Why Head Trash Clearance should be a practice

Hello and welcome back to the Head Trash show. This is your host, Alexia Leachman and thank you so much for joining me today.

Now in today’s episode, I want to talk about your head trash clearance practice and why it needs to be a practice rather than a one-off, hit. Something that you might do once and then not go back to again. Now if you take a close look at the podcast artwork, or the cover of my book, you’ll see there’s a there’s a picture of a head with a squiggly line in the head. And that squiggly line represents the head trash. It’s basically just a big scribble. And another way you could describe it is maybe a big tangled ball of string. Another thing that it reminds me a lot of is that draw that everybody has somewhere in their kitchen or hallway that’s full of all your old mobile phone charging leads and they’re all just tangled up in a big mess. So when you want to get one of those wires or charging cables out, right, you you might think “Oh yeah, I need that one, I need to get that ONE out”. So you kind of pull one out on its own and then, and then you get that one out. And that’s great, you can kind of do a little happy dance around the room. But then you’ve still got this big ball of tangled nonsense that still needs to be dealt with.

And that’s very much like head trash, you can go in and you can pull a strand out, you can clear something out one thing that’s bothering you today, and you will feel much better for it. But there’s still all this other stuff that you haven’t quite dealt with, or looked at that still needs to be dealt with. And so this is why it needs to be a practise because head trash clearance isn’t a one-off job.

Now if I said to you, you know, let’s say it was trash day tomorrow and you had all your bins ready and you take them all outside. What you don’t do at this point is say “Oh, you know, that’s great. I’ve taken my trash out. That’s it. I won’t have to do that ever again”. I mean, that’s ridiculous, right? You don’t take your trash out and think “I’m done. I’m never going to have to put my rubbish out ever again”. Because as we all know, life moves on, life continues. You will continue to buy stuff and that stuff that might be useful for a short moment. And then you need to get rid of it. So the packaging around your food, you need it to get it from the supermarket to your home. But once it’s at home, you don’t need it anymore and you throw it away. Now of course, with the environmental movement, packaging is changing quite drastically, but we’re not going to be rid of it that quickly.

Also when you think about clothes that you wear, you know, you buy clothes, you enjoy them for a while, maybe you’re really into fashion and you buy clothes and you wear that stuff for a few months and then and then you don’t want them any more. So there’s always going to be a need in your home and in your physical life to get rid of stuff, because the more you interact with the world around you, the more you buy, the more stuff at some point you will need to get rid of.

The same is true of your head trash. You can’t say that, “oh, I’ve got rid of this now”, because there’s going to be more stuff that piles in. And that’s assuming that you had a really good clear-out in the first place. A lot of people don’t really go through the process of having a really good clear-out. If you imagine that you had not thrown your trash out throughout the whole of your 20s, can you imagine what kind of mess you’d have in your house right now? So let’s just take that and imagine what kind of mess might be in your head. Now of course, not everyone listening is going to have a complete nightmare of a mess in terms of head trash in their head. But if you’ve never really done any exploratory work – any facing up to your fears or any any emotional clearance work – then there will be this build up in your head. That’s really going to be creating a lot of mental clutter. And it’s going to be slowing you down, getting in the way of some clear thinking, some clear decision making, and some connecting to your intuition, getting a good night’s sleep, having good skin. I mean, goodness me, I could carry on all day about the impact that our head trash has on us.

If you’ve never gone through that clearance process – and it doesn’t mean you have to do that using the head trash clearance method. You could be doing that in any number of ways in terms of dealing with the stuff that’s in your mind and getting rid of the stuff that no longer serves you. There are lots of ways to do that.

But if you’ve never gone through that process, then you’ve probably got a heap of stuff that you need to deal with. A really good place to start when we think “you know what – I’m going to sort out my head trash” is have a really good clear-out. A sort of kick-start process where you really go deep. Let’s say you decide to have a spring clean of your house you don’t just grab a cloth and the hoover. You think I’m going to empty the room, I’m going to empty the wardrobes, you know, you might do a Marie Kondo on your house. And it’s really thorough, cleansing and satisfying.

