Spring is the best time of year to mobilize change and foster new growth in your life. This is true in terms of your health goals as well as your overall life situation. Springtime offers a fresh opportunity to set new goals, make long term plans and define the steps necessary to successfully accomplish your greatest potential. It’s also time to do some “spring cleaning” –a great time to get rid of all the accumulated baggage that is weighing you down!

A useful spring exercise is to take stock of everything you own, identify what you haven’t used in the past year and won’t likely use in the future and then get rid of it! Sell it, take it to the dump or find someone who needs it more than you. For most people this amounts to about 25% of their possessions. With less stuff from the past weighing you down, you’ll feel lighter, freer and you will have more energy and enthusiasm to make positive changes in your life. In our clinical experience this simple exercise creates profoundly positive physical, emotional, and mental benefits for those who follow through with it.

At the same time – and this is the harder task – take the same cleansing approach with your ideas, values and habits. In other words, what mental baggage have you accumulated over your life’s time that must change if you want to create something new and positive in your life? Some questions to ask yourself in spring that can help you decide what to keep and what to toss:

1. Do I have a positive vision for my life
2. Do I have a positive vision for having vital thriving health?
3. Do I have a plan and do I know the steps to carry out this plan?
4. Are my actions, thoughts, decisions and speech aligned with my vision?

Very often we see patients who have clear health goals and positive plans for the future, but their daily actions do not support their vision. Here are a few likely scenarios: Someone who is determined to start an exercise program but won’t wake up early enough to get to the gym because they spend nights surfing the internet are watching television until 1AM. Or a person who wants to get themselves out of debt but continues to shop impulsively on credit cards. Another example would be a person who wants to eat healthier but won’t make time in their day to cook or shop for food-thereby perpetuating fast food consumption.

Having plans which never get realized or squandering your resources for the sake of something that is not in line with your vision of the future is a good way to get exhausted, frustrated, irritable depressed and angry. Ultimately, this lack of conviction carries a very high price: Chronic illness.

So, it’s very important to ask yourself where this discrepancy shows up in your life. In our experience, actions which bring a person’s vision closer to reality may cause some turbulence at first but will very quickly create the energy, enthusiasm and the results needed to motivate forward momentum and absolute conviction.

And what if you are already dealing with so-called “negative emotions”? Unfortunately, we often see patients who think there is something wrong with them because they are stuck in a particularly unpleasant emotional state. This leads to self-medication – either by alcohol, drugs, sugar, or other addictions – or prescribed medication which can take away the feeling but doesn’t necessarily address the underlying problem.

Other people try to escape from their emotions by blaming them on friends, family, co-workers, or even strangers. This is another avenue towards not only anger and frustration, but disempowerment as well. As soon as you think someone else in your life has control over your destiny, then there really isn’t anything you can do to change your situation. This is the person who is happy to complain about what’s wrong with their life, but won’t take steps to improve it.

Of course there are some problems in life over which you have no control. In these instances, the best course of action is simply to realize the futility of putting your energy into a situation which cannot possibly change. Facing into the reality of the situation directly is always the first step to moving beyond it.

We look at “emotions” as impersonal, much like the weather. We all experience emotions-but they are not inherently causes of illness. In fact, its our relationship to them that determines health or illness. In other words, its the conclusions we make about what we experience that matters more than the experience itself. If we become overly fixated on emotions as if they define us or mean something deeply about us, we are more likely to get stuck. Allowing emotions to move through without attachment can be a liberating experience!

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