I'm Natalie Lou and you're listening to the baggage reclaim sessions.

Hello, how are you doing?

Welcome to February. You know, it's funny, when we got back from San Francisco on New Year's day last month,

the first thing I watched when I was just wanted to sort of wind down and to try to stay awake was the new Netflix series tidying up with Marie Condo. For anyone who's not familiar with

her she's a very petite Japanese woman she's very cute and cool and she is well known now all over the world

for her sort of organizational philosophy. And after running a successful business

for a number of years helping Japanese people

to organize their homes, she wrote a very popular book

called The Life Changing Magic of Tidying. And her philosophy at the

core of it is about how everything needs to serve a purpose that we have in our home and you know it needs to spark joy

Which is something that divides a lot of opinion anyway

That's I don't actually want to talk about clearing our homes today. But watching it and

watching people struggle to let go of items in their home, the way that I see people

struggle to let go of even the most toxic relationships or they struggle to step

away from painful situations or even painful habits that they know aren't serving them.

It really got me thinking about emotional baggage and what we carry around with us.

At the heart of everything that I do here on a podcast on a blog

and in my books and so forth, it is about helping people to overcome the

emotional baggage that gets in the way of them enjoying mutually fulfilling relationships. It's about overcome the emotional

baggage that really gets in the way of us being able to be, do and have the things, you know, the relationships and the opportunities that reflect our best

selves. Every single one of us, incidentally, has emotional baggage. Like no one is exempt so no one is

weird for having emotional baggage but I do feel that as a society we're not aware

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