The practices of mindfulness and minimalism go hand-in-hand. Sometimes you can’t have one without the other. As many gurus and experienced minimalists will claim, being mindful often requires the exclusion of material possessions in order to reach a center in your mind, body, and soul. The following are ways that mindfulness and minimalism are intertwined.
Your Possessions Own You
Obsessions with material objects for egotistical purposes are the exact concepts that people who practice mindfulness are trying to escape. If you’ve ever seen the movie Fight Club or read the book, you’ve seen the internal dangers of letting your possessions own you, instead of vice-versa.
Minimizing your material things and doing without certain amenities is a sure way to provide yourself with the mental and spiritual space you need to achieve enlightenment and bear the fruits of your mindfulness, as an abundance of material clutter will seep over into your mentality and often clutter your thoughts.
Consider what happens when you always leave your television on. It can be hard to think sometimes, even with the volume down low. Sometimes you just need to unload your material weight and let go.
Pursuing Adventure
Many practices of mindfulness are also avid explorers and adventurers. We’ve all seen the stereotypes: Buddhists, monks, or so-called “Dharma Bums,” as legendary traveler and writer Jack Kerouac called them. It’s hard to go on an enlightening adventure however when you’re weighed down by all of your Earthly possessions. While it isn’t always necessary to go without everything that the stereotypical mindful wanderers go without, it can be beneficial to lighten your load considerably and then go on an adventure.
Christopher McCandless once said that the core of man’s spirit is in his necessity to adventure. This rings true for most seekers of mindfulness. You can’t gain any amount of experience if all you do is sit in the house watching T.V. or playing video games. Mindfulness will never be achievable unless you step out of your comfort zone. Sometimes, the things we own are the exact parameters keeping us in our comfort zones, effectively caging our minds from enlightenment.
Final Thoughts
While you don’t have to practice minimalism in your life just to be more mindful, it can help many people. When you start focusing on your thoughts and where your mind goes during different activities, you might find that to be happy and fulfilled, you don’t need as many belongings around you.
