The Power Of Simplicity

So today we're talking about simplicity and it's interesting I actually got this idea because I was reading a book about mysticism and it was actually specifically Tibetan Buddhist tantric mysticism which seems like a funny collection to put all together but and the very first thing they talked about was simplicity and how simplicity was actually central to a spiritual path which is really interesting because so often you know we embark on a spiritual journey and we believe that the point is to learn a million things you know we have to learn the names of all the gods and goddesses or the the meditation techniques or this Sanskrit word or whatever we need to learn all these things and sometimes you know sometimes that's really fun I mean as a perpetual student I dig I dig learning new things but sometimes it really actually takes us away from our journey we get so focused on trying to wrap our heads around concepts or trying to memorize this that we stop actually living a spiritual life and simplicity is kind of the answer it's kind of like the value of silence like we think that oh you know if we're supposed to be talking and we're supposed to be eloquent and we're supposed to hear the magic words you know the magic words if I could just hear those magic words that would just sort my whole life out and then I would I don't know I'd have the answers that I'm looking for when so often if we can actually come to that place of silence that's where the answer comes it's actually the simplicity of the silence it's almost like it opens a space and the answer can rise and the answers are so simple the answer might just be say no or say yes or give it a go like the answers are so simple and so often when we're confused in life when we have anxiety when we are depressed like so many of the things that we suffer from mentally and emotionally are actually due to extreme over complication of things not always but very often it's almost like even if something kind of begins with a trauma or it begins with pain in life or a difficult situation there is a magic and simplicity that will actually help us find our way out the world sort of creates this complex system and then all of a sudden it's like we get caught in that system of thought and it's like we can't get out and then our brain starts to replay the traumas and replay the conversations and replay this and then we replay conversations that haven't even happened and we spend all this time in our head having conversations with people who aren't there like this is an over complication of things when we actually come down to the simple truth of every situation it almost annoys us and I say this because it's like we've been trained for drama we've been trained for complexity like if I was to say to you know how are you doing and don't get me wrong there are days if someone says how am I doing I need to say okay like let's pick a topic because there's so many aspects of things going on and over here I'm kind of like thinking of a million things and over here I'm really simple and over here I'm kind of depressed and you know what I mean like we're complex beings but there's something about just about not over complicating things because we've been trained like even watching soap operas when I was young my parent my mom watched Young and the Restless I watched General Hospital we watch all these soap operas like pure drama and they're not just pure drama it's almost like we were subconsciously being trained to take one tiny little thing and drag it out over an entire season how can I take this one thing really make a good story out of it and really get the emotional juice like it's weird like Hollywood everything it's like why are we so addicted to that drama why do we like that why do we want to make things so complicated all the time and sometimes things are complicated like Einstein used to say simplify as much as possible but not too much don't get me wrong some things are complicated but sometimes they're not Einstein also used to say that if you can't explain it to a six-year-old you probably don't understand it and I really appreciate that that's something that has rung in my mind for my whole life if it's not simple then I'm actually making it complex and it doesn't need to be this is why I'm addicted to Richard Feynman Richard Feynman was this brilliant physicist just brilliant and if you ever go on YouTube and just look up I should have thought of this earlier but there's a series that somebody did and they just sat him down in a chair and they just asked him questions like they said can you explain magnetism can you explain elasticity can you explain this Richard Feynman looked at the world literally like through the eyes of a child and there was something in his simplicity that was his brilliance he didn't over complicate things which is how he saw the things that other people didn't see I'm reading his book right now one of his autobiographies and he was asked to investigate the shuttle crash back in the 80s so he was on this commissioners commission he was on the commission to investigate why the shuttle crashed and of course the complexity of working with the government and all this so it's hilarious reading his perception of having to work on this commission inside of NASA and the government and the press and all this and all this complexity and very often even when he did work for the government and stuff he would actually not take the hotel rooms that they gave him and he would go downtown and stay at some really,

Really cheap motel just to be away from the fray be away from all the politicking and the posh people and the fancy restaurant he just wanted to go and sit in a dive and just have a cup of coffee and be able to think straight he's kind of the master of simplicity to me and it allowed this brilliance to come so if you ever find this video on YouTube about him he'll just sit and he just starts talking about atoms he goes we just have to imagine there's all these jiggly bits and when they move closer together they jiggle faster and then when they do this and you're listening and you're a hundred percent with them because he hasn't over complicated it with jargon and oh,

