Your mind is a garden...Your thoughts are the seeds...you can grow flowers or you can grow weeds. Anonymous
Living simply begins in your thoughts. In fact, ALL things begin as thoughts. Recent studies suggest that the average person has 6,000 thoughts per day. Many of these thoughts are subconscious thoughts so you're not really aware of them on a conscious level. Nevertheless these thoughts are powerful enough to create your life.
If you want to create a life of "Living Simply" it will have to begin in your thoughts. You will need to intentionally choose to create a "Simple Life". But it doesn't stop there. Your previous thought pattern may get in the way without you realizing it. In a way, you're going to have to reprogram your mind to think differently.
Oprah had a show attempting to help a woman who was a hoarder. She brought in a team of experts to help declutter, clean, sanitize, and then truly transform her home into a beautiful, clean, uncluttered space. Then they showed her how to maintain her home to keep it in the same ordered way. Sometime later, they checked back with her to see how she was doing. Her home once again had become a cluttered pile of filth, junk, and garbage. Clearly it was more than her space that needed to be decluttered. And I say this with sincere empathy as this is a horrible way to have to live.
I'm sure we all realize that hoarding is a mental health illness. And while I cannot go in depth into the scope of this illness, it illustrates an extreme example of how our mental health, our inner thoughts and thinking can determine our outer life, how we live.
While most of us will probably not have a hoarding issue, our lives can become unmanageable or complicated through how we think.
A cluttered mind becomes a cluttered life.
You need to be planting seeds of the life you want to live. You need to plant, water, nurture, and care for those thoughts just as you would care for your flowers. If you are not intentional in this, then your life will continue as it has. And that's OK too if you are content with your life. But if you want to change and create a life that is simpler, less complicated and more joy filled, you will need to be intentional about what you think. There's an old saying that says, " If you do what you always did, you'll get what you always got."
Maybe the "Simple Life" is far from what your life is right now. Or maybe you're almost there and you just need more encouragement to keep on keeping on. Either way I hope these ideas will help you on your journey to a more contented lifestyle.
So how do you begin to do this?
It helps to begin with a journal. Go out and buy an inexpensive pretty journal that will help to motivate you to begin this journey. Because it is a journey, a lifestyle. Make a decision that this is the first day of the rest of your life to "Living Simply".
To begin this journal...
1) Make a list of what you would like your simple life to look like. Look back at this post DISCOVERING THE SIMPLE LIFE and this post SIMPLIFYING YOUR LIFE to gain some ideas and thoughts about what you want out of this "Simple Life". You might want to write it in the present tense in a descriptive style to help you really feel its impact. If you feel creative you can doodle some ideas in your journal. ( Umm, OK, I don't know why those two post links are different.. : )
2) Next make a list of your priorities in life.
3) Then begin to write in your journal all the quotes on living simply that you find here. Add to this your own thoughts and hopes of a Simpler Lifestyle.
4) Look at this journal in the morning and in the evening to begin to plant the seeds in your mind of this new life you want to live.
Of this be sure: you do not FIND the happy life, you MAKE it. Thomas S Monson
KEEP IT SIMPLE! : )
Sandy
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