Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery

Kindle
$0.00
or $9.99 to buy

Paperback
$12.52

$12.52 with 37 percent savings

List Price: $19.99

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

FREE delivery Friday, May 17 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35. Order within 19 hrs 13 mins

Select delivery location

In Stock

$$12.52 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Ships from

Amazon.com

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Returns

30-day easy returns

Returns

30-day easy returns

This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.

Read full return policy

Payment

Secure transaction

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Details

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

$8.00

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

FREE delivery Friday, May 17 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35. Order within 19 hrs 13 mins

Select delivery location

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

$$12.52 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Enhancements you chose aren't available for this seller. Details

${cardName} not available for the seller you chose

${cardName} unavailable for quantities greater than ${maxQuantity}.

Sold by Martistore and Fulfilled by Amazon.

Other sellers on Amazon

New & Used (44) from $1.51 + $3.98 shipping

Follow the author

Lauren Rosenfeld

+ Follow

More books from this author

Breathing Room: Open Your Heart by Decluttering Your Home Paperback – April 1, 2014

by Melva Green (Author)

4.5 202 ratings

See all formats and editions

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$12.52","priceAmount":12.52,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"12","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"52","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"iONItUqev5Of6Lj3mxN%2BUL3S5rdYCI5qFx1%2BIq%2BeqD3Uyl2Ictkt0FvBZzEQ%2F3mh9Re1d65gQluW9WaLYoZG1ncQHqcwK4KWE9MwIczjznqFiDDQWBkHtl5KMq4P%2FK%2FV4YXjOcfGff7SxicK05iJpw%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$8.00","priceAmount":8.00,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"8","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"00","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"iONItUqev5Of6Lj3mxN%2BUL3S5rdYCI5qhaYFSoitjiRLgK3vh1WTPvSgs3GnDeEdqK%2F7KdZLY%2F5p%2Fl6%2FYfAIIV21AxRibhr%2BWd4yjHdDW7nnLKbythpbK2pLLr4HExaehIPMHWCkM4mY7cEkPEgq3OrU3dJaDzZIfUeno5lsSZFLzqiLBXLU5qrUhymLYwys","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

Cleaning out your cupboards isn’t just about a tidier kitchen. Find peace, repair your past, and live a more fulfilled life with this uplifting guide to the spiritual practice of decluttering.

Bless your clutter. Yes, you heard right: Bless it. Bless everything in your life that is superfluous, broken, burdensome, and overwhelming—because it is all here to teach you an important lesson, perhaps the most important lesson there is: what really matters.

Everyone’s lives could use some serious decluttering. But decluttering isn’t just about sorting junk into piles and tossing things in the trash. Decluttering can inform us of our burdens, help us to understand our attachments, and aid us in identifying what is truly valuable in our lives.

Written by a medical doctor and a spiritual intuitive, with case studies of people just like you, Breathing Room takes you on an enlightening room-by-room tour where each room in your home corresponds to a “room” in your heart, and where decluttering will not just make space but improve the spirit.

So, if it’s weighing you down, if it’s become an obstacle, if it’s making it near impossible for you to find the things you really love—it’s time for you to let it go and find a little breathing room.

Frequently bought together

Breathing Room: Open Your Heart by Decluttering Your Home

$12.52

Get it as soon as Friday, May 17

In Stock

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

+

SoulSpace: Transform Your Home, Transform Your Life -- Creating a Home That Is Free of Clutter, Full of Beauty, and Inspired

$13.77

Get it as soon as Friday, May 17

In Stock

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

Total price:

To see our price, add these items to your cart.

Try again!

Details

Added to Cart

Choose items to buy together.