You must have to know this theorem and this theorem because this is all just what we do to make ourselves feel smart he didn't have to do that he really was smart he was actually a genius but it was in the simplicity so now you imagine if you walk through life with that sort of childlike perspective how much simpler life is when we're not constantly trying to imagine what's that other person thinking how is this going to affect this how is this going to you know oh my gosh what if I do this and oh,

I can see the 400 possible things that could go wrong or could go right or I hope like it's so complex and all of it's nonsense like it's all fantasy and there's something about just saying well,

What feels right right now I'll try that and then even we think oh,

Well you've got to be more serious about it it's like why why do we have to be more serious about it why do we take life so seriously whether we choose this or we choose that like what difference does it make you know even something crazy like a job you can say oh,

I don't know if I should take this job or this job oh and then you lose sleepover and it's like so what it's like literally a job we are these incarnate infinite beings that have come to earth to have an experience whether we work for Joe for a little while or we go over here we work for this company or then we leave who cares it's just an experience like it's almost like we've also been taught that this is really important like maybe it's in our education system you know when we're like 15 and the teachers are like you've got to pick your right choices and you don't want to close doors on the opportunities and you don't want to know what it's so important it's like really why is it so important you ask anyone who has a cancer diagnosis or anyone who's gone through anything really painful or difficult in life you soon find out how absolutely unimportant where you work is how much money you make all those things it's like we'll change it then whatever maybe you married this person and maybe it was a really juicy difficult experience and you left that person and maybe you were single for a while or maybe you found someone else like it's so strange it's like the importance that we put on every decision and everything it's like it's not about us like it's just a choice it's just life like it's not that big a deal so there's a lot of interesting things that we've been trained to do believe that no,

No this is really important really important it's kind of like ever since I was little like when I was a teenager Twiggy was all the rage and so you had to be size zero and we got this in our heads that we had to be skinny and of course I wasn't size zero my bones aren't size zero right that's just not who I was so you get it in your head that you have to lose weight you have to lose weight you have to lose weight and you'll do anything to do it so when I was in high school I became bulimic like I threw up every day four times not four times like three times a day because I would eat and throw up and eat and throw up and I did that until and I got super skinny and nothing changed in my life and this is one of those weird lies that we're told if you get this job then you're going to be happy if you get into that relationship then you're going to be happy if you do this thing then you're going to be happy so then we fill our minds with all these things because we must create the situation so that this happens I have to have the right training and I have to look right and I have to I don't know be lovable I have to be all this it's so complicated this is exhausting and it's all nonsense it's not that interesting and it won't make us happy we're not happy right now we're not going to be happy then either so it's just it's a really interesting thing to really retrain our minds to even value simplicity to really sit with whatever it is we might be going through right now to really ask ourselves is it really this complicated?

Is the problem I'm struggling with actually this complicated?

Like let's say for example like I know some of you guys have a pile of kids at home right now and I remember when I had a pile of kids at home life seemed really complicated the million moving parts and it wasn't just the kids it's the partner it's the in-laws it's the all the things and then there's the teething and then there's the school and then there's a this and then there's the that it's super complicated but if I had to look back and you know that whole if I knew then what I know now what made it complicated was the idea inside of me that it all had to look a certain way that I had to be on top of it and not only did I have to be on top of it I also had to be accomplishing something myself I also had to be I don't know I had to be Katrina so-and-so or something and have all the kids and and do this and and do this and da,

Da,

Da the bottom line is I was exhausted absolutely exhausted to the core of my being and when you are tired everything's complicated like everything like you just have no will to do anything when you get over tired and so the most simple solution for me when I was home with my kids was to sleep if I had valued my sleep more if I had valued afternoon naps instead of cleaning the house when the kids were napping to sleep to ask my friends to come and help if I had valued the importance of a well-rested mom my life wouldn't have been so complicated and I always laugh too because you know I've been self-employed for 25 years so it's always funny when my business becomes complicated because because because I'm the boss like I created it I created every single aspect of my life and then I get all stressed out because I'm too busy or something and it's like I think it's hilarious to actually go okay Katrina what and for me I always look at the philosophy what's the philosophy that's running in my head that's directing these thoughts that's directing my actions that's directing these things that I think I'm supposed to be doing and I can't give that oh and I got to do this and I got it oh and I couldn't do this why?

Why?