And the same can be said, of doing that with your head trash, you know, really going in and looking at all those inner conflicts, the value conflicts, the emotional conflicts, the fears, the things that are sucking your confidence.  I find that I get really excited doing that when clients come to me and they want like this big head trash clear-out. I get really excited about that kind of work. And so I will always encourage people to kind of do that big clear out to kickstart your process because it makes the maintenance the ongoing practice so much easier.

You know, if you imagine you want to lose a lot of weight. And you know, you might start by being quite drastic, you might decide that you’re going to change your diet significantly. You might hire a personal trainer, and you really want to lose a ton of weight in a reasonably short period of time. And then let’s say you achieve your goal weight then beyond that, you don’t just kind of throw everything out the window you carry on to maintain yourself. And so you still go to the gym, maybe you don’t sort of work out five times a week, maybe it’s more like two times a week. But there is still a maintenance of practice going on, that enables you to stay where you’re at and keep in good shape.

And the same is it’s the same with head trash stuff. So you might have this big clear-out at the beginning. But then you still need to keep an eye on that stuff that’s coming in. Those beliefs that are still getting in your way and holding you back, those emotional conflicts that are just causing you to get annoyed by these work colleagues or whatever it is that gets you get triggered day to day life. And of course new experiences happened to you. As you maybe you push the envelope in your life as you jump out of your comfort zone, you have new fears to face, you have new comfort zones that you’re reaching, there’s always something new to explore and to clear on the personal growth journey.

So for me when I get people coming to me and they want one head trash clearance session, I think, “well, that’s great. That’s brilliant. We’re going to clear this thing. Maybe it might be a phobia of needles and injections or, or something similar like that. We do this one thing that’s really going to help them in that moment in that time of their life that’s really going to help them. But really to experience true change and to notice a real change in how you feel inside your head, it’s a practice. It’s a boatload of work. And I say a ‘boatload’. You know, it depends on what kind of a state you’re in, right? But it doesn’t have to be as much as you imagine.

So for example, I had a lady that came to me not that long ago. She was being made redundant. So she had some money that was given to her by her company to help her to find the next job. And so she came to me and said, “I really, really, really want to do some head trash clearance”. And so I said, “Well, what is it what do you want to achieve?. What do you want out of this process?” And she said, “I just want the voices in my head to stop. I just want I just want peace and quiet my head.” I thought, wow, that’s a big ask. But I was really excited by it. So I know exactly what’s required in order to achieve that I’m like, right, this is what we need to do. This is how we’re going to go about it. And we absolutely did. We achieved that in less than two months. And in the end of it, she’s like, “I’m at peace. Now I don’t have I’m not arguing with myself all the time. I’m not replaying these conversational loops in my head constantly. I’m not debating with myself in my head. She was just more at peace with herself. More present and more mindful.

And so when I say there’s a boatload of work, I mean, yes, there could be a short period of intense work where there’s a lot of this clearance happening. But my goodness, the change can happen very, very quickly, very quickly, indeed. But then you need to carry on you can’t if you stop then it’s just going to gather again. It’s like with the trash at home. You can’t say I’ve had this big clear-out at home and that’s it. I’m not gonna have to clear out my house again. You know, you can have the ongoing weekly trash cycle, but then in six months, or in a year you will have to do your house clearance stuff again because there’s going to be new clothes that need thrown out there’s going to be new bits and pieces that you think “I don’t need that anymore. I need to get rid of it. I need to clear some space, so I can kind of feel relaxed in this place” you know.

