“For all my good intentions, there are days when things go wrong or I fall into old habits. When things are not going well, when I’m grumpy or mad, I’ll realize that I’ve not been paying attention to my soul and I’ve not been following my best routine.”
Robert Fulghum
Is downshifting a spiritual act? Is deciding to live more in alignment with the needs of the planet, humanity and ourselves an act of defiance, a refusal to comply, to be “socially included” or is it maybe a shift towards a mode of living that supports both our personal spiritual growth and the raising of global consciousness?
I have met plenty of atheistic, sustainable living and sustainable business enthusiasts who tell me that they see many reasons to simplify our social and business culture, to consume less, to emphasise personal and planetary wellbeing more, without needing to subscribe to any kind of spiritual beliefs or moral code. So, clearly, some sense of or belief in our spiritual nature is not a prerequisite for living more simply. For those who view living and working sustainably very much as part of their spiritual path, though, some kind of regular spiritual practice is paramount.
Why is that?
It’s like preparing to run a marathon. For most of us running a marathon is not something that we can just get up in the morning and do! We first need to train, to prepare and attune ourselves so that the task in hand becomes possible. For us to learn to change our approach to living and working to one where the needs of the planet, humanity and ourselves is uppermost in our consciousness, we need to practice being in touch and then remain in touch with that part of ourselves that guides us from the heart rather than from the head. I’m not saying that we never need guidance from the head, rather that our heads do a very good job of influencing us anyway, and flooding our consciousness for much of the time. By learning how to maintain contact with our hearts, our Higher Selves, the Divine, God, whatever that is for us, we will be redressing the balance between head and heart.
In my experience, regular, preferably daily, spiritual practice is a way to achieve this. What is it that gets in the way of us committing our time and energy to regular spiritual practice? What can we do to work with these obstacles and remove them?
Practical
A very effective way around these kinds of obstacles is to consider our options more openly. If we can’t find room at home to meditate or practice Yoga, T’ai Chi or QiGung, for example, perhaps we can explore what changes can be made in our home environment to accommodate some space. Perhaps it is easier to go out to a regular class some days and practice at home on others. Perhaps there’s another space away from home that we can use. Perhaps there are some changes we can make in how our home space is used in order to accommodate some room for our spiritual practice.
Personal health/physical
In an ideal world, we would establish a robust spiritual practice when we’re feeling well in order to carry us through any illness that might emerge later. In practice, this doesn’t always happen and we will need to be honest with ourselves about what we can handle when ill and balance that against the healing benefits of maintaining some form of practice. We will need to let anyone who is caring for us know that this is a priority for us and part of our care regime. Whatever our state of health, we may well benefit from working with a spiritual teacher.
Emotional
Awareness is the key here – to watch our automatic reactions and unpack them to reveal our underlying needs and how we might meet them in a life-sustaining way. Coaching can help to raise awareness.
Social
We can choose to ignore unsupportive comments, or we can choose to talk gently with those who appear to be putting obstacles in our way. In my experience, most of us would rather keep quiet and seethe than have what we fear might be a “difficult conversation”. In practice, it’s usually easier in the longer term to have the discussion.
Spiritual
Ironically, it’s maintaining a spiritual practice that helps us to achieve awareness of, clarity with, and insight into, all of the above. We can ask ourselves how flexible or rigid we want to be and where our boundaries lie. We can also investigate areas where we feel we would like to extend our knowledge. Spiritual growth can be a dynamic balance between the experiential and the expansion of knowledge.
Whilst not a prerequisite for living and working sustainably, maintaining a sound spiritual practice is something that many downshifters find supportive, inspiring and a great comfort. Whilst there can appear to be many obstacles to this approach in our modern, fast-paced way of life, it is possible to remove these. As with many areas of downshifting, effecting life changes that are important to us can lead us to question our assumptions and beliefs and thus to benefit from the process of growth that accompanies the change.
At his carpet company, Ray Anderson has increased sales and doubled profits while turning the traditional “take / make / waste” industrial system on its head. In a gentle, understated way, he shares a powerful vision for sustainable commerce.
Notice the incredibly beneficial effect this company’s “Mission Zero” business plan has had on goodwill and market share.
Highlighting the dominant role that business currently plays in plundering the earth’s resources and stressing the potential for business as a solution to the problem, his message is clear:
“Theft of our children’s future will one day be a crime.”