Xorin Balbes
141
Paperback
1 offer from $13.77
Dana K. White
5,323
Paperback
in Hoarding Addiction & Recovery
107 offers from $5.28
Matt Paxton
904
Paperback
71 offers from $8.99
Karen Kingston
497
Hardcover
30 offers from $7.00
Marsha Hayles
163
Paperback
72 offers from $1.35
Tracy McCubbin
575
Hardcover
62 offers from $2.32

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Breathing Room is a fascinating blend of the spiritual, practical and personal stories about how we can all declutter our lives. The book provides a clear guide to accomplish the inner work you need to do not only to declutter your physical world, but also to accomplish this in mind and spirit." -- Matt Chan ― creator and executive producer of A&E's series Hoarders

"With clarity, compassion, and humor, Lauren Rosenfeld and Dr. Melva Green help us see the deep connection between living space and heart space—guiding us toward freedom and ease within both. With both spiritual lessons and easy to do exercises, this book is a perfect blend of theory and practice. Readers of Breathing Room will soon find themselves rejoicing in the wide open spaces of both home and heart." -- Joan Borysenko, PhD ― author of Minding the Body, Mending the Mind, and Inner Peace for Busy People

"[Breathing Room] has helped me deeply understand that clearing space is not just about the 'stuff' in my house, but, more importantly, the 'stuff' in my heart." -- Patti Digh ― author of Life is a Verb

"This book is genius. If you shut down when faced with your clutter, if clutter is stopping you from living the beautiful life that is your birthright, read this book! It has what you need to change your relationship to clutter forever! -- Jennifer Louden ― author of The Woman's Comfort Book and The Life Organizer

"Breathing Room puts the Om into your home and the grease into your elbows! This is where the spirituality of clutter meets practicality with a big dose of compassion. Well done!" -- Tisha Morris ― author of Mind Body Home

"Who knew that clearing your physical space of unnecessary clutter could be a path of self-reflection and deep learning? Well Lauren Rosenfeld & Dr. Melva Green—that's who! In Breathing Room these two wise women guide us in how to learn from the spaces where we live and create rooms that reflect a nourished and nourishing heart. With compassion and humor they help us find a way to let the beauty we are shine through the inevitable messiness of being human." -- Oriah Mountain Dreamer ― author of The Invitation

"A compassionate guide to clearing out your clutter, and inviting space, light, and peace into your home and heart." -- Francine Jay ― author of The Joy of Less and A Minimalist Living Guide

"Melva Green in soft, super creative and direct. If anyone can provide the necessary 'breathing room' in our space or in our life it's her! This book is just fantastic!" -- Dorothy The Organizer, creator of Curb the Chaos System and expert on Hoarders

About the Author

Dr. Melva Green is a board-certified psychiatrist, TV personality, and spiritual healer. She is an expert doctor on the popular and critically acclaimed A&E show Hoarders. Dr. Green travels nationally and internationally assisting spiritually awakening souls who have committed to detoxing and decluttering—mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—so that they might live their best lives and awaken into their full potential. She lives in northern California with her son.

Lauren Rosenfeld, M.A., M.Ed., believes that the mundane details of our life are the stepping stones on our intimate path of the spirit. She is a professional Soul Declutterer who helps her clients let go of physical and emotional clutter that are preventing them their Breathing Room. She coauthored Your To Be List and blogs at LGRosenfeld.com, where she shares lessons on how our daily lives shine with spiritual lessons. She is an unapologetic hippie-peacenick-pluralist-dreamer who resides in Asheville, North Carolina, with her husband and four children.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Beyond Words (April 1, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1582704570
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1582704579
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.7 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.72 x 8.38 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #135,769 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #22 in Hoarding Addiction & Recovery
- #228 in Home Cleaning, Caretaking & Relocating
- #3,312 in Personal Transformation Self-Help

Customer Reviews:
4.5 202 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Lauren Rosenfeld

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Lauren Rosenfeld, M.A., M.Ed, is a Soul Declutterer and a Spiritual Treasure Hunter: Since childhood, she has been a spiritual intuitive who is able to see spiritual lessons shining even in life's most challenging situations.

She has written two books to guide readers toward finding miracles within the mundane: "Your To Be List" and "Breathing Room: Open Your Heart by Decluttering Your Home".