I remember when and I talk about this in my book what if you could skip the cancer so most of you guys know this but back in 1999 I was sick I had breast lumps my kids were 2 and 4 years old was married dairy farm super busy complicated life and I got sick and my mom had died 4 years before that of breast cancer and so this was a really big deal and I didn't want to go medicine just because everyone had died like everyone in my family had died of this so I wanted to find a different way and I remember so Jim this teacher appeared in my life very serendipitously and I remember lying on his table and I'm crying and he said what do you want right now?

Like what do you really want?

And I looked at him and kind of in maybe one of my very first moments of actual truth and we're going to talk about this because I.

.

.

My mind was so I don't want to say it was complex all of our minds are complex my mind was so filled with complexities all it was so important that I had to be here for this and I had to do this and I had to take care of this and I had to do this and this you know it's like I just had this feeling that if without me everything was just going to topple over and so the idea of even accessing my own truth within all of that was impossible like it was so buried within this morass of complexity but in this moment I looked at Jim and I started crying and I said I just want to go away and he said well you should go away he says you can come and stay at the chalet for as long as you want it's all yours and I start crying and I'm like I can't what about Wayne my husband what about my kids what about the farm what about that and Jim looks at me with this kind of that twinkle in his eye that gurus have because I kind of know better and he looks at me and he says well you could die then they'd figure it out and I laid there and I realized that if I died they'd figure it out they'd figure it all out everybody would figure it out and as morose as that may sound it was a complete turning point for me it was like wow how did I put myself at the center of so many people's existence or something and then at least I could start at zero and start to even remember who I really was what would actually bring me joy not just responsibility and obligations and all these things but what actually would bring me joy why was my soul even brought here like what am I doing here and so it was a really interesting thing sometimes we do have big calamities and not that I would ever wish that on anyone but we almost need something big to kind of clear out the cobwebs bring us to center and say okay hold on life's actually much simpler than I'm making it so one big way that we can simplify our thoughts is to really listen to our emotions I was sitting having dinner with someone the other day we were just chit-chatting we were really having a great conversation like it was really awesome and all of a sudden they said something and it threw me like it just kind of pissed me off and I just sort of felt myself energetically go like this like I was just like but it wasn't a big deal like what they said it'd be arguable whether or not it was actually a big deal or whether it was mean or whether it was I don't know what it was but wow did it ever push me back like I suddenly didn't really want to talk to them anymore I wasn't feeling so warm and fuzzy and open and trusting do you know what I mean?

Like sometimes you have this beautiful interaction with someone and you're feeling really trusting and your heart's all open and all of a sudden they just say something and you go something just goes off well I sat there and I chewed on it and I chewed on it I'm like judging myself so enter the complexity now because I'm not accepting the reality of that moment I'm not accepting the simplicity of the fact that they said something and it threw me back that's it that's the simple answer I don't know why but something happened and it threw me back but instead of keeping it simple I had to now make it complex so my brain is like why does that even bother you?

I think you're just being nitpicky I think you're just like judging them you know this is probably it's probably some foundation is something they did like three years ago and you know what else it's probably this you know what and you're just really insensitive I'm just like my brain is just having this entire board meeting about why how I'm feeling in that moment is wrong we do this all the time like it's just this constant thing that it's just a feeling it's just it's like we are human beings we aren't robots and so things happen and we respond to them our bodies respond our psyches respond who knows what part of me was responding maybe it was some karmic memory from a past life that had went whoa that felt familiar and uncomfortable I don't know so I sat there and I chewed and I chewed and the other person is kind of like noticing that I'm not really engaged in the conversation because I'm so busy in my own mind analyzing the hell out of this thing and finally I'm like Katrina just be honest just say the thing and so I just looked at them I said okay so I feel really distant right now and I don't really get it but we were having a conversation and then you said this thing and it just threw me back and I don't get it and I've been trying to analyze it in my head but I don't get it and we opened up this interesting conversation and I'm not even saying that we necessarily found a solution but we were able to have a conversation even if we kind of went yeah that's weird I wonder if it's this I wonder if it's that I wonder if it's this I wonder if it's that I don't know but there was something really nice to just be able to have a dialogue with the person that I was having the struggle with and even if I didn't solve it who cares like sometimes we don't open up conversations or we don't share our truth because we don't know what the end result is going to be if I could guarantee you well if you open up this sort of painful thing or this truth inside of you with this other person you're like yeah but what if they're even mad or what if it even makes things worse or what if whatever it's like yeah but why does your simple truth not matter you know there's something really interesting about when we don't honor that simple response it creates so much complexity in our relationships someone calls and they say hey do you want to go and do this thing you know this is one of the things that Jim taught me when I was sick that I had to listen to my heart and if my heart rose then it was a yes and if my heart sank it was a no that whole let your yeses be yeses and your nos be nos that was the hardest thing it's still hard to be honest it's still something I wrestle with and to actually know and actually trust inside that if my heart,

My soul,

My atman,

My whatever it is that lives in this incredibly wise heart center if it says hmm then confidently step forward in it and if it goes this is your energy this is like this is your soul this is your soul saying no that's not it yet we have been trained to go against it we've been trained to do the right thing we've been trained to do the thing that is the most comfortable for everybody but we're like literally going against our simple yes no truth and that's really interesting it's an interesting paradigm shift to say but I am a unique human I'm going to have unique responses to every situation just because you're this is a yes for you it doesn't mean it's a yes for me I'm a unique person I am here on this planet to work out certain things I'm here to have different experiences why in the world would we assume that we all have a yes on this so again there's like this surreal philosophy that we have to kind of look at and say am I allowed to be a unique person like am I allowed to have a unique perspective that perhaps no one else understands and just say yeah that would be great or no not really feeling it right now that's it there's no complexity there's no explanation because I don't know why it was one of the big things that I learned when I was sick I don't know if I learned it that's something I'm still learning from way back when is that I don't know when we honor that truth life is simple and the interesting thing is when you hang out with other people who also honor their truth they aren't going to ask for an explanation either if you say no they're going to go cool thanks for telling me and if they say yes you know they really mean it it's always interesting when people want more than a no or more than a yes or they keep pushing yeah but what about this what about this you know that in their life they're accustomed to over complicating things because they're not honoring their truth because they don't want you to honor your truth and that's okay again you can make this very simple and if someone keeps arguing with you you just go hmm this person doesn't understand honoring their truth next like there's nothing to argue about there's nothing to discuss it's just oh cool the other thing about our thoughts it's a lot about our thoughts obviously is even the idea of even conceptualizing time the idea that you know there's a great Buddhist mantra that says present moment only moment and I feel like wherever I first read about that they would use this mantra as they did a walking meditation through the grounds and as they walked they would just mentally repeat present moment only moment and that is a crazy mantra to try because as you think present moment only moment present moment only moment you can actually see the thoughts coming in from other timelines oh but then there's this thing that's going to happen tomorrow and I better I know what about this and what and then oh I remember this from way back and you're you realize that wow I am literally never in this moment and this moment this is the only moment now I feel very cliche what I'm going to say but it's the only moment that we can make choices it's the only moment of power it's the only moment that even exists and this is something that I'm really fascinated with right now is how much of our mind energy is spent on things that are imaginary they're not real at all and it's almost like we've been trained like do you guys ever see the fourth matrix and there's this one line where I don't know the architect or something he says oh it's great if we want to feed off of your brain we just have to put this idea in your head in an opposing thought and you'll just spin like this all night it's great and I'm like ever since I heard him say that and I totally bastardize that but ever since I heard that I really watch when my thought start to do this I'm like where are you going?

Where did this weird thought come from?

It's like I have to really discipline myself to not go on social media or especially TikTok before I go to bed because something someone will say something and it will go into my head like a seed and I will lie in bed having conversations with this total stranger arguing whatever it's said and it's just like this weird seed program that now is doing this it's not even real it's totally imaginary the only thing that's real is what's happening right now this is it there is nothing else and it's almost like because we've we don't like simplicity we don't like that right here right now what am I doing right now?

There's nothing else to think about like we don't even know how to do this it's a fascinating thing to discipline ourselves and I don't mean discipline I mean take it as a practice it's no matter what I'm thinking I'm like hold on am I in the future past present?

No,

I'm going to come back here okay,

I'm going to come back here perpetually come back here and you wouldn't believe like just the simple act of stopping that future past stuff your mind becomes so much quieter it's so simple it's almost so simple it's painful to actually only be in this moment because you're like oh no but I have to think about this thing tomorrow and it's like okay put it on a to-do list and do it tomorrow I know but I have all these thoughts well then write them all down right now write them all down get them out on paper I know but what about this thing?

It's like but what about right now?

What are you doing right now?

You know it's a very interesting thing that we actually have to train ourselves to be simple to be single-pointed single-pointed in this moment the other thing that and this is very personal on a part of my personal journey to simplicity you know especially over the last couple years and not that I want to get into some weird political thing but the strange divisiveness and everything that happened over the last few years one thing I really really really learned is that I actually don't know how anyone else thinks and I think because I've always had this ideal in my head that we are all one and I want us all to be understanding each other I want us all to be on the same page and I want us all to I don't know feel light and love and all that it's like I actually have spent a lot of time trying to imagine what this other person is thinking and the only way we do it is we project how we think I've only got this brain I've only got this processor I don't have another one to compare it to so I project how I think about things onto someone else and then try to figure out how would they make that decision based on what I imagine they must be thinking I can't tell you brain time and brain space I've wasted trying to figure out how someone could come to that solution how could they come to that belief how could they say those things based on how I think because I don't know how they think and it is a such an interesting thing to let go of to say I don't know how you think I don't even remotely know how you think I'm not even honestly here's my honest truth this is as weird as I'm gonna get today probably but if you imagine this galactic universe I remember did you ever see the movie K-Pax K-Pax was a movie with Kevin Spacey where he was an alien that came to earth to help someone he ends up in a psych ward and he's telling the psychiatrist well I'm from K-Pax this planet and the psychiatrist is like well why do you look like this though and he says well because this is the most efficient way to appear in your carbon-based atmosphere or however he said it and that stuck with me like crazy and sometimes when I'm really pondering things and I'm really wondering how the universe works and how we can have so many different people on the planet with so many different ideas and perceptions and all this I really do wonder if we really are all just from different galaxies but we're all appearing like this kind of like this in this movie K-Pax and when I go to that place I don't expect us all to think the same for some reason whether that's true or not it's not the point it allows my brain to rest because I don't have to pretend that everybody thinks like me they really are thinking completely differently and it's not wrong it's just completely different the beautiful thing the simplicity how this feeds into this idea of simplicity is I just get to show up as me that's it I'm going to be honest share my truth I don't mean my truth about you I mean my truth about me about how I feel and that's it and they share their truth about them and how they feel and then we have a conversation about it maybe we have completely different perspectives and we assume that we're going to have completely different perspectives but I'm not going to spend any time and energy trying to analyze why they think the way they think instead perhaps I'm going to ask questions and learn firsthand now I'm going to say that's so interesting I don't see it like that can you tell me more about how you got to that or where that comes from or did you have experiences like we would actually ask people questions instead of spending all this energy in our head trying to fathom how they got there but of course we're asking we're trying to figure out how they got there from us from my way of thinking because it's the only way of thinking I've got so there's an amazing simplicity that happens in relationships when we just allow everybody to show up as they are we don't analyze them we don't make assumptions about how they what they're doing or how they're thinking and we just show up simply like children I like chocolate they like vanilla I like whatever like we've really,

Really,

Really over complicated our perception and truthfully I think it has everything to do with this frontal cortex in the brain like animals for example don't have this developed frontal cortex theoretically I don't know about dolphins and whales and cool things like that but theoretically in humans this is a huge deal and sometimes when I'm really thinking about humanity and what in the world's going on sometimes I wonder if this was sort of a new addition in the last I don't know millennia or two and we're still trying to figure out how to do it because the frontal cortex like other parts of the brain we understand that they govern movement or sound or speech and this kind of thing but this is abstract thought so in theory this allows us to imagine a different time where we don't develop the frontal cortex until we're like eight,

Nine,

Ten years old before that we're just living in the moment I like that person I don't like that person they wrecked my sandcastle like I want coffee I want coffee that was my inner six-year-old talking I want a popsicle whatever right I must want coffee but you can't say well next week we're going to do this to a six-year-old they go like they don't have this they don't have that ability to project into a different timeline they don't have that ability yet they don't have the ability to have abstract thought about something that isn't happening but around age eight,

Nine,

Ten we start to develop this ability to have abstract thought and sometimes I think as humans we don't know what to do with it like we don't know what the positive use of this is it could be used like Einstein you know having using our imagination to create and understand the ability to sort of suspend our belief and kind of look around and go all right let's imagine that what if this brain is really,

