Small Revolutions: Voluntary Simplicity in Devon

Love and Compassion

"Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive." - The Dalai Lama.

Voluntary Simplicity Reconsidered

My ideas about voluntary simplicity have evolved in the past year.

Over a year ago, I think it was largely couched in terms of "Freedom from..." Freedom from stress, being in an unhappy job, chronic back pain, not being where I wanted to be, being in a built up busy city. It was largely hinged upon negatives

Now the picture is different. Voluntary simplicity for me has a changed meaning and is about all this:

• The most efficient means of being happy in any given situation. 80/20 thinking - taking the least effort to produce the greatest personal happiness.
• Regulating desire - by deliberately wanting less and questioning consumerism as a culture I've found myself more easily satisfied with less. I have to work less hard to be happy.
• Being mindful - meditation and studying buddhism has taught me (intellectually at least) that there is only one place that exists. And that's here and now. So I don't bank all my hopes on a future that may never arrive. I try my best as often as I can to be present, here and now, experiencing this. Although I'm only at the beginning of discovering this, I have found that somehow I have more 'moments', like this famous quote:

“If I had my life to live over, I’d try to make more mistakes next time. I would relax, I would limber up, I’d be sillier than I have been on this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would be less hygienic. I would take more chances. I would take more trips. I would climb more mountains, swim more rivers, and watch more sunsets. I would burn more gasoline. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would have more actual troubles and fewer imaginary ones.

 

You see, I’m one of those people who lives sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I’ve had my moments and if I had my life to live over, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead each day. I’ve been one of those people who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a rain coat and a parachute. If I had my life to live over, I’d go places and do things and travel lighter than I have.

If I had my life to live over I would start barefoot earlier in the spring & stay that way later in the fall. I would play hooky more. I wouldn’t make such good grades, except by accident. I’d ride more merry-go-rounds. I’d pick more daisies.”

-Nadine Starr

I can't say that I've made all the best decisions, or that life is perfect or anything like that. I'm not always happy and far from being permanently serene and zen about life. But somehow, and it's not even to do with where I am, there's been a big change.

Fundamentally, I think it's simply that I have learnt how to be more here and now. The moments have always been happening but I've just been too embroiled in my thoughts and delving into the mud of past memories and the spectres of futures to come, that I never really paid enough attention to here.

And rather than living frugally, or downshifting, or working on the land (all of which I am doing) it's this particular thing, this training, that has given a different surface, texture, quality to my experience of life.

It's crazy, really. Because all I do is sit in front of my light box with a cup of tea and try to follow my breath. And my mind runs off like a puppy. I acknowledge that, then come back.

That's all I do.

But for me, now, it's become the basis of a simplicity that I had never imagined.

I've spent so much of my life zoning out when I've been unhappy, or getting drunk, or going to sleep as an escape, or reading books, or immersing myself in dreams about what I want to happen in the future, or putting shovelfuls of hope into dreams and schemes. I was numbing out, avoiding.

But now I am learning to be here. And it's remarkable.

Sometimes when I get here, it's all so ordinary yet all completely transformed and miraculous.

In 2008, I plan to be 'here' more often.

It's the only place to be.

Broken Buddha

At Big Buddha on Koh Samui, there are a number of smaller buddhas with gold leaf peeling off and blank, silvery eyes. They were a potent symbol of two things the buddha taught - that we suffer because we are attached to things that are impermanent. It seemed poignant that these buddhas themselves were also showing their impermanence.

So I did a painting of one from a photo I took, which is going to my bessie, as a birthday gift, but I was proud of it so I wanted to show it off here:

The Cosmic Boomerang.

I've now taken the step of shutting down my business, and god do I feel happy about it. Thanks to everybody online and offline for their support

I got some great comment from Mike, and I'd like to paste his comments here:

"I spent most of last year doing the same thing, only to discover that I'm at my best/happiest/wholest in the garden, occasionally writing (words and software).  So, now wrapping up the loose ends of what remains of my business "interests", and just going with the flow for a while.  It's bliss."

I also had dinner with a friend last night who also told me about someone a lot more successful than myself. This person writes bestselling novels and has just given up, to the consternation of their publishers, a project that doesn't feel right, that just doesn't inspire them.

I feel I have learnt something of a lesson about letting go. About having the courage to give something up that doesn't feel right, to follow your heart regardless of its own peculiar, often frustrating logic.