Do create a 15 minute window in your day to benefit from the uplifting messages in this short video.
Ever since discovering The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy, I’ve been mulling over the idea of how this fascinating book can guide me in choosing further training opportunities to equip me for the next few years. I want my learning to be enjoyable and fulfilling. I also would like to feel that I’m equipping myself to continue to earn a living from what I most enjoy doing – working in partnership with others on their personal and spiritual development. Another aim is to complete the conversion of our house and garden to a comfortable low carbon, low-waste home that is reasonably resilient to the external effects of climate change and resource depletion.
During my musings, I had a flashback to choosing my “O” level options. “O” levels, for those who are not quite as old as me, or who are not familiar with the British education system, were exams taken usually at age 16 in a broad range of subjects. The modern equivalent are known as GCSEs. The idea is to prove one’s competence and to qualify for further and higher education or for entry into the job market. At age 14, the “0” level options I chose were a few science subjects, maths, English, a couple of languages and music. If I’m honest, I didn’t so much “choose” these subjects as delete from my “options list” those subjects I thought I couldn’t possibly tolerate for another 2 years!
Nowadays, with the benefit of several decades more life experience under my belt and a completely free choice in what I learn, I can take a much more flexible and empowered approach. As a quick, fun exercise, I decided to choose some subject options now from an imaginary list of my own “Skills for a Changing World.” My choices didn’t include some skills and knowledge areas that I’d consider essential because I reckon I’m already competent enough to pass the exam ;o) These would be skills such as basic literacy and numeracy, growing and preparing food, making clothes and child rearing, ethical business practice, coaching, some basic communication and relationships skills.
Rather than that, what follows represent subjects where I have a little knowledge, enough to know I’d enjoy further study and practice, but where I’d like to know a lot more:
1. Permaculture design and implementation
2. Ayurveda
3. Vipassana Meditation
4. Non-Violent Communication (NVC)
5. Naturopathy
6. Mediation
I don’t think that there are GCSEs available in any of these (yet!), although I have found other courses for all of them, for adults only. Now, all I have to decide is when to do what and how to live long enough to make good use of them all!
If you were 14 again and had a completely free reign in what to study, what would you choose that would help equip you for life in a sustainable society?
What is most important to you when you consider the training options open to you now and what you’d most enjoy doing? Why?
When I first decided to go self-employed, about 20 years ago, one of the benefits I imagined I would get from working this way was more focus, greater clarity and fewer distractions. How wrong I was! Well, to begin with I wasn’t wrong. Since I started off with largely paper based business systems, with just one or two projects and very few clients, there was little demand on my time from the outside world – fewer distractions and so more time for me to organise my life how I wanted it.
As time has gone on and my work has become more internet based, I’ve started being inundated with emails, calls to network, tweet and blog, complete surveys and interviews, read “important information” related to my profession and areas of interest and so the list goes on. Along with many of my clients, I have started to find this overwhelming and ironically self-defeating. It almost seems as though the communication highways have become like our motorways – the more of them you build or widen, the busier and more congested they will get.
How on earth does anyone, especially those of us championing the idea of living and working more simply, deal with this communication overload?
From a space free of distractions, for the moment at least, I thought I’d share with you some reflections on what it is I believe motivates us to get caught in this particular manifestation of the rat race:
1. Fear of missing out and appearing unknowledgeable.
2. Fear of not keeping up (with the latest data, world news, technology, political moves, gossip etc)
3. Fear of appearing ineffective, inefficient, outdated, out of touch.
4. Fear, fear, fear…
My two favourite antidotes to fear are…love and action. What we need to remember is that fear is a major driver in the Industrial Growth Society, the old paradigm. It is a tool commonly employed in the rat race to disempower. One route to a Life Sustaining Society, the new paradigm, is to recognise our fear, decide instead to work from our love of life and of what we do and take action on that.
What does this look like when we apply it? We can:
1. Decide for ourselves how much time we want to spend reading (taking information in) each day and where our focus is going to be. If we still feel a twinge of the “fear of missing out” then we can make a reference file for “material to be read later”. (An interesting experiment is then to review this file after 3 months and see how much of what you wrote there is still important to you!)
