Accomplish and appreciate housekeeping with this magick guide. Transform pesky obligations into means of safety, joy and enchantment!
Routine chores no longer have to feel like punishment, and there are formulae for transmuting chore-avoidance into spectacular housekeeping habits.
Preparation
Before you pick up your first tool, have you stopped to read the manual? Think about the times you’ve been instructed on housekeeping. Who taught you? What did you learn? Did it make sense? Did you retain any muscle memories about the chores? Is it rewarding? Has it ever been “your job” to do household cleaning?
Think about your relationship to tidying up.
Spend a few moments at your earliest convenience with an open journal and ink pen. Think about your automatic responses to common chores. Consider any messes you’ve been overlooking. Does it cause stress or relieve stress to clean up after yourself?
Give yourself permission to be honest about your habits, and be ready to start a new process for life.
Magick is a process. Prepare, and stick with it. Clean-up is ongoing since we’re consumptuous creatures. Take responsibility for your household impact, and connect with what it means to be in an enchanted living space.
Conceptualization
Growing successful with a new housekeeping routine requires mapping. You need to know and see what spaces you are responsible for. First, there is your body. You should have a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living space. You may have a garage, office or private lawn. Factor in vehicles, public transportation or public commons.
Housekeeping habits stay with us everywhere. It’s not only our responsibility to clean up at home but also to ensure we’re respecting the work and space of others we visit. Magick housekeeping applies to our thinking, social relationships and creative hobbies. Integrating hygiene as daily magick is good for our psychology since it is concentrated in organization and preservation.
Envision your places of responsibility and know that others are doing the same. We are all accomplishing daily tasks like watering the plants, playing with the kids and pets, prepping meals and taking our vitamins. Refresh your memory frequently with visions of us here on Earth, being in our space and taking care of the homestead.
Bonding
Animism is the philosophy that all things are made of life essence. Your coffee maker isn’t conscious, but it is a functioning machine made of parts. Those parts build a purpose to make your life better. You don’t need the coffee maker to talk back to you in verbage for you to be able to appreciate its magick.
In some spiritual practices, attachment to materials is condemnable. From Spookywood’s secular perspective, materialism is natural and useful. In artistic objectification, fixation on an object is not meant to be exploitative but rather a perspective tunnel to reification. Materialism (not matched with bonding) may be more likely to become exploitative.
We can choose to preserve materials by making healthy attachments to them and bonding with the magick they add to existence.
Elements of Bonding
John Bowlby was a psychologist who defined attachment in terms of spatial proximity and shared function. Psychological attachment involves interaction, goals, representational models and security. Attachment is how to build a relationship. Bonding is how we respond to the relationship (Mark Ettenberger, Łucja Bieleninik, Shulamit Epstein & Cochavit Elefant, 2021).
Mechanisms for Bonding (Gable, S. L., & Bromberg, C., 2018)
Security
Bonding buffers threat.
Ongoing exposure to stress and harmful stimuli increases the body’s cortisol and weakens the immune system. A mop can’t pay your bills, they it can resolve the spilled milk on the floor and prevent it from curdling into a stinky distraction while you’re watching a movie later on.
Housekeeping saves time and cognitive capacity. It requires tools, motivation, formulae and schedules. Housekeeping provides security by optimizing our health and living space!
Love
Retaining companionate love for housekeeping is a way to hack your brain’s reward system and feel good when cleaning. Being overwhelmed by chores isn’t a good reason to stop doing them. Keep an open mind about the ways you can improve your habits.
Washing dishes can be repulsive when there are loads of dishes caked with dried food. Loving your dishes will motivate you to rinse or spray your dishes as soon as you finish eating, while the sauce is still soluble, even if you can’t fully wash it immediately.
In order to love, you must be the source of love. Neurotransmitters work a limbic response that drives enchanting and loving behavior, and that cognitive magick is in you.
Love daily means housekeep daily. It is definitely doable to accomplish a daily list of micro-tasks and integrate housekeeping permanently. You never have to go back to being unorganized. Hack your love responses by pairing daily tasks with your favorite music, incentives, podcasts, workouts, socialization and crafty DIYs.
Gratitude
Being grateful depends on you finding beauty, purpose and narrative. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, discusses gratitude in his podcast, lecturing that it’s not possible to lie to ourselves about liking something. If we hate cleaning, then we hate to clean. It’s your summoning spell to transform your brain into Alice Nelson, and Huberman discusses that designing different narratives about our actions can motivate our neural connections to boost gratitude.
Remember that housekeeping is a spell. If you can afford it, purchase fashionable cleaning supplies and your favorite fragrances of cleaners. Think about how your brain is an elixir of hormones and chemicals that get to play house with solutions. Have a glass of wine and feel gratitude for Mrs. Meyers.
Dr. Huberman speaks about narrations as a path of restructuring neural processing. Imagining yourself as a cottage witch / wizard, watching housekeeping shows and listening to the Comfy Synth archives is a way to have fun cooking, cleaning and caring for the village.
