When my mind goes dark | I clean

Where My Mind Goes Dark, I Clean

Sometimes my mind goes dark.

Not in a dramatic, life-is-falling-apart kind of way. Just in the ordinary, relentless, everyday-overwhelm-of-being-alive kind of way.

The bills. The family. The work. The house. The endless mental checklist of things that need remembering, organising, fixing, planning and generally keeping on top of. The relationships that need nurturing. The children who need you. The food that needs buying, the dinner that needs making, the emails that need answering, the laundry that somehow reproduces overnight.

And somewhere in amongst all of that, you're supposed to be looking after yourself. Drinking enough water. Getting outside. Eating well. Meditating. Moving your body. Maintaining your spiritual practice. Remembering to be grateful for the life you've created.

Da da da.

It's a lot, isn't it?

I think we underestimate the sheer mental weight of ordinary life. Not because anything is necessarily wrong, or because we're ungrateful, but because there is just so much to hold. And sometimes my mind gets stuck in it. One thought leads to another and suddenly I'm spiralling through everything I haven't done, everything I should be doing, everything I'm worried about and everything that might go wrong.

The longer I sit in that space, the harder it is to get out of it. And the really annoying thing is that the things I'm avoiding don't disappear while I'm busy worrying about them. They just sit there, waiting. Getting bigger. Getting heavier.

So. When my mind goes dark, I clean.

Not because a clean house will solve my problems. Not because I'm chasing some unattainable state of domestic perfection. And certainly not because I've developed an overwhelming passion for it.

I do it because it's something I can actually do.

It's tangible. Straightforward. I can see the results. I put on a few loads of washing , I love hanging it up, the weight of damp cotton, the smell of it clean. I'll hoover. Wash the kitchen floor. One room, maybe two. Enough. Not every corner, not a full spring clean. Just enough to feel like something has shifted. Because something has.

I'll put a mantra on while I'm at it. Triple Mantra, or Ek Ong Kar. Something in Sanskrit, repeated, the words doing the heavy lifting when I don't quite have the words myself. And somewhere along the way, my energy moves. My head clears a little. The thoughts that felt so all-consuming lose some of their grip. I'm no longer trapped in my own head, trying to think my way out of a feeling.

I'm doing something. And sometimes, that's all it takes to find the beginning of my way back.

But shouldn't I just get on my mat?

I teach Kundalini Yoga and meditation. I spend my working life talking about the mind, the body, energy, consciousness and our connection to something greater than ourselves. So perhaps you'd assume that when life gets on top of me, I roll out my mat and sit down.

Sometimes I do. Getting up early and meditating is one of the most powerful things I know for clearing the mind. It's one of the reasons I keep coming back to it.

But sometimes I don't want to get on my mat. Sometimes I don't want to sit with my thoughts, breathe through my resistance or embark on a profound inner journey. Sometimes I just want to do a simple task, see a result and feel like I've achieved something.

Sometimes I just want to clean the kitchen.

And I think it's important to say that. Because working in the spiritual world can create this impression that we should always be turning inward when things get hard. That we should know how to regulate ourselves, find our centre, observe our thoughts. And yes , these practices are extraordinary. But we're still human. We still have days when the washing is piling up, the bills are due and our minds are doing their absolute best to convince us that everything is a problem.

We don't always need to turn every difficult moment into a spiritual practice.

Sometimes the spiritual practice is simply knowing what you need in that moment.

The mind needs cleaning too

Here's the thing though. I do believe our minds need tending to just as much as our homes do.

Think about how much we allow to accumulate in there. Every worry, every unfinished task, every conversation we replay, every imagined future, every little resentment, every story we tell ourselves about who we are and how things are going. We pick thoughts up, turn them over, examine them, carry them around. We revisit the same ones until they begin to feel like facts.

If we never give ourselves a little space from all of that, it's hardly surprising we sometimes feel overwhelmed by our own minds.

This is where meditation is so powerful. Getting up early, before the demands of the day begin, and giving yourself time to sit, breathe, chant and turn inwards , it can change the quality of everything that follows. It's like cleaning the mind. Not by stopping every thought or achieving some perfectly serene state. But by creating a little space between you and the constant stream of noise. By noticing what's happening without having to follow every thought wherever it wants to take you.

For me it goes deeper than feeling calmer. It's a reconnection. A remembering of who I am beneath all the doing, all the worrying, all the roles I play and all the things I believe I need to hold together.

A reconnection to God. And I don't mean that in a religious sense , I mean the experience of remembering that we are more than our thoughts, our to-do lists, our circumstances and the stories we tell ourselves. That there's something deeper beneath all of it. And sometimes, sitting quietly in the early morning with a mantra and a little space to breathe, is enough to remember.

When the pressure is on, start

One of the Seven Sutras of the Aquarian Age says: When the time is on you, start, and the pressure will be off.

I love this. But I've come to understand that sometimes we can't start the thing we're actually supposed to start. It's too big. Too loaded. Too tangled up with everything else going on in our heads.

So start somewhere else.

Start with something small, simple and achievable. Something that doesn't require you to summon every ounce of motivation you have. For me, that's often cleaning. For you it might be a walk, the garden, cooking, putting on music, doing something with your hands.

And if you want to bring a little mantra into it, even better. You don't need to be sitting cross-legged on a mat. Put one on while you're doing the dishes. Let the sound fill the space. Give your mind something else to rest on while your body gets on with what it's doing. You don't need to understand every layer of meaning , you can simply listen, breathe and let the repetition become an anchor.

One I particularly love when life feels heavy is Aap Sahaee Hoa , traditionally associated with protection, support and navigating challenges. A reminder that we don't have to carry everything through our own effort alone. That we're held by something greater than ourselves.

You don't have to solve everything today

Perhaps finding our way back doesn't always happen in one great moment of clarity. Perhaps it happens in smaller moments. In washing the dishes. In changing the bedsheets. In walking outside and feeling the air on your face. In putting on a song that reminds you who you are beneath all the noise.

Or in getting up early, before the world starts demanding things of you, and giving yourself ten minutes to sit quietly. With your breath. Your mantra. Yourself.

We don't always need to think our way out of overwhelm. Sometimes we need to move through it. Sometimes we need to sit still long enough to realise we've been lost in our thoughts in the first place. And sometimes, honestly, we need both.

The bills still need paying. The children still need feeding. The difficult conversations still need having. And sometimes we need to ask for help, or simply acknowledge that we're struggling. I'm not suggesting we can clean our way out of every hard feeling.

But I do believe there's something in recognising when we're caught in a spiral and finding a way to interrupt it.

For me, that often starts with a cloth, a bucket and a good mantra. It's not glamorous. It's not profound in the way we might expect a spiritual practice to be.

But it's real. And it works.

And sometimes, when your mind has taken you somewhere you'd rather not be, the kindest thing you can do is stop trying to solve your whole life in your head.

Get up. Put something on. Start small. Move a little energy.

You don't have to know exactly how you're going to find your way back.

You just have to find the first thing you can do.

And begin.