“Today, let us swim wildly, joyously in gratitude.” – Rumi

“Traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.” –Buckminster Fuller

Happy Monday, y’all!! It’s spring and the birds are serenading, the flowers are popping up everywhere and I can actually open my windows for the first time in weeks.

And while this doesn’t usually occur to me, some people think of spring cleaning this time of year. You know, that ritual where you throw out all those clothes that haven’t been in style since Chandler Bing married Monica.

Well, the spring cleaning I’m devoted to is tossing out all the useless ideas I picked up when I was a kid, all those “You cant’s. It’s hard. Why bother?”

Before the age of 5, pretty much everything we hear and experience is sucked up like a vacuum cleaner. And, sadly, that’s the programming that still runs so much of our lives.

Despite our affirmations, our intentions to grow and thrive, we’ve got this five-year-old consciousness running the show. Before you’re five or six, your brain operates in mostly theta wave mode which is perfect for picking up language, family nuances and other stuff you need to know. Unfortunately, it also picks up messages that don’t exactly serve you.

For example, the minute you got sick, ran a fever above 99-degrees, your well-meaning parents trotted you off to the doctor. The message you got from that is “you need something outside yourself to heal.”

Had they instead insisted in the Truth—that your body knows good and well how to heal itself—you’d have that programming running your life.

Anytime, we’re not in the present moment (with me, most of the time), the subconscious programming, that darned five-year-old, the default mode runs the show.

So, yeah, I should probably lose the red turtleneck, the Ugg boots and several other items that would make better Halloween costumes, but the cleaning I am most interested in is getting rid of all those no-longer-useful ideas that I unwittingly drag around like a ball and chain.

In this moment, in this glorious now moment, I am joyful, abundant and as perfect as those flowers boisterously showing off in my front yard.

Pam Grout is the author of E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality.