Wind and rain have been whipping through the East Coast this week, cleaning out the crevices in the sidewalks and turning cherry blossom petals into confetti. New York City feels fresh and full of potential.
’Tis the season of the deep clean, a chance to polish the spoons and throw open our closets to see what we have accumulated this year. It’s time to get the Mag flashlight and inspect the recesses of the cabinets and under the stove.
As we clear out our physical space, we can do an internal cleanse, too. For me, that means an emotional and spiritual deep clean where I hold up to the light the resentments that I harbor. I am looking at my beliefs and questioning whether or not they are true, and might I perhaps choose a different story to believe. I am noticing how often my quest for approval motivates me more than my genuine enthusiasm for a project. I’m sitting with the uncomfortable as I question how I am spending my time, what and when I eat, and the words I speak. I know that a few weeks of this will do me good—a spiritual cleanse—and then I, too, will feel fresh and new.
There is a tool called Spring Cleaning that I learned from one of my favorite teachers, Regena Thomashauer. It requires a partner and about twenty minutes. Tomashauer goes by the name “Mama Gena” and she is the founder of the School for Womanly Arts. In previous letters, I’ve written about what it is like to stand among thousands of women in her classroom, learning what it means to be a pleasure researcher. It is in this pleasure-researching spirit that I am sharing Mama Gena’s practice of spring cleaning. There is a script to follow, and the closer you can hue to the script, the better. It goes like this:
Partner One: I’d like to spring clean on…[Easter Bunnies]
You can choose whatever topic is causing some friction in your life. I have spring cleaned on motherhood, loneliness, overwhelm, deadlines, sleep… anything goes.
Partner Two: Please tell me what you have on [Easter Bunnies]
You let it rip. Vent. Speak whatever comes to mind in a stream of consciousness. Talk until you feel complete. This could be one sentence or ten. For example:
Partner One: This Easter Bunny thing is causing me inordinate stress. I don’t know how to explain it to my child. Do I go along with this myth and what does it even mean, this imaginary rabbit? Also, is the rabbit immortal, or are there easter bunny turnovers, where he trains subsequent generations, like in Lois Lowry’s The Giver? I love a good jelly bean, but I’m also scared and overwhelmed by the way we pretend to believe in some magical creature.
Here’s the important part: Your partner does not chime in with agreement or rebuttal. Your partner does not offer advice. Your partner keeps the attention on you and in that space, there is room for self-discovery. Your partner has a simple script of two words: “thank you.”
And then you begin again. Your partner says, “Tell me what you have on (your topic)”
This time you excavate a little deeper, again saying whatever is on your mind until you are complete. (“Maybe I just feel an attachment to the Easter Bunny as a way of retaining aspects of childhood. I miss the freedom and credulity of youth.”) Your partner says, “Thank you.”
The way Mama Gena teachers this tool, each round of this is called a pull. It’s important to set a timer. I usually go somewhere between 3 and 10 minutes. The compression of time gives shape to the conversation and brings heightened awareness. When the time is up, your partner lets you know that you have 3 more pulls, then 2, then announces your final pull. It is in this space, I notice, that there is almost always a turn, an ah-ha moment where I or my partner get a new take on something that has been vexing us.
And then you switch roles.
That’s it. That’s the whole practice. I do this practice almost daily and it has helped me clean my house from the inside out. I have learned what I believe to be true. I have located my desires in times when I felt confused and in that space with an attentive listener, I have talked my way through tears and rage and heartbreak. I almost always leave the session with clarity and a more open heart. Sometimes I spring clean on the same topic for weeks on end. For me, lately, that has been my relationship with money. I have a few different spring cleaning partners in my life and we jump on the phone for a session a few times a week.
Spring cleaning does for the soul what a bucket of soapy water and knee pads does for your house. It is a tool that allows you to clean out the gunk of stuck emotions so you can clearly distinguish between what you believe to be true, and what is really there.
I offer this to you as an experiment. I have taught my kids how to spring clean. Sometimes, on the phone, when a friend is getting in deep on a problem, especially a recurring one, I stop us and suggest a spring clean. It is a way to contain and complaint and turn it into self-discovery. It enables me to get out of the role of offering advice and we are reminded that the answers always lie within.
If you would like to learn more about this tool and meet some other Pleasure Report readers, join us next Friday at noon EST for community practice. Zoom details here.
From the Institute of Pleasure Studies
For more than twenty years, Regena Thomashauer (Mama Gena) has taught women how to reclaim their innate feminine power and life force and learn that pleasure is their birthright. She proposes a radical rethink of the patriarchal system, one in which women are taught to cultivate their desire through sexuality, embodied movement, connection to the feminine and sisterhood. Her work, more than any, has informed my research and I can say without hesitation that her book, Pussy: A Reclamation, changed my life. Don’t be scared of the title. No matter your gender, it’s a book I recommend for all of us.
Even though monk, activist, poet, and writer Thomas Merton eschews pleasure (We were not created for pleasure, he says, but rather spiritual joy.) I find his words below to be prescient to our modern-day conundrum:
“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.” ― Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
Thank you for reading. And come join us next Friday at noon EST to meet for real, in-person (kinda) on Zoom.