Spring Cleaning has nothing on Fall Pruning. It can feel so good to look around (yard, closets, life) and see what has shriveled, overgrown, or made itself unnecessary. This also means taking the shears to a perhaps very full summer schedule that is still hanging on, yet no longer realistic.

Susan, a student with a very smart biology-major daughter, reported back that it’s the tree that lets go of the leaf. Well, to be more accurate, due to the decrease in available light, the tree builds a barrier wall of cells which cuts the leaf off from nutrients. Eventually, the leaf is completely separated from the tree and falls.

Sometimes we have to be discriminate. Are the people and activities in my life nourishing me? Am I sacrificing my health to meet someone else’s (or my own) expectations? As the days shorten and autumn calls us inside, we may have some decisions to make: do I have enough time and energy (light) to devote wholeheartedly to each person or thing? And if not, I may have to create a boundary and let that thing go.

This can be difficult, and humor always help. So, taking from Gabrielle Roth’s fabulous book, Connections:

Release yourself from old attachments and baggage. Cross off the people on your Christmas card list that you don’t even like or speak to. Give away clothes from your skinny days, your fat days, your punk phase or one shopping craze or another. And then there are those tchotchkes. Your beer stein collection, the stolen shot glasses, Aunt Tilly’s figurines. Empty the drawer of business cards with god-knows-whose phone numbers scrawled on the back. Throw out unfinished projects or journals, recipes you’ll never try, back issues of magazines you’ll never read. Set up shop on eBay. Someone out there is dying to pay for your karma. Once you’ve stripped your environment of all those reminders of past selves, you’ll find their hold on you decreases. Your surroundings should reflect who you are now.

Ahhh. I can feel the lightness already.

Your surroundings should reflect who you are now. Right now.

Let’s commit to supporting each other in our pruning this year. If we can help you in your practice in any way, please let us know.