip naked and collapse into bed, my clothes rarely find themselves sorted into the laundry or put back away where they might stay clean. They instead ended up on the eternally dusty unfinished wood floor, filling in for the sweeping I was avoiding. To deal with this, I had to face realities that I didn’t like looking at. I had to see the limitations of my neurology and my body, and that meant accepting how extremely difficult it could be to mentally process how to sort clothes, or even have the fine motor skills needed to handle them. What I felt was something simple that I should “just be able to do” was embarrassingly hard for me. I needed to treat this difficulty not as a failure from which to avert my eyes, but neutrally as one of the many realities of my reflection. More specifically, I needed to stop planning for the way I thought I should be or who I wish I was, and instead plan for who I was right then. So I decided on a place where I could toss my clothes on the days I just couldn’t deal and built a routine for sorting them when I was capable. What was once a shame-filled task steeped in intense anxiety and a pervading sense of hopelessness became a solution with clear directions, then eventually a happy success.

This became another framework for meditation, but this time for identifying the skin-crawling feeling when I was starting to face down parts of myself that made me cringe. The feelings that cropped up while truly facing down my living space were the same that happened when truly facing down myself, and in both instances it instinctually had me turning away. But while I could delude myself into thinking that there was nothing in that particular spot of my mind to look at, I couldn’t delude myself into thinking that my laundry was being handled well when I had to push through a pile of it to get out of bed. I could ignore it or pretend it wasn’t that big of a deal, but I was definitely having the visceral experience of wading through laundry.

So I had to be present. I had to come out of my avoidant haze and be there with the laundry piles of my brain. By doing this, the detached emotional observance of meditation went from feeling like repression to instead a tool of acceptance. By not overreacting, I could start gathering mental laundry and figure out what to do about it.

• Small Steps

One of the most wonderful things that I took away from an ADD self-help program was the concept of breaking big, overwhelming tasks down into smaller and smaller parts until each step inspired the least amount of anxiety possible. When facing down the idea of being a more tidy person, the idea of organizing my whole room was overwhelming, so I focused on creating a small foundation and building from there. If I didn’t have the patience for facing all the issues in my life, could I have patience for just dealing with my bedroom? If not, then perhaps I could go through that one insistently constant pile of belongings on my floor? If not, could I just take one book from the pile and put it on the bookshelf? A bit nearer to the bookshelf? While the manual I was using for “tidying up” suggested doing it all at once, and that is something I had success with in full overhaul situations, at this point I was trying to build routines that would be part of day-to-day life. Accidentally ending up with a large amount of clutter was a quality of myself I was learning to accept would always be there, so I had to figure out how to live with it while not constantly making the cleaning of it an overhaul-level event.

This meant I began tangibly experiencing the domino effect that could be started by making one small, yet relatively solid, healthy change in my life. For instance, troubleshooting how to keep better track of my wallet (having a designated drawer space for it to live in, getting a bigger wallet to make its presence – or lack thereof – more noticeable, etc.) then led to a drawer for storing it and other important leaving-the-house items, which lead to figuring out a system I could use for these items when traveling for months at a time. Now that I have this notable proof of improvement (among many others), what I once considered to be dismissible small behavior changes are viewed with far more appreciation.

When facing down the overwhelming concept that is Meditation, already having the habit of identifying these stacking small accomplishments in self-improvement is incredibly beneficial. When the first bits of depression or anxiety show up, asking, “Why should you even bother?” or “Are you even doing this right?”, these bits of proof, small as they may be, might just change the answer. Or maybe your mental health has upended your life again and now you find yourself trying to restart. Having an idea of how to watch those bits stack back up again can help curb at least some of the frustration at having to rebuild. Tangible progress can be a very important training tool.

• Setting Reasonable Goals

Like I mentioned before, I’m just messy by nature. As I’ve built up and adjusted my cleaning practices over the years, I’ve had to accept this. A certain amount of cluttering happens if I don’t stay vigilant, be it from health flares, mental issues, or straight up laziness. I call this “silting”. It means there are no actual issues with the cleaning structure I’ve established, I just haven’t put much effort into keeping the flow going lately, so clutter is starting to collect. And that’s OK. Sometimes there’s a chronic problem that’s worth troubleshooting, and a bit of reorganizing here or there is simply part of normal maintenance. A good chunk of reorganizing is needed every once in a while. My space doesn’t function too well when it gets overly static, and letting it “breathe” helps keep that flow moving.