Really valuable for that kind of thing but unfortunately instead we fill it with weird stories and we fill it with vicious cycles of thought and emotion and all these kind of things or we fill it with fears and then we dive into those fear thoughts and then we play them all out it's like we don't quite understand what to do with this which is really interesting when you think of spiritual teachers the gurus the cities like all these great teachers the number one thing they say is you have to control your mind which seems like a very hard thing to do but what if what they're saying is we need to clear this frontal cortex we need to use this for what it's designed for because there's no way that it's designed to be used for disasterizing Mark Twain once said I've been through some terrible things in my life and some of them actually happened there's no way that's what this was designed for to imagine every wrong thing that could happen or to perpetually play out patterns over and over and over again there's no way because it only hurts us it only puts us into stress and depression and anxiety so if we meditate if we do pranayama if we do exercise if we run if we do horseback riding if we swim in oceans whatever it is what do we do that allows this to clear what do we do to create the set point where we actually have a clear frontal cortex imagine like the back brain is always going to be going that's what it's doing it's running our heart and our liver and all the good stuff in our body but this front part we have control over right now we could simply think something different we have a hundred percent control of what we want to think about in the same way that I can lift my arm up and down so this is why like in the land of well you know what can we do to create this simplicity in our minds and therefore our lives we can do things in our external environment we can look around our house and say all right what's current are there things in my house that are from my past that I don't look at that I don't do anything with that are really just carrying a memory that's unnecessary to actually just simplify everything in our world and this is a big thing in the yogic world right to just really simplify simplify and you don't have to become a zen minimalist but to just really consciously go through your world your clothes your fridge your house and say is this all me right now is it me today is it me 10 years ago is my house filled with the things that other people think I should be like I remember when I was first married we had a farmhouse like we were on the farm my parents were huge entertainers they just always had parties and friends over and stuff like my mom was a great hostess and my dad just loved it it was just they just loved all that and they were teachers so they had weekends off they had summers off so they had just it was very different and then I get married and we're dairy farmers but I set my house up like my parents did and we have a huge dining room suite and we've got this and we've got couches and we've got all as if we're like serving all these people all the time but we were dairy farmers we never entertained people I'd be lucky to have someone over for coffee and it was so interesting that my house well and also because I had so many people die in my family at that time of my life the house got filled with my parents stuff my parents dining room suites and my grandparents couches and at one point in a point of low depression I remember walking through my house and just thinking I used to call it the house of dead people's things and I just realized there is not a thing in this house that represents me or that reflects who I am and so one day I actually gathered everything together that wasn't me I was reading Sarah Ben-Breathnock's book at the time called Simple Abundance like if this is interesting to you this book called Simple Abundance so beautiful so it's just a beautiful,

Beautiful book and I was reading that at the time and I packed everything up including the dining room suites everything and I sold it all at auction my husband was a very patient man ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha but everything,

Everything off the walls everything I just needed blank slate I needed to even understand who was I if I wasn't their daughter so it's a really interesting thing to just go through your life go through your car go through your bedroom go through your apartment your house and say is this me today?

Was this me 20 years ago?

Like could we risk just being me today?

I often think of monks and I used to have this friend that I talked about before and he,

I used to call him my friend the monk in blue jeans and he had lived in some monasteries so when he lived in his apartment he's married now with kids so he has a very different existence but when he was alone he used to have his bowl and he had his chopsticks and he had a pot and he cooked everything in this pot and he ate it in the bowl and he ate it with the chopsticks and then he would wash the pot and wash the bowl and wash the chopsticks and you just had the one you didn't have a sink full of dishes you just had the one thing and he was so present and so simple it's a funny thing how almost scary that feels to be so in the moment almost what would I do with myself if my life was so simple?

It's almost like we don't remember what it's like to just create like a child if I really had a blank slate and I didn't have a sink full of dishes and a house that had to be cleaned and a 400 things on a to-do list what would I do in that kind of simplicity?

There's a lot of reasons we keep our lives very,

Very busy very,

Very complex because it's like we've just lost touch with like do you remember you know when we used to go on long car rides and we would sit in the car and you just stare out the window for hours sometimes you picked on your brothers and sisters and drove your parents crazy but we don't have enough of that of that just nothing time so in the land of yoga and meditation there's really interesting things you can do like there's a practice called traticum and traticum is how we train singular vision so sometimes this is where you might stare at a candle so you kind of close your eyes you breathe deeply on here on Insight Timer I have a practice called kaya sthairam and this is a really good one to do when you want to practice something like traticum so you sit still,

You light your candle then you practice this kaya sthairam which just basically allows your body to become perfectly still and then you open your eyes and you gaze at the fire you gaze at the candle flame until the candle flame appears here you know how you do that and you can stare at something and it kind of becomes the negative here and as soon as you stare at long enough it will appear here and then you close your eyes and look at the flame in your third eye and then maybe that'll kind of flicker out and then you open your eyes and you look at the candle flame again and you keep doing this and eventually after you've practiced this for months or who knows how long maybe once,

Who knows if you ever are lost in life if life ever becomes too complex all you have to do is close your eyes and see this flame and there's something about feeling this flame or seeing this flame in our third eye in this chakra that instantly simplifies everything and we breathe deeply and we can.

