3 Amazing Benefits of An Off-Grid Mindset
Here’s how cultivating an off-grid mindset can bring you more peace, joy, and satisfaction with life…
When we think about moving “off-grid,” physical preparations are often the first things to come to mind. While they are indeed important, there is also a certain “off-grid mindset” that can help you to be happier and more successful at off-grid living – or even life in general!
As this interesting article by the author of The Abundance of Less mentions, in Japan, “living “off the grid” is not just a buzz phrase. It’s an entire approach to life.”
By cultivating an off-grid mindset, you can truly reap the deeper, more meaningful rewards of this way of life – such as peace, gratitude, balance, and a sense of connection to the world around you.
Here are 3 amazing off-grid mindset shifts that most of us would benefit from – whether living off-the-grid or not!
1. A training of the spirit to live well with less.
Being off the grid means you’re not connected to the electrical infrastructure of the whole economy. When the electricity supply isn’t endless, and you generate it yourself, there’s a kind of training of the spirit that happens. When one’s tendency to profligacy and waste are held in check, appreciation naturally grows…
2. A mindset based in simplicity.
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The people that I visited throughout the mountains of rural Japan demonstrated the concepts of true humility, radical slowness, gentleness, and simplicity in a number of different ways. They spoke to me of their off-the-grid mentality using mind-opening phrases like, “Don’t be greedy with the soil,” “Don’t do unnecessary work,” and “Convenience just speeds you up…”
3. A humble approach to life.
Kogan Murata, one of the men I met on my journey, plays only seven songs on his baritone bamboo flute as part of his Zen practice, and all of them hundreds of years old. He is searching for “the true sound,” he says, and that, he told me, takes 30 years. He was practicing a level of humility that I couldn’t have imagined when I was younger, no matter how full of radical ideas I thought I was. Listening to him, I was called to examine what it means to be truly humble. How receptive can we be to the earth, to nature, to a single insect, to the sound of the rain?
When I worked with Murata in his rice paddy, helping him plant seedlings, I thought I had to rush to get as much done as quickly as possible. But he kept saying to me, “Go slower. Be slothful!” He was saying that the well-made thing takes time. That mentality, I think, is also being off the grid—the grid of overwork, efficiency, and the requirement to relentlessly increase productivity.
Read More at MindBodyGreen.com…
