Your Inner Feeling of Bliss 20 Sep 2011 7:45 PM (13 years ago)
Dear Rabbits,
Can I suggest the most simple precept to guide and direct your entire life?
Listen to your inner feeling of bliss.
A rabbit’s life is as simple as that, and if yours is more complicated, it’s because you make it more complicated.
It might sound painfully obvious, but do you actually live by this? So often other considerations take priority without our realizing it—convenience, other people, money, a feeling of control, habits, etc.
What could be a more simple and well chosen precept to guide and direct your life? Whether looking at a relationship, deliberating a career path, picking a word in a conversation or which head of kale to eat from someone’s garden, ask yourself “what will bring me bliss?”
Bliss could take many forms, including love, peace, or joy. But if you are allowing anything else to guide you, you might be wasting your life.
It sounds simple, but most of us aren’t used to listening to our inner feeling of bliss. And how weird is that?! It seems like nothing should be more habitual or instinctive! So why is this?
I see two reasons: one is that many of us live in a very brain-centered world. We live by our brain more often than our heart. We are rational, and there are many benefits to this. But there are problems as well when pursuing bliss, love, or joy. See, rationality and brain don’t know what the heart can know, and the heart is where our bliss resides. You don’t look for clothing in a restaurant, so why should you look for bliss in your mind?
The other reason we don’t often listen to our inner feeling of bliss is that listening takes effort. Especially the type of deep listening which is required for the heart. Listening takes effort, practice, space, and time. In other words, it’s terribly inconvenient when seen from our modern, fast-paced, internet perspective.
So I encourage you to make the time and space for your heart. Trust your heart and let it guide you to joy and love. If your heart is what feels bliss, if your heart is where bliss resides, then there is no more simple, cheesy, nor true answer to achieving bliss than “listen to your heart.”
Love,
Loy
Confidence In Sunshine 6 Sep 2011 5:32 PM (13 years ago)
Dear Rabbits,
Are you confident?
I often struggle with the idea of confidence, and I’m sure many of you do too. Even the answer to “what is confidence?” sometimes seems unclear. But confidence is so important to understand for anyone who wants to live simply and live well.
Without confidence, we’ll spend more energy preparing for contingencies than living. We’ll be nervous about pleasing and impressing other people. We’ll create “if only”s as excuses not to be happy just yet. We’ll worry and worry and our mind will go a mile in one hundred directions, but we won’t take a single step forward.
So to live simply, confidence is necessary.
I think part of the reason confidence seems so unattainable for so many is that we don’t have a proper understanding of confidence. So what is confidence?
Well I can easily tell you what it’s not. The confidence I’m talking about isn’t a high self image or ego or feelings of invincibility. You will always make mistakes, so if you rest your confidence in your abilities, intelligence, or awesomeness, eventually, that will be shaken. Your confidence might soar one day and plummet the next…and what kind of a confidence is that? Confidence is for relying on, so it had better be reliable!
The confidence I’m talking about is confidence of the “confidence in sunshine, confidence in rain” variety. True confidence is resting in the reassurance that everything is as it is, and that’s okay.
This is the confidence that will bring about a peaceful life with calm, attentive steps. A life without the rushing around, worrying about people’s opinions, nervous buying, and insecurities.
I see confidence as a sort of fundamental faith in the forces of life. Confidence is sort of a foundation and energy for our beliefs and desires. It is something that shapes and enables our lives. It gives us a foothold.
So how about resting our confidence in the stability of the universe, in the order of things? Trust that things are as they should be…not because there is a “should be” and things inevitably match up with that, but because there is a “way things are,” and that is how it should be!
If this sounds a little vague and you’re curious what this looks like more specifically, have no fear: we’ll be returning to the idea of confidence pretty regularly in the future. So stay tuned and thanks for reading!
Love,
~ Loy
Kittens, Rowdiness, and Utopia 1 Sep 2010 4:49 PM (14 years ago)
No bunny photograph today. I’m computer-free at a festival this week [Burning Man], Loy ran off for a meditation retreat in the blackberry bushes across the street, and hopefully, if all goes well, this will be automatically posted in a couple days.
But I wanted to tell you that there is excitement!
If you don’t read Rowdy Kittens already, I’d suggest it for anyone interested in simplicity and minimalism! Friend and inspiration, Tammy Strobel, has been one of my favorite bloggers ever since I stumbled across Rowdy Kittens long ago.
Tammy released her new book, Smalltopia, a couple days ago, and I just finished reading through it. It isn’t about minimalism itself, but I want to mention it because:
- It’s about living life and running a business from a minimalist perspective.
- Rowdy Kittens is an awesome blog you should know about anyways.
- And well…I wrote a chapter for it!
If you’re curious, Smalltopia‘s about building your own small business via an online presence in order to live the life you want. [That is, unless the life you want explicitly involves a different career path.] But if you are interested, it’s an inspirational guide that I think you might like!
This isn’t a hand holding “1, 2, 3, poof a business” book. Smalltopia focuses more on kicking your butt in gear to think about why you’d want to be self-sufficient in the first place, why you haven’t taken steps to do it yet, and the broader ideas behind a tribe, personal motivation, and keeping your priorities in line. It also includes over a dozen case studies and essays by people who support themselves with an online presence [including Leo Babauta, Everett Bogue, Chris Guillebeau, and others. How did I get included in that again?!]
There are a lot of articles and websites out there with information like this for free…and Tammy even points out that some of the material is on her blog already…but for the right people, it’s convenient, inspirational, and a great source of information!
Anyways, check out Rowdy Kittens here. I could give you an affiliate link for the book, but I appreciate Tammy’s work, and would rather that sales go fully to her. So if you’re interested, find Smalltopia on her blog!
As for me, I’ll be spending the week at the Burning Man festival. I will be frying in the desert sun with the yuppie-hippies in my black, full-length evening dress I’m bringing, having spiritual awakenings more frequently than a faux-bo-bo [bohemian-bourgeois] dare beg their parents for money, and planning my next set of Simple Rabbit articles!
Until then <3