Five powerful ways to simplify your life and step into a gentle way of wellbeing
How do we try to create a simple life?
In today’s complicated, chaotic world, many of us yearn for a simple way of living, one that nourishes and sustains us. We crave wellbeing despite the clutter and complication, quietness and time for reflection instead of noise and busyness.
One answer is to look to our homes and workspaces. And it certainly seems to make sense to simplify our life by cleaning and clearing - going through drawers and cupboards, throwing out old things that no longer serve us, tidying up the debris of everyday living.
Taking this a stage further, we might simplify our relationships and routines, ruthlessly cutting out the toxic and whatever no longer works for us.
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All these ways of simplifying make a difference and I know from my own experience that taking bags of unwanted clutter to a charity shop is a joyful and cathartic experience.
Similarly reducing screen time and limiting mindless scrolling through social media has given me the time to start reading again. And these books are far more nurturing, mind-expanding and life-enhancing than my social media accounts ever turned out to be.
But with all of this, we need to take care that we’re not missing a huge, important part of the jigsaw that needs to be in place and this is what you need to understand.
Nothing in our life changes permanently unless something in us transforms as well. You can do all the decluttering you like, but unless there is an internal shift, some transformation in your inner landscape, you’ll find yourself repeating your patterns time after time.
Nothing in our life changes permanently unless something in us transforms as well.
What really creates a simple life?
We start by looking at what’s going on inside our mind. By turning our attention inward we can transform our life and tap into the inner tranquillity and spaciousness we crave irrespective of the circumstances of our life.
So let me share with you five ways that transformed my inner world and created a richer, deeper experience of life but one that also externally looks far simpler than it did. As I’ll show you, simplicity starts in the mind.
Contents
1. Pay less attention to the stories you create in your mind
2. Notice the present
3. Accept the current moment
4. Accept any emotions
5. Trust that you will have wisdom in the moment
1. Pay less attention to the stories you create in your mind
Complexity and busyness are created in the mind.
I know it looks as if these feelings of overwhelm have everything to do with stacks of unwashed pots and pans, a busy diary full to the brim with meetings or a never-ending list of chores.
But these things in of themselves are not the problem.
But’s that’s crazy I can hear you cry! They have everything to do with how I FEEL. How could they not?
Perhaps it would help to think about it this way.
How could a feeling ever be transmitted to you from an untidy house? And why do some people seem calm and tranquil no matter their surroundings? More significantly, have you ever noticed these things bother you sometimes and at other times, despite the mayhem, you feel calm and serene?
No, these external circumstances never have the power to make us feel a specific way no matter how off the planet this idea may seem.
Let’s take this a step further.
How aware are you of the voice in your head? The one that comments upon everything that happens to you from the moment you wake up in the morning until you fall asleep at night?
It’s this voice that’s at the root of the clutter in our minds. This is the voice that seeing an untidy kitchen tells you a story about how bad you are at keeping your home tidy or whines that it’s going to take forever to clear.
It’s equally the voice that without drama, tells you how to organise your time and get chores done.
There’s no objective reality about what an untidy kitchen means and the implications it has for us. The emotions we feel are a direct result of the story we tell ourselves once we begin “an untidy workspace, so that means…..” One way leads to angry, depression, the other leads to a calm response to a situation that it feels like we need to sort out.
And if this has caught your interest and you’d like to read more, have a look at my book Ditch the Midlife Stress From The Inside Out.
2. Notice the present
This takes us to the next step of seeing what is taking place now, in the present moment and giving that all of our attention. The feeling of time slowing down occurs naturally as we do this, automatically leading to life feeling more straightforward.
We are dealing with life one step at a time rather than holding (often with difficulty), all the competing priorities and demands that need to be focused on in the next five hours/days/ weeks.
It’s far easier to stay in that quiet space if we place our attention on what needs to happen right now and here.
3. Accept the present moment
This brings us neatly to what for me has been the most important step in living a more simple, quieter life and that is to accept what life is giving us now.
For many years I’ve wanted to live somewhere else but the demands of work and family have made that impossible and impractical in the short term. For a long time (years!), I fought the reality of this. It was the source of many an internal, silent complaint in my mind and I felt as if I was living in a constant battle with the longings of my soul and the demands of reality.
But at some point, to find a gentle way of being, I knew I had to find peace by either uprooting myself and leaving my family (which frankly was never going to happen) or accepting that this is what life is giving me at this moment.
This doesn’t mean that these dreams can’t be something to work towards in the future, but in insisting that life should be something else, I am blinding myself to the beauty and possibilities of this moment.
4. Accept any emotions
Oh how we like to complicate life!
Along with any emotion we feel, can come a huge amount of baggage and unless they come within a narrow category of “acceptable feelings” it seems impossible for us to simply feel an emotion. We might not like the emotions we feel, or we might feel guilty about them, or we may fear them.
There is no right or wrong about emotions and squashing them down, or ignoring and rejecting them takes up an incredible amount of what I we could call psychic energy.
It’s a bit like going through the day carrying a huge suitcase of useless objects. No matter what we feel about these emotions they are still going to be there although this isn’t also an excuse to give those emotions full range and act on them.
Anyone in a long-term relationship has no doubt noticed that murderous feelings towards a partner can sometimes raise their head but the sane (and legal response) is to acknowledge to ourselves how we feel and share that anger in a respectful way.
5. Trust that you will have wisdom in the moment
The final step that I want to talk about is all about trusting that when life goes haywire, we will know how to manage and what action to take.
Complexity comes when we are trying so hard to anticipate (you can change that word for worry) about what may or may not happen in the future.
In many ways this also links into being in the present moment because when we are caught up in worries about the future or regrets about the past, we lose the only moment we have which is the present one.
I always love that Mark Twain quote about worrying about things that might happen in the future, most of which never happen. The future is for many reasons, impossible to predict and whilst there are some things that are a dead cert – the death and taxes argument, most tricks and turns that happen to us are never forseen.
We can start to trust in ourself more, trust that the more we relax into life and who we are, the more simple it will be to know how to respond when life goes haywire.
Conclusion
By all means, carry on decluttering your external environment. Strip out those cupboards, clear out those hidden nooks and crannies, throw out the unwanted and unused.
But do it with an awareness that the most important place to start to lead a simple, gentle life is by examining your internal world and your relationship to life.
Once we do this, we realise that the peace and tranquillity we have craved for so long have always been far closer to us than we might have thought and never been dependent on the tiring control of our external world.