2. Use the utmost discretion in answering any email that makes a request of us (and therefore is likely to add to our list of tasks to do.) Is this an opportunity? Is this in alignment with my business or personal mission? If not, we can train ourselves to say no, firmly but politely.
3. Use the smallest amount of the simplest technology we can in order to complete a task. This includes networking sites and methodologies.
My theory is that anything more than this could be classed as a distraction and that we can use the time, space and energy we’ve just created to re-connect to our truth and to give to others.
What do you think?
What type of communication is a distraction for you?
What would you deem to be an essential?
Chatting with people recently and listening to their stories and their aspirations, one trend I’ve noticed is a kind of restlessness about the perceived need to have a dream, to have something concrete and tangible to aim for, and the sadness amongst some of those who believe they don’t have a dream.
Whilst downshifting or aspiring to live more sustainably can seem on the surface to be like a dream, in reality what I, and many of my clients, find is that it’s more of an interesting journey than a dream to be achieved. So, ironically, even striving towards the goal of a “sustainable living dream” can be counter productive. What guides us on the right path of our journey I would call a vision rather than a dream.
When we feel that we don’t have something tangible to aim for, that our future holds little in a material sense for us to obtain, what is really happening is that we are encountering obstacles on our journey that are obscuring our view of our vision.
1. Being in the rat race and having no time for quiet reflection.
2. Feeling too stressed out, tired, or ill for contemplation.
3. Believing that we have to bow to pressure from others – loved ones, friends, work colleagues so that we fail to contemplate what we’d actually like for ourselves.
4. Believing that we have no choice.
5. Being in uncontrolled debt (which is in effect another form of point 3.)
6. Living in fear.
What happens when we clear the obstacles on our route is that we start to take responsibility for the way in which we experience the circumstances of our lives and a vision starts to emerge of the path we’re already on.
1. Spending a day or longer away from the computer.
2. Having a complete break from the media (T.V., newspapers and magazines, internet, mobile phones etc)
3. Having some time alone, away from other people and in a peaceful environment.
4. Honouring our bodies through quietly eating nourishing food and taking gentle, enjoyable exercise.
5. Practising gratitude. Finding some time each day to silently, or openly, appreciate the people, events, circumstances, environments that we are grateful for in our lives.
6. Remembering to include a regular dose of inspiration in our week, through reading material, film, poetry, music or whatever works for us.
7. Establishing a regular, committed, spiritual practice e.g. meditation, Tai Chi, Qigong, prayer, Yoga.
We create some space in our lives for the truth, our vision of our future, to break through and make itself apparent. We know when this happens because we feel on course, more balanced and clear and quite possibly a sense of relief and ease.
Downshifting, or voluntary simplicity is all about clearing obstacles from our natural path, rather than striving for something material. In the rat race we have money, success, winning, meeting budgets and deadlines that are supposed to motivate us. They don’t of course, past scaring us into submission and depleting our energy. A more sustainable way of living favours happiness, health, community, meaning and fulfilment as part of our vision for the future. These are qualities that we each have a conscious choice in, in terms of how we choose to experience and act on what we are given. This therefore leads to us feeling more empowered, valued and energised.
You might have spotted that the practical ideas for getting us back on track to a simpler, less stressful way of life are much more about living in the present than making things happen in the future. Is this at odds with engaging in any planning? Actually, I would suggest that it isn’t. Living in the present is necessary in order to enjoy each moment, cope with crisis, make wise decisions, cultivate peace of mind and serenity. We do need to plan for the future too otherwise we are like a ship without a compass. If we think of the future as being a collection of successive moments in time, then we can actually do both – plan and enjoy the present - by making wise choices in every moment whilst being aware of the principles we prefer to live by. This is what I mean by having a vision rather than striving towards a dream. This is why unearthing a vision can be more satisfying than setting goals. Having goals tends to lead us into establishing some kind of dependence on the outcome of our decisions and our actions. Having a vision frees us to live for each moment, to aspire to “be” a certain way rather than to achieve a particular, materialistic goal.
Our path is then defined by the choices we make and the vision we hold in each moment.
Enjoy the journey!
This site seeks to explore the heart and soul of downshifting to a more sustainable, ethical and holistic way of living and working, in keeping with the needs of the planet, humanity as a whole and ourselves as individuals. (read more)