Maintenance
Develop daily housekeeping habits by block-scheduling micro-tasks. You can avoid spending clumps of time mass-cleaning by accomplishing your obligations mosaically.
A daily block schedule is essential to see your time. Start by figuring out how much time it takes for you to accomplish various chores. Then, purchase (or draw) a daily block schedule to chart the activities.
Treat housekeeping as a normal, pleasant part of being. This will buffer pressure to feel like you should be doing something other than cleaning. Housekeeping is good, useful and enjoyable. Housekeeping is abundant in reward and security.
If you have trouble maintaining housekeeping interest, here are some helpful tips!
★ Enchanted Cleaning Supplies
Whatever you can afford to make or purchase, invest in products you genuinely enjoy. Have fun buying or making your favorite scents, brands and DIYs. Put on a cute apron and/or hunky work gloves. Leave reviews, try new technologies — be a housekeeping wizard and have (safe) fun with chemicals and solutions.
★ Multi-Moves
While brushing your teeth, spray and wipe off the mirror. Keep a bottle of cleaner handy under every sink and at the desk. At the gas station, toss out those takeout bags and cups. Put a container of automobile wipes in the dashboard to sanitize your steering wheel and cell phone after pumping gas.
If you have trouble making your bed, invest in decorative sheets that look sophisticated without a blanket. Instead of making the bed, you can make a point to fold the blanket or toss it into a decorative basket beside the bed.
Keep some non-toxic bathroom spray handy and scrub the tub while you’re showering. Catch up on your favorite T.V. show or podcast while you workout or do the dishes. While you’re waiting for the microwave to stop cooking your meal, play a game by racing to accomplish a micro-task before the buzzer bings.
★ Technology
Especially for people with disabilities, technological housekeeping tools are a life-saving convenience and luxury. Washer and dryers, robot vacuums, power washers, UV lights and dump trucks make cleaning easier than ever before, and with scientific investment, this can continue to improve!
★ Cleaning Services
If you’re overwhelmed by unexpected events, cleaning services are a great way to support local services. If you are low on cash, at least put up $20 and some dinner to see if any of your pals would be willing to stop by and help you with a few tasks.
Be transparent about your budget and needs. Don’t tell your helper that you need one room cleaned if it’s really the entire house. Don’t reduce the severity of the clutter out of embarrassment, and compensate fairly by respecting the time, resources and generosity of your helper or servicer.
★ Housekeeping Chart
Get fun and crafty with a housekeeping chart! A foam mat covered with floral fabric makes an easy pin-board for sticky notes, daily block schedules and chore charts. If you invest in a stylish chart, you'll be more likely to notice it and interact with the notes there. It can also bring life to an empty wall space!
★ Notifications
Set your cell alarm for daily tasks and time them (in addition to keeping your block schedule). Hearing celebratory sounds or seeing bright, colorful notification alerts can hardwire your brain into responding to housekeeping activities rewardingly.
★ Donate/ Gift Unused Items
Here in the south, there’s no shame in garage-saling and turning junk into treasure! I you haven’t used something in over two years, consider gifting or selling it. Facebook marketplace makes it easy to make digital sales, ship and deliver goods locally and even start a thrifty side business if you’re a ritual shopper.
★ Disperse tasks
Get out of the habit of procrastinating housekeeping as a one-day hassle event. This is our daily lives. Obviously, our schedules don’t allow us to do loads of laundry all day, so unless you’re working remotely and have a large family, you may need to schedule 4 30-minute loads 4 days out of the week.
Take a break for smokes, snacks and beverages.
If you’ve got bigger tasks that require multiple hands, plan those accordingly over the course of weeks and months. Compensate others for their assistance.
Housekeeping Categories
★ Air / Ventilation
★ Personal Hygiene
★ Public Hygiene
★ Dirt
★ Dust
★ Floor Cleaning
★ Polishing
★ Laundry
★ Gardening / Weeding
★ Home repair
★ Automobile maintenance
★ Plumbing
★ Disinfecting / De-greasing / De-cluttering
The more you envision mundane tasks as magickal pleasures, the easier it is to commit to daily housekeeping. Make your space spectacular with love, gratitude and magick maintenance. Implement ways of enchanting chore time by divvying up daily tasks, utilizing magick tools and observing your motivation and patterns.
REFERENCES
Chapman, Heather M., (2011). Love: A Biological, Psychological and Philosophical Study. Senior Honors Projects. Paper 254. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/srhonorsprog/254https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/srhonorsprog/254
Gable, S. L., & Bromberg, C. (2018). Healthy social bonds: A necessary condition for well-being. In E. Diener, S. Oishi, & L. Tay (Eds.), Handbook of well-being. Salt Lake City, UT: DEF Publishers. DOI:nobascholar.com
Ettenberger, Mark; Bieleninik, Łucja; Epstein, Shulamit & Elefant, Cochavit. (2021). Defining Attachment and Bonding: Overlaps, Differences and Implications for Music Therapy Clinical Practice and Research in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. doi:10.3390/ijerph18041733