Leading A Simple Life: 5 Steps to Aligning with Peace.
What does it mean to lead a simple life? What does it look like? What does it feel like? And most importantly—how different from your current life is it?
I’m starting todays lesson off this way, to get you thinking very factually.
What is Simplicity?
Simplicity is a way of thinking, acting, and communicating that allows you to glide with the current of life rather than fighting against it.
Simplicity is highly spiritual, healing and incredibly enjoyable. But what does simplicity mean? It means a quality of ease — an ease in thought, an ease in effort, an ease in how you interpret and understand situations and scenarios.
Simplicity is not busyness, but it is effort.
Simplicity does not mean you’ve taken a day off from duties nor does it imply dialling back involvement. Simplicity means to see that life already has a frequency and to become one with it.
5 Steps to a Simple Life
If you feel exhausted, fragmented, or "small," it is because you are out of alignment with your biological and spiritual design. To help you return home to yourself, I have distilled the Vedic path into five essential steps.
Step 1: Slow Down the "Velocity" of Your Thinking & Effort.
Simplicity starts with a change in speed. A simple life is a spiritual life. When we slow down, we instil a steady, sustainable velocity (speed) to our thinking and effort, which in response slows down the picture of life we perceive.
Think of it like this:
If you have just slowed down the scene of life you are observing—have altered your reality drastically, in comparison to the general public. Do you see the advantage of slowing the scene down?
Imagine watching the scene of a movie in slow motion, compared to its normal speed. You have more time to
Extract information
Interpret and comprehend what you are experiencing
This is why simplicity is part and parcel with spirituality. By choosing simplicity, you are slowing down the speed of thought, which is slowing down the speed of feeling, which is slowing down your reactions, which is giving you control over how you witness life. This reduction in velocity thus enables you to effectively become one with the frequency of your natural environment.
Step 2: Diagnose Your "Intellectual Adolescence"
Before you can change, you must reflect on your current state. Most of us operate from a seat of "intellectual adolescence"—a way of living that is entirely unconscious, impatient, and plastic, influenced by a strong insecurity towards our body, our voice, our abilities and the lot we were born into in this life.
Check your internal dialogue for these three markers of ungratefulness:
The Body: "It’s not beautiful enough."
The Environment: "Swimming in the lake is not enough; we need a boat."
The Senses: "This fresh food isn't tasty enough; it needs more flavour."
Recognize that these thoughts are driven a deep, unprocessed greediness “for more”. To move toward peace, you must first witness the "fake and plastic" habits you’ve been using to mask your uncertainty.
When you reflect on how you currently live your life, what do you notice? Is it simple, is it steady, is it stable, or is it busy? Reflect on how you wake up, how you put on your clothes, how you brush your teeth, how you shower, how you drive, how you eat your food, how you work, how you think and how you feel.
If you can see this example in yourself, you can see how at a philosophical level you are unconscious to the ungratefulness you embody on a moment to moment basis.
Step 3: Renounce the Four Derangements
My life changed drastically when I stopped trying to "fit in" and realized I was chasing ghosts. To align with a simple life, you must stop obsessively prioritizing the Four Derangements:
Fame
Money
Sex
Power
When you stop prioritizing them, the "busy" urges that drive your life begin to evaporate. You aren't losing anything; you are clearing the neurotic urge for validation so you can finally hear the resonant frequency of your own soul.
Step 4: Synchronize with the Elements
At your very core, you are a borrowed accumulation of your elemental environment. To find grounding, you must return your biology to its source.
Earth: Eat living, fresh foods / ground barefoot
Water: Drink fresh, clean water / cleanse in the river, lakes and streams
Sun: Bathe in the pranic biophotonic light
Air: Breathe fresh air / cleanse your bare skin in the wind
Ether: Be in the infinite space / bathe in the substrate of samsara
As your busy life is replaced by these simple acts, your elemental structure begins to synchronize with nature. The fragmented versions of "you" will begin to collide and merge into one cohesive direction.
Let your hair grow
Put you bare feet on the ground
Dress in natural fibres, coloured with plant dyes
Eat fresh living foods
Bathe in the rivers and lakes
Take solo retreats into the deep old-growth forests
Become one with the resonant frequency of nature
Step 5: Trade Urges for Awareness
Realize that steady, relaxed thinking cannot arise out of a life driven by constant urges, clutter, disorganization, and material excess. Simplicity is a way of living, solving and communicating that prioritizes Less over More, Presence over Pressure.
Case in point, I’ve always had a strong mind and a good heart, but in my early years, due to a lack of mentorship, I allowed I myself become a degenerate, choosing to fit in instead of being who a truly was.
I wanted more. I wanted to be cool. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be rich. I wanted to be known. I wanted power. And this “want and effort” persisted for so many years. Even in the face of intense hardship, struggle and loss—I kept trying to “make it work".
And much like you, I often asked myself if this “Would ever end?”
And it did. My life changed drastically when I slowed down. In this simplicity I woke up out of my unconscious sleep and became conscious. I started thinking differently, feeling differently, eating differently, dressing differently, and ultimately I became conscious of my busy unproductive daily patterns. I stopped pursuing fame, money, sex and power.
What happened next was nothing short of extraordinary. The elemental structure of my biology started synchronizing with the elements of nature. And as my busy life was taken over by simple living, all fragmented versions of me that I ever created, collided. And for the first time in my life I was moving holistically in one unified direction.
Your journey toward simplicity is a return to your true Self. If you feel a yearning for this ease, I invite you to leave a comment below. Let’s discuss how you can take your first step away from the noise today.
