“Life is really simple but we insist on making it complicated – Confucious
I used to have a tai chi teacher who would constantly repeat this phrase throughout class “it’s this simple.” Of course, while learning anything new, especially tai chi your mind doesn’t want you to believe it’s simple. In fact, it feels like the complete opposite. It’s challenging, confusing, tiring, overwhelming – simple not so much.
Though, my teacher’s phrase and the way he purposely said it after teaching us each new pose began to settle in my mind. The truth was, it was really simple movements combined. Lifting one hand, lowering the other, shifting back and forth with your knees bent. The actions were totally easy and simple but my mind would create a storm of struggle out of it.
I was doing something different and it felt uncomfortable in my body and definitely challenged my mind because I had to concentrate. His words became a mantra in my life that I still use today.
It’s that simple. It’s simple. It’s easier than I’m making it out to be.
I wondered in what other areas of life I could simplify my thoughts, reactions and resistance. At the time, everything felt complicated and hard. It was the “struggle” so many of us experience. Life felt heavy and helpless.
So I began applying this mantra all around to understand if it was all that complex and difficult or underneath it all – was it plain and simple?
I found that it was and could be so much simpler than I made it out to be. The mind and its false stories and ideals made it complicated. The emotions I was holding onto from these false thoughts made it even heavier.
Can you take a deep look inside of yourself right now and ask, “What would it look like and feel like to make this current challenge/experience easier, simpler, and lighter?”
Our thoughts, beliefs and sayings are guiding our lives and it’s up to us to take a different view.
These are a few of my favorite quotes on simplicity. Use them and allow them to guide you towards your own version of simplifying your fears, problems and challenges. Use them to find more peace clarity and ease.
- “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
― Ernst F. Schumacher - “There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.”
― Leo Tolstoy - “It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials.”
― Bruce Lee - “I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run. ”
― Henry David Thoreau
Love and light,
