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Some of that stuff I hadn’t used, or even seen, in years.

When I moved to Wyoming some years back, I decided to simplify and "de-clutter" my life. All was well for a while.

But my laptop’s death prompted me to look around my house. It dawned on me, despite my "de-cluttering" upon moving to Wyoming, I had managed to "re-clutter" my life again. I’m well organized and neat, and much of my clutter was well hidden.

So I made myself a promise. When I find anything I haven’t seen, or missed, for a year or more, I don’t need it -- and I’ll throw it out.

All that probably sounds familiar to many of you. But how about the other aspects of our lives? Relationships, finances, spirituality, etc. etc. Are they cluttered too?

Here’s Chief Joseph.

It’s so easy to let your lives get cluttered, isn’t it? While we see nothing "wrong" with that, it often distracts you, and draws you away from, if you will, life’s finer aspects.

Let’s talk about spirituality since that’s what this newsletter is supposed to be about. (Joseph said this humorously.)

We see many of you on a seemingly endless quest for a deeper sense of spirituality. A quest for understanding who you are and why you’re here.

That’s a very good thing!

But what sometimes happens is you get so caught up in the quest, you’re going in ten or twenty different directions at once. Or trying to.

You wander from one book to another, one teacher to another, one seminar to another, and so on. Until eventually your lives become confused and cluttered by trying to do too much at once.

There is nothing wrong with reading lots of books, following lots of teachers, attending lots of seminars. But what we often see is many of you losing sight of your real purpose in this lifetime.

Your real purpose is to simply live your lives with joy.

In your constant searching for the answer among all the clutter, you forget you are the answer. All you seek is within you. There is nothing to seek outside yourselves, nothing to find.

If you approach all the books, teachers, and seminars with the clear, simple intent of using them to explore the wonders within you, great!

But if you use them hoping to find the answer there, you’ll just continue on an endless, empty search to nowhere.

You’ll reach a point of frustration and perhaps even desperation. All that clutter will be confusing, and you’ll get lost in it.

But if your intent and vision is to find all you seek within yourselves, then all is well. All the "clutter" -- books, teachers, seminars -- then become tools to help you find the meaning of it all.

You are the answer. You are all you seek.

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