Last night I watched Minimalism: A Documentary About The Important Things. Minimalism is a practice I’ve been implementing into my own life over the last year, and it occurred to me that in order to be more open and conscious we might need to talk about some minimalism for the soul.
However, physical minimalism is a boxing up of things and getting rid of them in some way in order to make space. My thinking is that minimalism of the soul or center of who we are requires something a bit more unorthodox. What do I mean?
Michael Ryce teaches that to become more open we actually need to unpack the things that cause our hurt and pain in order to make space for love. Say for example that in your travels today, you hit a traffic jam caused by road construction. The situation will make you late to an important meeting or in picking your kids up from school, and so you get frustrated, stressed, and angry.
Do you blame the construction workers, the city, or the barricades and cones?! They are not the cause of your frustration. They are just there, doing a job. You’re not experiencing cause and effect, where the construction is the cause and the effect is you’re upset. What you are really experiencing, according to Ryce is the cause (an upset that is triggered inside of you from some past pain) that has the effect of you becoming frustrated with something outside of you.
The issue is you may not realize consciously what that pain or cause is in order to deal with it especially not right in the moment where you are sitting in traffic. That means at some point you need to stop and using a tool of some sort, be it prayer or journaling, therapy, or talking to a friend, and to figure out what the root cause is that makes you unhappy.
I love the Reality Management worksheets I got from Ryce’s seminar at Heartland in Missouri. What they do is help you take ownership of your own pain, unpacking it, and seeing that your frustration basically comes from the situation not going the way you intend or have a “goal” for it to. A full worksheet takes you back to the place that consciously or sub-consciously in your past created a painful moment that has existed inside you gnawing away at you asking you to heal it. And every “trigger” such as road construction will continue to gnaw at you until you finally explode or face your pain.
The outcome is that when we unpack what is causing us pain, we can learn to face it without fear and heal it. We can’t just box it up and ship it out of our lives. That behavior is denial and avoidance. But when we expose the hurt and remove it by processing through to the origin of that hurt, we actually empty the box completely and leave space for love. Sounds simple, but it isn’t. Minimalism is work, physically and emotionally. It means letting go so you can move forward.
In the same way, reducing clutter in our physical lives simplifies the way we live, “collapsing” pain inside of us frees us up to love.
With less pain and more love in the open capacity of our heart, we can now go out and give love more freely as well. And guess what? When we put love out into the world it comes back to us ten-fold.
So ask yourself today, how do I show love to the world? Am I capable of loving myself and others or is the pain boxed up inside of me like a hoarder smothering my happiness? Tough question, but a great start to the path of healing.
You have my permission to pause, and go gently to get there.
Go you!
Christina
