Healing HOME

How one woman reclaimed her home–and her life–five minutes at a time

There is a woman (Bonnie) out in Utah whose YouTube channel is called “A Beautiful Mess.” She specializes in the same kind of service that I do—healing homes, essentially, and the families within them.

She recently featured another woman’s home, a woman that she’d been working with named Cammy. The beauty was, Cammy is highly stressed with serious health issues and such, and she learned to use cleaning as therapy of a sort—a way of gaining some semblance of control in a chaotic situation.

Our home is a place where we get to set our own rules and boundaries—we are the queen of the castle. For some people, this is the only form of empowerment in their lives that they know how to exercise. And it can be done, five minutes at a time, one tabletop or cabinet, and eventually one room at a time.

Something she did that was life-changing for her is, she selected three things to do every day no matter what:

• Take out a bag of trash.
• Load and run the dishwasher.
• Do one load of laundry.

Slowly over time, this has given her strength: a sense that she can control this aspect of her life to a great extent—and that if she can control and improve this one, why not others?

I want to share the video. There’s a lot of emotion here, but her process is amazing and inspiring.

Like Cammy, we don’t have to drown in our problems. If we choose to wallow in them and do nothing else, we can end up drowning. But if we just get moving, engaging the mechanical nature of the human body, we balance life in this way. When we are highly mental or emotional, it is best to exercise in some way as this quiets the other processes. This gives us pause to realize that we have more control over life than it feels or seems at times.