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A solution will rise Traticon can be done staring at something beautiful it can be done staring at a tree or a mountain or a blade of grass or the ocean it's this constant focus you just focus and focus and focus and allow everything else to float away and all we're doing is practicing simplifying,

We're practicing clearing this frontal cortex so that we can actually walk around our life with this clear slate we can actually observe the world without a million filters without a million fears without a million backstories and to actually live like that to imagine living in that kind of simplicity it almost feels surreal like oh yeah but could anyone do that?

And it's like what if that's all we're supposed to do?

What if that's the joy?

What if that's seeing the world through the eyes of a child?

Like what if all.

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I always am very sensitive to complexity that as soon as something becomes really complex I go all right there's some extra stuff in here there's no way this is actually this complicated I don't think so so joy and it's funny because I call this talk the power of simplicity and I wasn't going to I was going to call it the joy of simplicity but it really is a power and not in a weird power over way but in a way of actually living our lives in this place of real clarity in this moment so suddenly we really can affect change right we can really make choices in our lives in this clear space and it really is a powerful space and it's interesting to think about power and simplicity in the same sentence but I think it's important otherwise we don't value it high enough we think it's oh yeah yeah simplicity for simple-minded people or something and it's like no simplicity is not for simple-minded people whatever that means it's a very powerful wonderful joyful space to live I'm going to put my glasses on and if you guys have any questions I'm really happy to answer them what if you've said yes to so many things that you feel overwhelmed about being able to do everything well and yet you still want to do them all oh I hear that ha ha ha ha ha then I just trust that it all is meant to happen but we're it's sort of like that analogy of your computer where it's like we think even though we've said yes to 100 things which is a hundred percent I totally identify with this but I think I need to have all 15 screens open and I need my back brain chewing on all of them all the time and what if it isn't like that what if it's like okay I have agreed to all of these things because my life is rich and juicy and I'm going to do one thing at a time and it's going to be blissful and amazing and then we kind of trust that time will allow it that idea that time bends when we need things to be done and we want things to be done time is not you know we have this this illusion that because the clock ticks that there's a limited amount of time and I can only do so much in the time allotted but is that real?

That's one of the greatest things that quantum physicists and physicists love to play with is the true nature of time does it bend when we're focused?

But I believe the one thing I believe whether it's true or not I don't know but what I believe in my own life is the more singularly focused I am on any task and I'm with you I love having 15 things and 15 irons in the fire but when I am most singularly focused on a single thing there's always enough time for everything but when I get everything in suddenly I don't even want to do anything because it just doesn't I'm so overwhelmed so that's my sense of it we sold our house and moved so many boxes imagine one out of quarter I want to let go of most of everything that my wife wants to keep all including stuff that hasn't seen the light of day not a simple conversation or to find partnership other than compromise I find this so interesting I'd actually love to do a much longer talk about this where because I believe that in the future we will have relationships where we don't need to compromise anything and this is a journey right it's not a small thing like imagine if everybody actually got to be whoever they were I mean what that would mean is we aren't necessarily overlapping our spaces either in the old paradigm when we have a partner we have a kitchen we have a living room we have a bedroom we have a backyard we you know what I mean like it's not we're almost set up for this sort of not just codependence but almost we have to come to a unanimous decision which requires that one of us compromises and so within the current paradigm where we share space and one person wants to keep everything and the other person wants to be minimalist that's really hard like that's really really really really hard but you wonder if there's a gentle way into this independent love where you kind of say all right how do we do this that we really honor each other but in no way do I have to live like you want to live and you don't have to live like I want to live and it might be something radical like Osho used to always say that you should have separate bedrooms that you just simply maintain the autonomy of being an independent human and then you actually are healthier in the relationship because you're still independent people you're not sleeping in the same bed you're not sharing the same space all the time but when you have separate bedrooms you actually remember who you are and then you bring more of yourself to the relationship to begin with and so what if there's a gentle journey towards something where it's even as simple as I recognize that you really love having a lot of stuff and I really would like to play with having less let's have different separate cupboards in the kitchen or let's have separate parts of the bathroom or let's have different these are my shelves and these are your shelves or can I have the main floor and you have that floor or something that one's not right and one's not wrong but we recognize that we really are different and that's okay and there's I don't know there's a obviously every space is different and every couple is different but I just think it's an interesting meditation to go so how do we do this that nobody has to compromise what they love some people love to be surrounded by lots of stuff and some people are Zen monks in their in their hearts,

You know,

So but to imagine that it's possible is interesting I've been a hoarder all my life I've kept small things from the past gifts that my friends gave me during childhood or souvenirs that I've collected from different places how do I know if I should let it go?

