What Can You Do Without?

It takes so much tension and energy to hold on to anything, you don’t realize it until you let go. -  Ra Uru Hu

Your problem is you're... too busy holding onto your unworthiness. - Ram Dass

Eventually, you become wise enough to realize that you don't want that stuff inside of you.  It doesn’t matter who stimulates it.  It doesn’t matter what situation hits it.  It doesn’t matter whether it makes sense, or whether it seems fair or not.  Unfortunately, most of us are not that wise.  We’re really not trying to be free of our stuff; we’re trying to justify keeping it.  – Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul

Today was a good day to work.  Comfortable temperatures, no wind, no rain.   I worked until it was too dark to see much.  Mostly I spent that time hauling windfall off the land.   The firs shed a lot of branches when the wind blows.  Almost as prolific as the old pecan trees I had in Richardson.   I always compared them to my cats.  They shed all day long yet there is no observable loss on them. 

That made me think about simplicity and letting go.   My finances are challenging right now which added a piquancy to the contemplation.  Essentially it boiled down to the question, “What can you do without?”   The first take on that was probably in the physical realm.  Possessions, luxuries, toxic pleasures.  Or mental, what concepts, views, expectations, or perspectives can I let go off?  That no longer serves me.   Beyond that it gets a little trickier. 

I have always been a frugal person.  Some of that conditioning came from family.  We were not poor but with five kids in a small town you did pick up on ways to consume conservatively.  For example, when we had baked potatoes we cleaned the aluminum foil wrapping for the next time.  It wasn’t driven by ecological conservation as you see in these times.  It came from the context of their lives but it was conservation nonetheless.  All of my grandparents lived through the Depression and you could still see some of the imprinting from that experience.   One way that may have manifested is my tendency to re-use and re-purpose things.  I use what I find.

But there are also shadow aspects.  Part of it is fear driven.   Survival fears or the more basic fear of not really feeling safe in the world.  Watch how you spend your money because you don’t trust that the flow of money will always be there.  I could go on about different conditionings that could also feed into that.  But that it just speculation.  That is the dark side of frugality – the holding on out of fear.  Frugal is getting the most value out of your resources – it isn’t about being cheap or miserly.

In Gene Keys I have Key 23 in the Pearl Sphere of the Pearl Sequence – the Gift of Simplicity.   My tendency towards simplicity is much more than enforced limitations on resources.   It is reinforced throughout my design.  I don’t suppose there is anything wrong about complexity but simplicity is much more peaceful to me.  This path has led to a lot of letting go of things that were a part of the complexity of the Not-Self built up by conditioning for sixty years.  This emptying increasingly simplified my views and concepts actually to the point where it is rather scary at times. Seemingly down to just practice.  How far can I go?

What can I do without?