Here is a brief excerpt from my recently released book. If you are intrigued, send me a message. For now, you can order the book directly from me. However, in a little while, you will be able to purchase the book through my website and through Amazon. I will let you know as soon as possible. In the meantime, I hope to hear from you directly.

Our life is frittered away by detail... Simplify, simplify! – Henry Thoreau

When can less be more? Here is how I see it.

When we live a simpler life where less is more, we create a spaciousness and clarity that allow for balance, relationship, peace, harmony and contentment to arise organically in our lives. In a sense, we prepare the soil in which we grow and nourish our soul so the essence of our being and relationships, human and spiritual, can emerge and express itself freely. In the words of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.”

Living simply leads to a renewed and fresh ‘felt experience’ of love and grace that remains elusive in busy, stuffy and cluttered environments. There, we are preoccupied with doing and having. How do we ever discover our ‘being’ in this noisy and hectic environment that drowns out the often-quiet voices of our essence?

It’s simple, not simplistic, and not necessarily easy. It requires committed awareness to shift our focus from doing and having to being, out of which the doing arises, which will lead to certain ‘haves’. In turn, whatever we have and do informs and enriches our being authentically and with integrity.

How simple is your life? I mean all aspects of your life–your personal and professional life, which entails all physical, emotional, mental, social, economical, relational, environmental and spiritual aspects of your being. Let’s say, on a scale from 1-10, with 10 being absolutely simple, what number will you assign your way of living and being right now? Just take a breath; be still and see what number pops into your awareness.

‘Wait a second,’ you say. ‘Life’s too complex for such a simplistic assessment!’ Is it really? Are we perhaps just scared of the implications? In the Western world, at least in the last 60 years, we certainly have not been taught to understand and appreciate the values inherent in ‘letting go,’ saying good-bye, subtraction or departing, loss or death. The unknown tends to frighten us. We fear that eliminating ‘stuff,’ either material or immaterial, from our lives might cause us discomfort, pain or grief. At times we want to avoid this sense of dis-ease at all cost and pretend it doesn’t exist. We feel challenged because we haven’t learned how to appreciate the tremendous challenges and opportunities–often painful, agonizing and simultaneously mystical–that present themselves to us through our experience of loss and grief.

Perhaps we just allow life to become more complex, filled with ever-increasing choices as consumerism continues to thrive and our notion of well-being and wealth centres on incessant accumulation and additions. For instance, we are confronted with hundreds of TV channels or products online and in stores from which we can now choose. Does the choice inherently bring quality or an increased sense of contentment? What about the pressure these choices bring with them? We seem to have been good students in a culture that defines progress by how well we amass material possessions, often under the pretext of providing security and safety. But what about the unintended consequences?

A growth in complexity in our societal structures has not resulted in growing happiness, more time, freedom or wisdom. Perhaps we can learn from the Kingdom of Bhutan, where material and spiritual measures are considered equally important when measuring the Gross National Happiness (GNH), as opposed to the more familiar Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that focuses only on material goods. The environmentalist Paul Hawken bluntly claims, “At present, we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it Gross Domestic Product.”

It undoubtedly is true that what we have been cultivating our ability to destruct not only ourselves, but also everything around us, including our precious planet Earth. Nevertheless, we seem to equate complexity with sophistication or social advancement. The poet T.S. Eliot asks us these questions…