And the same goes to your head you need to have a clear up so that you can relax in your own company not feel like you have to distract yourself constantly by your phone, by TV, by binge-watching Netflix documentaries,, or whatever it is. You know, how about just being in nature? Do you have to always have your earbuds on when you go for a walk when you get get get to take some transport? Can you just not sit with yourself? And generally those that struggle to sit with just themselves as company trying to disrupt themselves because of the head trash because of this constant noise in their head. They just want it to stop. They don’t want to argue with themselves anymore. They don’t want to replay that conversation that they wish had gone differently and the keep changing the ending of what they should have said, Does that happen to you? I’ve been through that and it still happens to me to a degree and then I then I realised what’s going on and then I work on that bit. There’s always new stuff to clear. You know, I’ve been clearing my head trash like a demon possessed for I don’t know, about 10 years and there’s always new stuff to clear that always is, but it’s so much easier to maintain that practice once you’re in a good place, than allowing it to get out of control and thinking “my goodness, I can’t even find a way out here. I feel so overwhelmed. My anxiety is off the charts. I feel so fearful I don’t want to do anything I I can’t even face going out to do anything that’s good for me. I can’t do self-care because I don’t love myself enough.”

If you allow those feelings, that head trash, to accumulate, then it can really manifest itself in some very difficult situations in your life and also manifest as dis-ease You know, dis-ease in terms of lack of ease with who you are lack of ease with your thoughts, your feelings. So, so yeah, I realise I have gone off on a little bit of a rant. But I just want to impress on you the need to consider head trash clearance as a practice, something that you put time aside regularly for. That you are always curious about and think, oh, maybe I should work on that maybe I’ll add that to my list. And I’ll do that when I do my my monthly clearance session or my weekly clearance session or whatever rhythm that you feel you want to put in place in your life. And it’s going to be different for everybody, right? Because we’re all in such different places. And we all respond so differently to what’s going on around us. So, you know, I know I go through bursts, I’ve always got a list on the go. And sometimes I’ll just go through really intense session of a few days. I’ll just do loads and loads of clients then I’ll kind of back off for a few weeks and then I’ll go back and do that again. So it really is different for everyone. You get some people that, you know, those really big fans of the Miracle Morning they’ll be getting up really early in the morning and, and have that they’re different elements of their daily practise that they they do for themselves. And so, head trash tends to be a good part of a regular practice. Like if you like getting up a few hours early before the rest of the house awakes, then that could be a good time for you to do some head trash clearance. So it really does depend on what’s going to work for you. But I just want to impress on you. I think it really is a practice that we can that will have the most impact in your life when it does become a practice because when it is a one off, you know, if you think back to exercise, yes, it you can go off and go for a really long walk or go on a skiing holiday and you’ve done a load of exercise that week, but really, for your body and mind to benefit from exercise. It’s a regular thing. And the mind and the body is so connected that I think we need to be thinking about that in terms of mental health and emotional health as well. We can’t be ignoring our mental health and ignoring our emotional health and just looking at it sporadic because it affects so many aspects of our lives and it’s the beginning of so much, you know, it’s the when we have difficulties emotional and mental stuff, it’s that’s the beginning of stuff that might then show up later in the body. So it really is such an important aspect of our lives that I think it warrants a regular practice. So that is what I want to share with you today is encouraging you to think about what is your regular head trash clearance practice is going to be. Whether it is with the head trash clearance method or whether it’s another method, there’s so many emotional clearance tools that it can be with any, any of those, if you can find one that you can get on with that you can do to yourself, where you can just keep up to you know, keep on top of it. So things don’t get out of control that you’re able to feel emotionally strong, mentally strong.

In the most parts. Of course, you know, even by doing this stuff, you still have days where you get hit by a curveball, and that’s fine, that’s absolutely fine, but you’re much more able to bounce back by having a strong foundation of emotional resilience by having these regular practices in your life. So think about when you might be putting this aside, when you might be doing this in your life. Think about what resources you’re going to need to maintain this. But you know, maybe you need the support group, maybe you’re quite happy doing this on your own. And maybe you need to support somebody to really kick butt to along this journey and really check in with you. I can be that person, by the way I have. This is how I support my clients. We do big clear outs together. We also do more long term clearance work as well. So sometimes you need somebody else to help you with that. And that’s absolutely fine. Okay, so I wanted to share that with you. I hope this has been a useful episode and I look forward to catching you next time here on the Head Trash Show. Bye for now.

Alexia Leachman
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