My friend and I were talking about “cleansing”. The juice cleansing, cleansing minds, cleaning up thought forms, cleansing your space…“Jeezus. When am I cleansed enough already?” he lamented. “Tell me about.” I sighed, sipping on my hot water…with lemon…because…cleansing.

Here’s what I figure:

80% of life is for creating, moving your dreams forward — LIVING. 20% of life is for cleansing and purifying.

We’re either making something, or letting something go. We’ve got to let stuff go in order to make more stuff. I could go on…in fact, I will:

A basic analogy: You spend most of your day clothed, put together, and consuming. You spend a relatively small amount of your day on hygiene, optimizing health, preening, and releasing — without doing so, you and your life would be very unpleasant. Like Pareto’s principle figured, it’s the 20% of purifying our lives that makes all the difference to our 80% of living.

Except we resist a lot of the necessary clean up because it requires restraint and focus. Supplements, hassle. “Clear-the-air conversations” with people, so uncomfortable. Knocking gluten out of your diet — but fresh bread, mmmm. The purification of our mind is where we hit serious resistance. Exfoliating negative thinking, detoxing our spirit of doubt, grief, fear — this is the root of the work to be done, and it can be the hardest to get to. But it’s so simple: Just like you bathe your body, you have to bathe your spirit. We declutter our spaces. We freshen up our bodies. We need to be still and flush out the debris (usually illusions) from our psyches.

Cleaning our minds, bodies, and spaces is essential — as in, a profoundly critical must must must. It fuels every kind of vitality and fulfillment. It’s the difference between held back and fully free, congested and clear, shuffling along and flying.

So fall in love with the necessity of regular purification.

• Have the conversation so you no longer have to carry the burden. Lighter.
• Kick the fake food so your body can re-set to optimal. Lighter.
• Bathe your body with complete sensual respect — because it’s YOUR BODY. Lighter.
• Sit your beautiful self down and be still so that you can feel life pulsing through you. Stay there just a minute longer because that’s the place where the heavy thoughts give way to the healing truth. Let light pour through you — it’s the most powerful tool in the universe — cleansing, revealing, life-giving. Lighter.

Proactive and preventative purification — you know that’s where it’s at. Because we want to steer clear of things like backed up GI tracts, or long term depression or anxiety, or your friends sending the Hoarders TV crew to your place. Clean it up and and keep it clean before your system backs up with any number of things — self doubt, memories of sh*tty resentments on replay, or too much cholesterol. Get in front of yourself.

Deep living is dirty, sweaty, gorgeous work. We will accumulate things. But your Soul wants to be mobile, unencumbered — in touch with all the parts of your life.

Purify as you go so your Soul has room to grow. @DanielleLaPorte (Click to Tweet!)

Only ever Love,

Danielle LaPorte is the creator of The Desire Map: A Guide To Creating Goals With Soul — the book that turned into a day planner system, a top iTunes app, and an international workshop program. A Desire Map workshop happens every weekend somewhere in the world. Author of The Fire Starter Sessions and the wildly popular #Truthbomb series, Danielle is also the co-creator of Your Big Beautiful Book Plan and co-host of the Beautiful Writer’s Group podcast.

Entrepreneur Magazine calls her “equal parts poet and entrepreneurial badass…edgy, contrarian…loving and inspired.” A speaker, poet, former business strategist and Washington-DC think tank exec, she writes weekly at DanielleLaPorte.com, where over four million visitors have gone for her straight-up advice — a site that’s been deemed “the best place online for kick-ass spirituality,” and was named one of the “Top 100 Websites for Women” by Forbes. The Huffington Post named her Twitter feed as one of the “12 of Wisest Twitter Accounts Worth Following.” You can find her @daniellelaporte just about everywhere.