SpaceClear Reflections

Let There Be Light

Posted on03. Sep, 2010 by Stephanie Bennett Vogt.

Guess which window was the first to get cleaned today after an embarrassingly long period of time (read: years)…?
Imagine how much more of the world might be available to us with a little bit of loving up (and elbow grease). I’m thinking I should change my tagline to: “Clearing a path to your true nature–one window [...]

Continue Reading

Praise for Your Spacious Self

Posted on06. Aug, 2010 by Stephanie Bennett Vogt.

I love pleasant surprises.  I got a really nice one the other day in the form of an unsolicited review for my book.
This one is by someone named Austin S. on Goodreads. I don’t know who Austin is, but I’m grateful for the time he took to write about my book, and what it has [...]

Continue Reading

Airing Out The Heirlooms

Posted on20. Jul, 2010 by Stephanie Bennett Vogt.

Just read a terrific New York Times article about the effect heirlooms have on on our lives entitled “How to Lose a Legacy” by Ellen Lupton. Humorous, colorful, timely – this article does a good job of naming the behaviors and beliefs that keep us holding on to dusty relics of our past.
Some of my favorite lines:

An [...]

Continue Reading

One-Minute Clearing Practice

Posted on16. Jul, 2010 by Stephanie Bennett Vogt.

Try this experiment: Watch the 3-minute video below and see if adopting a simple daily practice in home tending doesn’t help bring new energy into your home and  life.
Even better: Set an intention before you begin your one-minute practice and repeat the exercise every day for a week. See if it doesn’t lead to creating new openings in [...]

Continue Reading

Clearing the Residue of Previous Occupants

Posted on06. Jul, 2010 by Stephanie Bennett Vogt.

How many times have you gone into a big warehouse store feeling just fine and come out totally depleted? Or, maybe you’re standing in the checkout line of your supermarket and suddenly feel a wave of emotion, like depression, worry about money, anxiety—something you weren’t feeling before? Perhaps you walk into a room and feel [...]

Continue Reading

Setting Free the Stuff: Sara’s Transformation

Posted on02. Jul, 2010 by Stephanie Bennett Vogt.

I was inspired by this post, so I asked the author if I could share it with you all. Here’s Sara’s story of making friends with clutter and clearing:
Space Clearing, The Last Frontier
by Sara Beatty
No, I’m not talking about vacuuming up space litter (although that’s a terrific idea.) For me, this path started in [...]

Continue Reading

Secret to Clearing Anything

Posted on18. Jun, 2010 by Stephanie Bennett Vogt.

“We can only clear to the degree that we are willing to feel our feelings.” –sbv
If you took a workshop with me, you ‘d learn that to clear anything – from a messy desktop to the disturbing influences of an ecological disaster – you would have to enter a sometimes scary zone called feeling.
This [...]

Continue Reading

Coming Clear: Confessions of a Packrat

Posted on11. May, 2010 by Stephanie Bennett Vogt.

“I want to shed my waste with quiet reverence like the pine…
Keep me mindful of what I take into my home, the items brought to substitute
for real living…Help me slowly to surrender all excess.”
–Gunilla Norris, Being Home
I’m a packrat.
There, I said it.
Yes, squirreled away in the dark recesses of my house I still have boxes [...]

Continue Reading

Clearing a Space after a Person Dies

Posted on04. May, 2010 by Stephanie Bennett Vogt.

I was invited to clear an apartment recently belonging to woman who had suffered and died of ovarian cancer. The two women handling her estate called me in because they felt that the space did not feel good to them and they hoped to be able to sell it quickly and easily. One of them [...]

Continue Reading

Gathering Your Clearing Mojo

Posted on23. Apr, 2010 by Stephanie Bennett Vogt.

What needs gathering in your home or life that you can do in one minute or less?
My spring newsletter might inspire you.  The theme this quarter is about “gathering” – as in loose ends, all those papers cluttering up your desk, the clothes that you no longer need or love…
Gathering steam… gathering your self.
Click [...]

Continue Reading

Extreme Clearing vs. The Slow-Drip Effect

Posted on02. Apr, 2010 by Stephanie Bennett Vogt.

“Change happens slowly, then all at once.” – Unknown
Thanks to Mother Nature and major flooding in our area, we got a head start clearing the junk in our basement this year. Not easy. Not pretty. Not ideal. This form of “extreme clearing” is not worth waiting (or hoping) for. It’s too consuming and jangly.
I favor the [...]

Continue Reading

The Grace in Gathering

Posted on30. Mar, 2010 by Stephanie Bennett Vogt.

“I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.” – Anne Lamott
It’s springtime: A return to my rituals of gathering.
Gathering clothes I no longer love (or can wear) to take to the Goodwill. Gathering and tossing the growing [...]

Continue Reading

Clearing the Past Clears the Present

Posted on26. Mar, 2010 by Stephanie Bennett Vogt.

What would happen if you sat in a circle with a few people and together you took a minute to tune into a person or a thing with what I call “spacious detachment”? You could be tuning into antique bowl from the 18th century that “doesn’t feel quite right,” or a stoic-looking person in a [...]

Continue Reading

Moving Things Releases Stuck Energy

Posted on23. Feb, 2010 by Stephanie Bennett Vogt.

As my daughter prepared to leave home for college for the first time last fall, I wrote a post a called “Packing: How Much Stuff is Too Much.”

I thought my “bottom line” was worth sharing again for no other reason than that we live in a culture that possesses many things, and the transfer of [...]

Continue Reading

Reducing Stress & Clutter: A No-Brainer?

Posted on19. Feb, 2010 by Stephanie Bennett Vogt.

At the risk of sounding a bit like one of those late night infomercials, I have to say there’s more!
This is a follow-up to a post I wrote  a month back entitled “No Home No Have.”  If it didn’t inspire you to start picking up after yourself, you might consider the positive effect that repetitive actions have [...]

Continue Reading

A Clean House

Posted on09. Feb, 2010 by Stephanie Bennett Vogt.

How important is it to have a clean house? How do you juggle a demanding job and a family and still have the time for basic chores like cleaning? My sister Martha, a hospice nurse and mom to a possé of adorable dogs and cats weighs in:
I used to clean my house as a way [...]

Continue Reading

No Home, No Have

Posted on15. Jan, 2010 by Stephanie Bennett Vogt.

“How we hold the simplest of our tasks
speaks loudly about how we hold life itself.
– Gunilla Norris, Being Home
“I once saw a staggering statistic in Newsweek: ‘It takes the average American fifty-five minutes every day-roughly twelve weeks a year-looking for things they know they own but can’t find’ (Newsweek, June 7, 2004). Though I’ve thought that [...]

Continue Reading