Lauren blogs about everyday miracles and mysticism at lgrosenfeld.com. She lives in Asheville, NC with her husband and their four children.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5

202 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Lauren Williams, the Casual Unclutterer

A gentle approach with great power.

Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2023

Verified Purchase

Breathing Room: Open Your Heart by Decluttering Your Home is a self-help book written by Lauren Rosenfeld, a life coach who focuses on spirituality, and Dr. Melva Green, a psychiatrist on the TV show Hoarders. I watch Hoarders for white noise while I work, I dislike Hoarders, I have a guilty pleasure/loathe it relationship with Hoarders. But I learn from it: my Organizer colleagues' assessments of their clients' situations can give me valuable insights about my clients - I've even recommended that a client watch a particular episode because his circumstances are startlingly similar to the circumstances of the episode's participant. My colleagues' approaches broaden my own. The therapists' differing styles - some far quieter in their demeanor, some much more forceful, some much more "clinical," some far more spiritual, some very skillfully weaving between them all, demonstrate for me potential affects I can try with my clients.

And I admit I have favorite clinicians. Dr. Green is top of the list. I admire her: she shared her self with Hoarders participants, asking them to look into their lives by openly deciphering what she could reveal of herself that would ring true to them. Breathing Room gifts its readers that same voice. It's the only self-help book I know which barely alludes to established exercises, such as the Clutter-Image Rating Scale and the Saving Inventory - Revised, for analyzing your clutter. There's no ranking your levels of anxiety while discarding things. Instead, Dr. Green leads people to immediately listen to their emotions about their satisfaction with their lives, no matter how negative, to learn what is driving them to clutter their environments. Dr. Green provides guidance to healing from discontent, with self-forgiveness and care, and transforming the discontent into motivation for change. It's a gentle approach with great power.

Lauren Williams, Casual Uncluttering LLC, Woodinville, WA USA

Reviewed in the United States on January 24, 2022

Verified Purchase

I have read a lot of books are decluttering. Until now my favorite was Joshua Becker’s The More of Less.
But this book goes one very important step further. It goes to the root of the cause of clutter – or to the heart, as it were.
I am very picky and do not give five stars lightly. But this book is so well written and so eye-opening that it receives 10 stars from me.
Even if you’ve done loads of therapy, these authors cut right to the chase. There is no clutter in their words, just truth.
I am deeply grateful for this beautiful work and the changes it has made in my life.
I look forward to using the courage I have gained in these pages to creating a brighter -and clutter-free future…..

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Ideaphoriana

Decluttering as spiritual process

Reviewed in the United States on November 27, 2015

Verified Purchase

Breathing Room is yet another variation on the theme of using the decluttering process to change your life: in this case, decluttering as “a spiritual process that involves coming into communion with what is truly important” [Kindle location 96]. Breathing Room offers a different and unusual definition of clutter is -- anything that’s getting in the way of you living your life the way you want:

Here’s the deal, and it’s pretty darned simple: Whether the clutter is in your home, heart, mind, or spirit; if it’s weighing you down, crowding you out, blocking your light, cramping your style; if it’s become an obstacle you keep stumbling over; if it continually cuts you with a broken, jagged edge; if it’s stopping you from finding the things you really love, then it’s time for you to let it go [245].

The authors’ “honest truth” is that “you only have room and time for what you truly love, [357] hence the need “for you to make some space for what truly matters. It’s time you found a little breathing room” [248].

It’s important to understand that this definition of clutter is distinctly different from what you or I might have in mind. By Breathing Room’s definition, a cluttered desk or nest of things in a closet is not really clutter if it’s not getting in your way; conversely, a single object could be clutter if it’s “cramping your style” or “weighing you down.” In effect, defining your things (or your emotions or thoughts for that matter) as clutter depends more or less entirely on their effect on you.

