Eight Exercises for Lighter Living

I'm going to assume that you're like me: basically shackled to a sick, capitalist culture that's increasingly deranged, and a captive to tens of thousands of years of evolution, trying to find a couple of hours a week to develop a more mindful, responsible approach to life.

Where do we start, then?

When all we know is that we want change, how do we jolt ourselves out of passivity into action?

We look around ourselves. We look at the room in which we sit, and listen to what it is telling us.

Let's do that now.

Consumerism tells us: we are what we own. What if it's true?

One of the many ways that I've changed since moving into the van is in my attitude to possessions.

It's no coincidence either that every serious attempt at a spiritual life, from Buddhist to Christian monastacism, to hippie counter-culturalism involves a stripping away of 'things'.

It's also the topic most guaranteed to enrage those wallowing in complacencey. Oh the vitriol, the mockery I get back when I suggest: your possessions don't just tell me who you are, and where your confusion and pretence resides; they are costing you precious energy and keeping you trapped.

How can an audit of our possessions and relationship to them nudge us towards a greater self-awareness, a less precarious dependence on aquisition, accumulation and ownership?

How can light living lead us towards enlightenment?

I've some ideas.

Lessons From Radical Downsizing

I sold, gave away, or disposed of 95% of what I owned before moving into the van.

This wasn't conscious asceticism, but sheer practicality. There simply was not room for more than what I considered at the time to be the essentials.

And yet, 20 months later, it's clear: what I regarded as essentials were superfluous.

I find myself in a monthly pattern of uncovering yet more detritus (that has been here the whole time): the horror!

"What on earth is this doing here?" I think. I feel irritated, intruded upon by these things, mainly produced by machines in faraway lands, promising some efficiency or convenience that itself depends on a false view of what our time is to be used for (more on that later).

And so, owning far, far less than any almost other individual I know, I dispose of, or give away, more than ever.

Consumerism taught us that the self was to be realised by expenditure of the resources we earned by participating in capitalism: the right clothes, books, make up and home decor would somehow help us outwardly express our inner selves, find identity and achieve recognition (for our taste, our wealth, our individuality).

There is nothing like reducing your physical space to make you realise that all possessions do in the most part is get in the way.

This isn’t minimalism as an aesthetic or virtue, but somatic disgust: a bodily reaction to excess; sensory overload meeting a new baseline.

A few things seem to be happening at once (and you don't need to radically downsize your living space to access this mindset):