The files are being archived as we speak, and I have left in its place, a picture of a buddha. There is something wonderful and refreshing and freeing about letting it all go.

I worry sometimes that it may be yet another instance of me flitting from one thing to another. But something tells me that although there is a risk of that with my personality, there is also a greater force carving out a certain, almost inevitable path.

The path is massage.

I started training with Clare Maxwell Hudson a couple of years ago. I had just come out of a turbulent period of my life with a need to escape my life in London and get some time out. The escape I found was going round Europe in a campervan. That turned out to be a bizarre and not altogether wonderful experience, and after a minibus crash in Sorrento in Italy. But I still needed somewhere to chill out so I went to Thailand for two months, and wrote constantly in my journal. When the Tsunami hit on Boxing Day, and my family was frantically trying to get in contact with me not knowing if I was alive or dead, I was on the other side of the country sheltered from the devastation and unaware of it.

I came back home and started the massage course again. This was all down to Clare's kindness as she did not  make me pay to do the course again. Later that year redundancy threatened, and a new job loomed and I gave up once again, stupidly.

I can tell how this is looking. Bad.

But I find myself here and now, knowing that I have to complete my training as a massage therapist. There seems to be something inevitable about it, rather like a vast karmic/cosmic boomerang. Whatever I try to do, however I try to escape (university, corporate careers, far flung escapes and bizarre travel adventures) I am brought back to the same thing again.

I don't believe in destiny. It's an absolute construct. There's no such thing. It's generally something we map onto history with hindsight in order to confer it with some sort of narrative inevitability that serves our own purposes. And that's a whole load of rubbish.

But I do believe in following your own heart. In fact, the older I get, I believe that is the only way. Knowing yourself and following your heart. Because life is short and at the end we die. I believe my various bits and pieces will simply become part of the universe again. That's it.

Massage and aromatherapy is something that I have harboured in my heart since I was 17.

And I believe it's time to stop playing around and start following my heart well and truly. Because that's the only way there is.

Doesn't matter that it doesn't create fortunes. It does matter that what I do in life has to feel right to me, and only me.

Clare Maxwell Hudson has closed her school I was shocked to find a couple of weeks ago. And it sparked something in me.

So, Clare, if you ever happen to come across this, I'm back. And this time the cosmic boomerang is coming home to stay, because I can no longer run away from what I need to do.

Meditation Magic

The last few days I have made a concerted effort to meditate every day. It's too soon to see the meditation work its full magic (and having an attitude expecting that doesn't help) but I've noticed myself getting (and I've picked the word carefully) more whole.

When your universe contracts to the present moment, all worries drop away. The simplest thing, like the sound of rains, or the plinking of raindrops in puddles and their patterns of concentric circles racing outwards, become utterly beautiful and fascinating.

Of course it's not always like this. Sometimes meditating is just what it is. Very ordinary.

So, rather than 'trying hard' or getting all serious about it, I've decided that it is now just a part of my day, best done in the morning. No choice about it, it is just there. Like exercise. Mindfulness of breathing one day, Metta Bhavana the next.

When your future and your past are outside of the beginning and end of your breath, and your breath is all you need to focus on right here and now, life becomes incredibly simple.

"Your actions are your only possessions." ~ Lao Tse

Speaks for itself.

Mindfulness and Voluntary Simplicity

For me, mindfulness and consciousness is intimately connected with voluntary simplicity. Everyone puts a different emphasis on their own practise of voluntary simplicity, and this is just how it is manifesting with me right now.

I think I have had a bit of an epiphany about mindfulness, reading a book called Being Nobody, Going Nowhere by Ayya Khema.

She talks about the mind spontanouesly producing all sorts of thoughts with neither rhyme nor reason. And that (as I've experienced) with closer examination, much of these thoughts are better of dropped using mindfulness.

I was a bit sceptical of this when I first considered it. I have always believed that my ability to think is my greatest asset. It is a big part of what I call 'me'.

But when I meditated yesterday, I found hundreds of different thoughts just happening and I witnessed something extradorinary. Dozens upon hundreds of thoughts that just happened and actually thoughts that were not me, and that I did not identify with me.

It's like sitting in a big cinema on your own with a massive screen. All sorts of stuff comes up on the screen. Very often for fractions of a second each time, you have images and memories running on from each other in quick succession. It's like a mish mash of everything you've ever experienced or thought, edited together into long strings made up of random chunks.