In this context, it’s not surprising that Breathing Room makes large, outsized claims about the stakes and potential benefits of the decluttering process. Green and Rosenfeld assert that “decluttering is a deep spiritual practice that can bring you closer to your true self, the people you love, and your Divine Source” [238]. In their view, one’s clutter is hiding “spiritual lessons and emotional ah-has” which are there waiting to help you liberate your home and your heart, “give flight to your spirit and rock your world” [144]. Perhaps this is because the authors’ experiences were based on their work with extreme cases (co-author Green was a consultant on the TV show Hoarders), I found myself wondering if the primary audience for this book is serious hoarders, for which the heavy spiritual emphasis is an antidote; extreme problems demand extreme solutions.

Although Breathing Room recognizes that the decluttering process is a “complex” and “personal” journey and that “only you know how to make that journey safe and comfortable” [149-153], this happens in the context of its “spiritual method of decluttering” which is called SLICE, an acronym for “Stop and Listen. Intend. Clear the Energy” [165]. The method itself is demanding — the first step (Stop and Listen) asks no less of you than to “change your habits of being” [176] — and for me it goes off track by reading too much into our clutter, which for them represents “our history, fears, worries, and uncomfortable and painful emotions” [182]. Indeed, the authors assert that our emotions “tend to generate clutter” [188] that “blocks our hearts” [330]. The solution to all this is to use decluttering to create empty spaces, which are “full of pure potential, a vast openness into which we can invite any energy we desire” [265].

This does not match my experience with my own decluttering efforts. For instance, Breathing Room’s assertion that “we create our clutter unconsciously, through indecision, fear, and running away” is rather naive if you ask me; our consumerist society which encourages us to accumulate things thoughtlessly has a major role to play in this too. The authors also seem to uncritically criticize all “time-saving” devices that in fact “are not only consuming physical space and time, but they are also taking up mental and emotional energy” [353]. There is an element of truth to this in many cases, but I still happen to think a blender is quite handy, thank you.

As a result, I found Breathing Room’s approach to be foreign for my own purposes for the most part. For me, decluttering can be a deep spiritual practice, or it can be something far less ambitious than aiming to serve one’s “Highest Self” [234], for instance. I did find some nuggets in Breathing Room here and there. The authors’ advice to

listen to your clutter. Yes, clutter speaks. It speaks volumes! It can tell us about our attachments, fears, and worries. It can regale us with regrets about missed opportunities or our disappointments in life. This is not easy stuff that our clutter has to say [504]

reminds me of the inner voices I've encountered in my 1000 things projects. The notion that “our lives are overburdened by physical reflections of our emotional exhaustion” [351] could be another useful insight in moderation (vs. as the basis for an entire method or process). The notion of decluttering as relief and release is another appealing concept, but again this can happen without it having to be a spiritual experience.

Breathing Room looks like an excellent resource for someone who is in dire straits relative to their relationship with their things, or for someone who wants their decluttering process to be a deep spiritual journey. If that description doesn’t fit you, you’ll most likely find a more simpatico approach elsewhere.

32 people found this helpful

Helpful

Judy Herman

Taking deep breaths embracing sacred messiness

Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2018

Verified Purchase

A year ago, one of my clients told me about this book. I bought it and it sat on my shelf for a year. And now, after reading the preface and intro, I feel a kindred spirit with these two soul sister authors. It's even more meaningful since writing my book "Beyond Messy Relationships: Divine Invitations To Your Authentic Self." Breathing Room is exactly what I need since I've struggled with clutter all my life. I love their acronym SLICE (Stop, Listen, Intend, Clear the Energy). I can't wait to use this process along with a decluttering journal. I teared up with the final section "Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life." That is the message I've become more clear about as I live throughout my messy relationships. My journal-writing over four decades has given me clarity. I use the analogy of breathing in fresh air: Awareness, Intentionality, and Risks. But right now my work-space with my journals and manuscripts needs serious decluttering! And I'm eager to declutter attitudes I'm not even aware of now. This is an amazing and life-giving message. It's a must-read, even if you don't have a major hoarding problem. Or don't want to admit that you have a minor one. So a year later after being on my shelf it isn't too late!

3 people found this helpful

Helpful