With only two weeks to go before the end of spring, there’s still time to do your spring cleaning, that is, if you’re so inclined.
I was raised by a very squeaky-clean type of mother. My sister and I did a lot of the grunt work – basically taking our house apart – scouring, scrubbing, and sluicing it down, until there was a sheen and a shine on everything.
If you know me a little, then you could imagine that this sort of upbringing would make spring cleaning anathema to me. I’ve rebelled against it for years. Until now. Until we moved into this beautiful, new, lustrous house.
So now, I’ve begun. I’ve even found some treasures today as I de-cluttered* and dusted shelves. Things that went missing after we moved in a year ago, and I put down to: “Well, they’ll turn up one day.” I also found a dead green frog, sadly green no more.
It’s very yogic to launder and lave. It’s in keeping with the precept Saucha, one of the Niyama, the one that suggest to you to make things unsullied, unsoiled. It’s true that when we and our stuff and our environment are all clean and wholesome, they feel energised. We feel energised.
If you’re a director of a school, you probably have it written into your December calendar to take a broom to everything, to wash all the equipment, and maybe even put a lick of paint on the walls or at least take the handprints (and footprints!) off.
Even at the Yoga Shed, we’ll have our cleaning ritual at the end of the year. Hopefully, we won’t find any more dead frogs.
*This word is not in my dictionary. Possibly it’s a new-ish replacement for “spring cleaning”, a way to modernise the dreary old chores.

Yoga Shed