In short, it's like channel surfing/flicking at ultra high speed.

Mindfulness meditation is useful and helpful, because otherwise the mind is like a big TV that's switched on all the time. Things happen on it and then just drop away. It changes channel randomly and quickly, makes things up, remembers other things, worries about others. The confusion arises with identifying all that mass of thought with 'Self' or 'me' just because it happens across the radar of our consciousness.

Like TV, watching the mind we can either be active or passive consumers. As active consumers, we are aware of what we're watching and we're able to have some objectivity. As passive consumers we passively and uncritically absorb what is happening - there is a suspension of disbelief. We react as if it everything it presented us were absolutely true.

Mindfulness for me is not about switching that TV off.

Mindfulness is about being conscious of and remembering the fact that I am watching this TV, so I can detach myself from the way it tends to pull me all over the place with sometimes irritating and anxiety producing randomness.

The thoughts, although the content may be familiar and they're happening inside my head, are no more 'me' than a dog I see walking past my window, or an old lady I see walking down the street.

Voluntary simplicity starts with ourselves, at home in our minds. There's no point opting for the simple life physically (for example, it's just one type of simple living), if your mind is full of the clutter of the non-simple life and you're still absorbing and identifying with everything that arises because of it.

It's about stepping back and choosing which thoughts you 'own' and which ones you'll let come across your radar and just drop away again. Like the advertising messages you've internalised, as just one example.

I don't think you can ever rigidly, strictly and consistently choose what you think all the time. The mind just happens by itself - it's far too creative and independent and random. Such thinking smacks of brainwashing and computer programming.

But I think you can choose varying degrees of attachment or detachment to the thoughts which arise. And in proportion that you don't 'own' or 'hold onto' random thoughts which arise, life can become progressively simpler.

Today's small revolution: own less thought.

[Note: I'm not a buddhist, and these are just reflections rather than rigorous workings - please treat them as such!]

A Million Different Pieces

Today I meditated for the first time in many months.

During the 28 minutes I had a multitude of distractions.

It felt like my brain was surfing a million channels zipping back and forth in opposite directions, myself a monkey hopping from one channel to the other. That's the image that came to mind.

Seeing all these thoughts, I marvelled at how I am able to stay on track with any one thought at any given time, and quite struck with how I manage even to get through the day (let alone get to the almost 30 years that I am).

Mindfulness teaches detachment, and seeing all these thoughts, I understood why its important to detach, lest I otherwise be at the emotional pitch and toss of anything that happens in my consciousness or radar.

It is so easy to grab a thought and run with it somewhere. And end up somewhere utterly strange, feeling a bit bad, or unsettled or anxious.

Am I just describing my own brain?

Meditation, I find, is not so much the antidote, as the stepping back from it all, seeing thoughts for what they are - just thoughts - and nothing more.

The Miracle of Mindfulness

I don't tend to read books cover to cover nowadays. Instead, I graze.

I find nuggets of information, and chew them over. Because I like thinking, and the books I buy make me think.

This week I have been mostly reading Thich Nhat Hanh's, The Miracle of Mindfulness.

As I progress I am seeing more how consciousness and mindfulness contribute to voluntary simplicity.

I was running a workshop today and of 14 people registering at least 3 didn't turn up. A further person didn't come back after one of the breaks.

I saw one of them later on in the office walking in my direction. Something inside of me let go. And I made eye contact and smiled - genuinely. That was it. No bad feeling inside, no wanting an explanation. No brooding upon rudeness. I actually felt a bit (just a bit) compassionate towards them.

Perhaps it has been the (sort of) meditation (in bed, on the bus) on the interdependence of things that has led to this change of heart.

Holding a grudge requires energy and effort.
Because you have to hold the grudge and not the other person.

But also I think it is the idea of letting go, of non-attachment to the fruits of one's labour.

You do your best, and then you step back.
Which saves so much agonising and energy spent on being upset.

It reminds me of a comment Marian Van Eyk McCain made on Jessica's blog which struck me very much. Whether the world can be saved or not from ecological breakdown, (I prefer to think it can by the way)  in both cases we'll need  compassion, caring and detachment. So that's what we have to do.

I'll be setting aside more time for mindfulness and loving kindness meditation. Because both, through very little effort in the past couple of days have improved my world.

It's not that the world has changed, but the way I look at it.

And I have felt lighter and freer for it.