I think it's really important to honor what brings you joy I had an uncle and aunt who used to collect salt and pepper shakers and they had an entire room the walls were covered with salt and pepper shakers from all over the world what's wrong with that?

Look at this it's beautiful it's not my way but it's beautiful and it's lovely it's like someone mentioned that they're an artist well,

Your house should be a representation of it's where you live it's not a your house isn't a it's not a showcase it doesn't have to look good for anybody else you know,

I mean,

We're not going into the home and garden magazine or something if you love knickknacks then have knickknacks if you love Zen simplicity then have Zen simplicity so the question just becomes like if you call yourself a hoarder right,

If that's something that you genuinely understand about yourself then my guess is that there are some things in your world that you don't need anymore and there's other things that still really hold great value and that's how I would discern if this doesn't hold I mean,

That's one of the things that Sarah Ben-Breathnock used to say that if it isn't beautiful,

Useful or something else maybe it was just those if it isn't beautiful or useful,

Let it go but what's beauty to each other,

To everybody?

Some people,

Beauty might be having beautiful paintings on every wall and beauty to another person might be white walls with glass you know,

There's no judgment here I'm not a believer that everyone should live in Zen simplicity I think we should all be our quirky,

Amazing selves but if there's stuff that we don't need if there's stuff we're holding on to say out of fear,

Out of scarcity things like that,

That's a problem sometimes we hoard because we're afraid of the downtimes or whatever like I think we can each really look at things and say or maybe you need a really good friend to come in and help you who loves you,

A friend who loves you to come in and help you because maybe there's emotional loading to some of this stuff and you really don't need it there's another really interesting process that sounds really dark but it's called Swedish death cleaning and the premise is that let's imagine you were going to die and your family was going to have to go through all of this or someone was going to have to go through all of this what would you get rid of?

What would you keep?

I've had to go through a lot of estates of my family and grandparents and it's hard so there's a lot of different tricks you can play,

You can do but I don't think it's right to glamorize Zen minimalist living either I don't think there's a right way here whether your house is filled with interesting corners of bits and art and knickknacks,

Awesome if your house is glass minimalist,

Pristine,

Awesome we all know the things that we don't need the unhealthy things,

The closets filled with stuff we never wear that we never will wear,

That are collecting dust those are the things we can get rid of can we touch on this topic from the angle of people?

Yeah,

So if you imagine simplifying your life in terms of people such a big deal like to even say let's imagine,

Let's imagine for a moment that we are truly on a spiritual path when I say we're on a spiritual path what I mean is that there's more going on than just survival that there's intention that we're connected to something greater so then all of a sudden every experience that we're attracted to matters every experience we're repulsed by and I don't mean repulsion I mean literally magnetically pushed away from that also matters these are clues on our path so when people come into our lives if we are magnetically attracted to them to having conversation with them,

To spending time with them that's interesting if for some reason everything they say annoys us we don't like it,

We want to,

We're constantly and we feel repulsed in that that oh,

Do you want to go do this?

No what if we just trust it?

What if we don't go into some big complexity oh,

It's probably because of this and it's because they have these political views and I like what if we don't go there?

And we just trust the simplicity of the yes no and it's not yes no forever it's not that oh,

I'm attracted to this person and I don't mean like sexually I mean my soul is attracted to this person maybe I'm just attracted to this person for this week or this project or this something because in any moment that could shift and right now this person we're just meant to take a break for a while maybe that while is forever maybe it's three days who knows but we allow ourselves to live in the moment and when someone says do you want to do this?

Yes no simple well why?

Don't know and then all of a sudden our lives become filled with the people who lift our hearts but the way to keep it simple is do not add a philosophy to it don't say oh,

Well I like having this person with me because the blah blah blah or I don't like this person because like don't go into the because all we know is I'm feeling called to be with this person or not be with this person what if we don't know what if the story is so big and so deep that we've never known the whole truth and it includes family maybe you feel really drawn to go have dinner with this family or you don't feel like going to that reunion or whatever so thank you so much for being here I hope you have a wonderful day