5 Ways to Simplify Your Life

“There is a beauty and clarity that comes from simplicity, that we sometimes do not appreciate in our thirst for intricate solutions.” — Dallin H. Oaks.

Life is complicated. Relationships are complicated. Friendships are complicated. Life choices are complicated. Or are they? Is it possible that our excessive need to complicate life is just merely giving us something to do?

In our utter and complete fear of being bored are we perhaps overcomplicating every single thing in our life for the mere fact that it just gives us something to think about incessantly, or to complain about to our friends, or to distract ourselves from ourselves?

Could it be that our fragile little egos claim they want happiness, and inner peace, and simplicity from life situations but deep down are deathly afraid of this because in order to have true happiness and simple joy and uncomplicated relationships with others would mean the death of a majority of the jibber-jabber mind chatter that our egos spew out all day long? Without over-thinking, worrying, complaining, and complicating everything to the point that we overanalyze every single situation the ego would lose 90% of its hold on us.

Our true self thrives in simplicity, in fact it is simplicity. It knows that anything outside of simplicity is merely our ego or false self begging for our attention. As long as it has our attention we won’t pay attention to what is real and true… which is that we don’t need to spend so much time thinking about how we can go about achieving happiness. We already are happiness. We don’t need to spend all our time trying to get love from another person, we already are love.

As long as the ego can overcomplicate every situation to the point that we don’t see that all is well and perfect already it has won. But the reality of the situation is, it doesn’t have to be this way. As Confucius said, “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” Here are five ways you may be making your life more complicated than it needs to be:

1) You live in your head too much. — Our minds are constantly trying to make sense of everything. They are going over every single “what if?”, “why did they do that?”, “what does this all mean?” — so much so that they forget that all of life is happening in the present moment. Literally only this present moment exists. So mulling over past conversations, or stressing about future events literally just drives us mad. We spend hours playing out scenarios in our head that have never happened and may or may not ever happen. We overthink everything that we are completely disconnected from what is real and the beauty of experiencing the present moment when it actually happens… in the present moment.

2) You want to make everyone happy all the time. — Trying to please everyone might work every once in a while, but most of the time it will be an impossible feat. In order to please one person, it is inevitable that you will upset another person to some extent. There will be times when everyone in your life is going to have their own opinion on how you should live yours, so trying to satisfy them all would be undoable. How about you just do what makes you happy?

Yes, some people will have something to say, or may be disappointed, but this is your life, right? Once people in your life catch on that you have made yourself your first priority, they will be less inclined to ask you to go out of your way just to please them.

Also, they won’t be so shocked when you tell them “no” instead of desperately trying to prevent them from being upset by just doing exactly what they tell you to.

3) You believe your perception of life is the absolute truth. — Here’s a secret: Your perception does not equal truth, it only means just that… YOUR perception. So the cashier at the store isn’t necessarily a rude witch just because you perceived her that way. Did it occur to you that maybe she is dealing with a problem in her personal life? And the girl/guy you went on a date with isn’t necessarily an insensitive jerk.

Maybe they’ve had a really difficult childhood and they don’t know how to open up to people very easily. Regardless of the situation, we must realize that there are always two sides to every coin. When we stop convincing ourselves and others that we know exactly what is going on in other people’s heads and why they act the way they do, we stop wasting so much time judging, complaining and criticizing others. We simply see things and people as they are, without imposing our own little story on them which may or may not be anywhere near the actual truth.

4) You don’t trust that there is a higher intelligence at work. — Whether you call it the universe, or God, or Source, or the all that is, there is a force that is working behind the scenes in every single aspect of our lives. There is never a moment that we are separate from its presence because in all actuality we come from it, meaning we ARE it, just a tiny little slice of it.

Our feeble little minds can’t comprehend this, so because of that we try to make our own plans and agendas on how things in our life will go. News flash: things rarely go the way we thought they would, right?

This is because the higher intelligence knows what’s best for us, even though we are convinced we know. The higher intelligence sees a bigger picture, it knows the reason your car wouldn’t start today was because there was going to be huge collision on the highway right when you would have been driving on it.

Accept and surrender to whatever it brings to you or brings you to. It is always giving you exactly what you need in any given moment, your only assignment is to: TRUST.

5) You’re not honest with yourself. — This is a big one and actually a lot harder than it seems mainly because so many of us hide ourselves from ourselves so much that we don’t even know what the truth is anymore. Believe it or not, a lot of people are comfortable in their misery. They have become so accustomed to it that the mere thought of not having something to be miserable about sounds like the scariest thing ever. So they fool themselves.

They rationalize, justify, and make excuses of why they still need to work at the job that they feel sucks the soul out of them, or they need to continue to cling on to an addiction of whatever the object of their desire is.

As long as they can evade actually being honest with themselves which 9 times out of 10 is that they are afraid, they can stay comfortably unhappy, which for some reason sounds better than simply admitting that whoever or whatever or wherever is never going to bring them any closer to the happiness they claim they want.

Life really doesn’t need to be hard. In fact, when we start to simplify it we realize that the simple life is where true joy and happiness actually lives. We take things and people at face value. We trust the process of life and don’t overanalyze everyone and everything. So, if you do anything, do this… keep it simple.

Inspirational writer/blogger and lightworker, focused on self awareness and personal development, Nikki Sapp is dedicated to helping others raise their vibration, discover their true selves and encouraging them to live a life that they truly love. Follow her blog at ALifeThatYouLove.wordpress.com