Everyday Spiritual Masters: Four Things I Learn From Marie Kondo
Everyone I know is talking about Marie Kondo.
Four years ago she burst into the American book market, writing about how to tidy up and organize living spaces. Recently, Netflix began streaming her show, Tidying Up, where she makes several visits to peoples’ homes over the course of a few weeks — helping them make decisions about what to throw out, give away, recycle, or keep. She calls her methed the Konmari way.
As a spiritual leader, I wonder if her popularity means she’s hitting on some deeper human need that’s not being met in our culture.
Every major faith tradition contains spiritual disciplines meant to shape its adherents and help them have happier, more meaningful lives — and many of those disciplines overlap between religions.
For example, every faith major tradition contains the discipline of giving away money. If you want to shape yourself into a generous person who is detached from the pull of the neverending “stuff” we can accumlate in our culture, make a practice of giving away a percentage of your income. In my tradition, 10% is a baseline with some people giving away more than that.
While 70% of Americans identify as Christian and 6% of Americans ideintify with another major faith, many of us don’t attend religious services regularly or practice these kinds of longstanding disciplines that have been handed down for millennia. So the spiritual practices that have withstood the test of time for helping humans live more meaningful lives remain on the shelf, unlearned and unpracticed.
I think this has left many of us feeling overwhelmed by the consumer culture in which we live — a culture that values buying (and buying and buying), shored up by a an astronomical marketing and advertising behemoth stalking us everywhere we go. What tactics can we use to help us untangle from our desire for more?
Even as a pastor who practices disciplines such as contemplation and giving away money, I feel the need for more tools to help me live a happier life because our cultural tide is so strong — the minimalists among us are hard-pressed to keep clutter-free homes.
Enter Marie Kondo.
Marie Kondo has become one of my spiritual teachers. She’s a Japanese woman inspired by Zen Buddhism who has insights I need and that make my life better.
Here are four spiritual practices I learn from her in an ongoing way:
1. Decluttering of the Mind
Somewhere between the Great Depression and today, many Americans have gone from scarcity to overwheming abundance. My grandma — who is 95 years old — grew up in the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma during the Depression, and she talks about how she received one pair of overalls each year at Christmas (along with an orange) to last her for the season. Every scrap of cloth on the farm, every metal or plastic object, could be used and used again — repurposed and valued.
But today most Americans have more stuff in our homes than we need: clothing, shoes, spices, books, movies, kitchen utensils, miscellaneous paper, toys, holiday decorations, tools, and so on. And what was once a virtue — not throwing something away that could be used again because it needed to be — becomes a vice; we hoard objects someone else could use, needing ever-increasing space and larger homes to hold our things and allowing clutter to cause us stress.
Marie Kondo helps me embrace the idea that some items have served their purpose in my life, and I can feel gratitude for those objects and pass them along to someone else who can use them. I don’t need to accumulate an endless supply of things, especially in a world where, comparatively, I have far more than I need while others truly do experience scarcity.
“Cleaning the temple is part of Buddhist training, but tidying the temple is not. With cleaning, we can let our minds empty while our hands keep moving, but tidying requires us to think — about what to discard, what to keep, and where to put it. You could say that tidying orders the mind while cleaning purifies it.”
(Marie Kondo, Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up)
Kondo talks about how tidying orders the mind, and I’d argue that’s a spiritual practice — an internal ordering based on priorities, health, and ethical considerations. It frees up space to think about things that are truly important to us.
Feeling grateful for the usefulness of items and then detaching from an emotional or psychological need for them to remain in my home is a nourishing way to relate to objects. When we’re overscheduled and facing mounds of “stuff” in our homes, it’s truly transformative to declutter both the living space and the mind space that accompanies large messes. And, if you’re not in the regular practice of giving money and/or things away, giving away extra items you don’t need anymore is a good place to start on your journey toward a healthier relationship to stuff.
2. Visualization
Marie Kondo writes that, “Folding a garment often reminds me of the priests who carve Buddhist statues. They gaze intently at a piece of wood until they see the shape of the figure within it and carve the wood until it emerges.”
I did this with my spice cabinet last week. While my house generally is tidy-ish, behind cabinet and closet doors there are secret stashes — my spice cabinet harboring duplicate bottles and bags of unknowns and spices I’ve carried with me from house to house for years. But when I opened it last week, I pictured what I *hoped* it could look like, and then set about consolidating, throwing things out, and placing various herbs and seasonings into labeled bottles. It looks amazing. It looks like I don’t live here.
My spiritual tradition invites me to look at the world as though positive possibilities are endless (even if they’re not!). By employing this kind of visualization at a small level and then enacting the changes I see in my mind, I learn that things that seem unlikely can in fact be achieved. I’m practicing a discipline that helps me translate my optimism and sense of empowerment to the larger messes of society and of organizations. It trains my imaginination to think of things hopefully and optimistically.
3. Ritual
Rituals help humans connect and bond. We have cultural rituals (weddings, bar/bat mitzvahs, State of the Union address), and personal rituals (Saturday brunch with friends, exercise routines, kissing our partners hello when we get home from a long day at work). But with the widespread breakdown of social connection of the past few decades, many people experience less ritual connection in their lives than our predecessors.
Marie Kondo wholeheartedly embraces ritualistic connection. In every home she visits, she kneels and introduces herself to the home — treating it as a living, breathing object. Often she invites the homeowners to join her. She then tells the home her intentions for it, and feels thankful for its existance. In part, this relates to her practice of visualization and mindfulness. But it also taps into a deeper human desire to use ritual (and ritualistic prayer) to establish connection. Not only does she allow herself to feel connected to the whole, but also invites that same connection of intentionality with the people with whom she works.
Each aspect of tidying up is scripted to help the person following the KonMari method learn to do it better. That, also, is ritual. The most powerful rituals help us get to a place we hope to be. For example, my faith tradition takes communion every week at church — this is to remind us that everyone, no matter who we are, is welcome at the table of God without shame or exclusion. We may not all practice that value perfectly in our everyday lives, but the hope is that, if you perform a ritual that reinforces that value every week of your life, then it will help shape you into a more inclusive and loving human. (Not surprisingly, churches that practice this ritual while excluding some from the partaking of the bread and wine shape adherents known for intolerance and exclusion.)
Marie Kondo helps people become less and less attached to things by allowing people to start by detaching from the items to which they’re less attached already (clothing, esp. clothing that doesn’t fit!), and moving onto objects that have a greater hold on our psyches (sentimental objects, she calls them — pictures and the like). She instructs people to thank the items that no longer serve a purpose, and to feel happy about the things that do. These are spiritual rituals meant to shape people to be 1) more grateful (which correlates with happiness), and 2) more present to what they do have.
4. Joy
Marie Kondo present as a joyful human. I don’t know if she is, but watching her is a delight.
Learning to discover joy in the everyday is a #lifegoal. When we’re present to what we have and who we’re with, and we surround ourselves with meaning, our lives will be better. And when we spend less money on stuff that we don’t need, it frees us up to spend money on things that bring us even more connection and, thus, JOY.
A current trend is to stop buying Christmas gifts and instead buy our loved ones experiences. Why? We don’t need more stuff. But we could use more joy.
In Sum …
Decluttering space and our minds, learning to hope in visualizing optimistic possibilities, ritually connecting with our things and with people around us, and surrounding ourselves with things, people, and events that spark our joy can profoundly change the quality of our lives. Even when times are tough, these practices help us embrace the best in life and help us become healthier humans.