But I’ve found there’s a point where spending all that effort on cleaning starts to become its own issue. There’s a difference between “being functional” and “perfectly cleaning everything”, especially when I’m being realistic about the amount of work it takes me to reach “functional”. After a certain point, pushing forward begins to feel like cleaning for the sake of cleaning. While I’m enjoying the process of it all, it’s usually a sign that I have lost sight of why I’m cleaning in the first place. It’s certainly not to achieve some sort of level of precision and perfection, because that’s not only unrealistic, but ultimately self-destructive when I continually fall short. It’s supposed to be to create a healthy, functional situation for who I am and what I want to do. It’s so I can treat my living space and belongings with gratitude and respect. It’s so I can continue to learn from my own struggles, and in that way possibly help others.

And that connects right back to meditation. While the degree may vary, my mind is always going to be a bit of a mess. Whether it’s from the side-effects of chronic pain, neurology, trauma, or simply good old madness, it’s unreasonable to hold myself to standards of mental “perfection” that are unattainable. And things are even going to “silt” up in my head as much as they do in my living space, so I just need remember what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. I need to keep on it as I am able, accept my periods of what feels like relapse, respect the body I find myself in, and do my best to avoid responding with destructive extremes. There’s a comfortable ground in-between somewhere that is a far better place for me to work towards. Buddhism’s not called “the Middle Way” for nothing!

• Mess Divination

After doing Holda’s “as below, so above” practice for some time, I started noticing patterns in the way my clutter would accumulate. If I was having issues around motivating myself to do art, I would notice that things had been starting to “silt” between my bed and my art supplies for days. If I was having trouble connecting with a certain deity, I would find that something I had forgotten on the floor was blocking me from being able to comfortably reach Their altar.

It got to the point that I would just stand in my room and look around to see where messes had formed. From there I could identify where blockages were also forming in my interior blind spots before they made themselves known. Much like a diviner throwing down bones or rocks and reading the results, I was looking at the clothes, dishes, and forgotten projects I had blindly tossed down. There will always be a level of chaos in my living space, so it’s unreasonable to expect my surroundings to be any more static than my swirling mind. And just as my internal chaos can leave space for messages to slip through, my external chaos can sometimes lead to that as well. The Gods are very skilled at working with what we have to offer. Cleaning up those types of messes became a segment of time I could spend on the corresponding area in myself.

There’s also a difference between this “mess divination” and an unkempt altar. I think of the latter like “leaving a mess in Their space and Them being reasonably displeased”, which is different from “there’s a mess inside of my space (both physically and mentally) and that’s keeping me from being open to Them”. Insulating from the intensity of that kind of connection, no matter how it happens, is natural. And it’s important to take steps to address it.

More than once I’ve had it expressed to me that prayer is like “speaking”, while meditation is more like “listening”. So just as meditation can help open oneself up to “listening” more fully, prolonged practice of this cleaning with Holda gave me a way to do it as well. Not only does it show me where I was resisting hearing something, but it also gives me a way to address and lessen that resistance. Then by the time I sit down to meditate, the blocks that made the listening in my day-to-day spiritual life uncomfortable have already been lessened. And by being able to identify where those feelings of lessening are happening in me, I can also pay those blocked areas special attention when trying to deepen my meditation.

In Conclusion, A Blessing

Those are the foundations she showed me. Maybe some of it has rung true to your situation, maybe some of it gives you an idea of how to move forward, or maybe you somehow stuck through to the end only to be disappointed. Whichever of those it was, I’m hoping you also made it to this point because you are searching for a way to deal with your own messes, because it’s in the spirit of that which I feel the need to make one more point.

As much as I tie all of this back to Buddhist meditation, the cleaning I was doing with Holda was manifesting in its own time and way. It translates to meditation, but something can only be translated when it’s a language in its own right. What Holda as a goddess of witches taught me was a form of magic. It was an action done with the intent of enforcing my will on my own mind. Yet when I explain what happened step-by-step, it sounds incredibly practical and mundane. That’s because it is. That’s the type of blessings She brings into my life, and the type I hope She brings you, whether what you found here spoke to you or not. May She show you the magic in the practical and the mundane, then grant you the fortitude and clarity to do something with it.