Dear Dr. Rick,

I had an experience recently that so reminded me of the day in your program that is about detaching from material stuff and just had to tell you about it.

A friend of mine recently sold her house, and I helped her pack up to move. During this process, she went through a lot of emotions which ultimately led her to the most empowering truth. It all started with a simple garage sale …

She enlisted some help to put on a garage sale to prune out a lot of excess furniture and material stuff that clearly wouln’t fit in wherever she would live next, but she hadn’t yet found that place. Well, it got a little complicated, and ultimately the closing got moved up and she had to abandon the “sale” idea altogether.

She still had major furniture left and made a radical decision about it. She gave it away! She found surprisingly that it made her really happy to do it.

It was all that stuck energy about so much stuff that she was feeling crushed by; and once she gave all that furniture away, she felt absolutely elated and free. And she was amazed by those feelings, and that she actually did it. She was overcome with happiness because of the feeling of freedom she was having, and she didn’t give a rip about not getting any money for it—it no longer mattered to her!

She is still, weeks later, absolutely reveling in how wonderful she feels because she feels completely unencumbered by stuff. Her feeling of freedom is the only thing that matters, and gosh, does it ever matter a lot!

— Janice, Holland, Michigan

Excerpt from Extreme Thought Makeover by Rick Schaefer, M.D., 2010

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