Slow Living: The Secrets to Slowing Down and Noticing the Simple Joys Anywhere

by Helena Woods Narrated by Vanessa Johansson

Overview

Looking for peace and happiness? Slow Living, is your guide on how to slow down your life and live peacefully. Helena Woods, author and creator of popular YouTube channel Simple Joys, reveals the wisdom she has learned by moving abroad from the US and living a slower life in France. With beautiful prose, she provides inspiration and guidance to create a simple living environment wherever you are.



Slow Living is for anyone looking to simplify life. Personal growth books for women tend to leave out men and children, but this book was intentionally crafted with everyone in mind! If you're looking for how to improve yourself and how to get into simple living, then this is the guide for you! For many, a slow European lifestyle seems out of reach, but with the direction in this book, listeners are able to craft this lifestyle for themselves anywhere, anytime.



You'll find: ways to value quiet moments, which bring simple joys to your life; how slow living takes root when less becomes more in your home; a guide on how to simplify your everyday life for mental clarity; and how to create routines that enrich your mind and feed your soul. If you like books for homebodies or if you enjoyed Slow, Essentialism, or Simple Pleasures, you'll love Slow Living.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159914934
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	06/27/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Slow Living in Practice

“How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives.”

—Annie Dillard

  

We live in a society that has an intense sense of urgency. We want things done quickly and efficiently. We want fast food and fast cars. We don’t always celebrate the quiet things that develop slowly. Things that require patience. Like jewelry making or painting a work of art that takes meticulous detail and brush strokes. Look at growing a baby or tending to a garden. These things take time. 

Time doesn’t actually move quickly. We just think it does.

If you’re someone who tends to say, “Where did the beginning of the year go…it feels like it was just yesterday,” that’s a clear indicator to slow down. Time doesn’t fly by, we’re just rushing through it. We jam pack our schedules, filling it to the brim with work meetings, side-hustles, and social events, that it does, indeed, appear like life is moving fast. But that’s because we’ve made it so. But you can make the conscious choice to embrace simplicity, a life of less, and opt to live slower. For it’s when we live slower that we have more time to revel. 

What we do with our days is how we spend our short but beautiful existence. And how we start our day is a great indicator of how the rest of the day will ensue. We’re living life deliberately, rather than living life by default. When we begin our day from a peaceful place, we’ll remember that initial feeling throughout the rest of the day when our work and family life gets a little chaotic. We’ll have a measurement, a setpoint, to remind us of the energy and values we want to embody for the remaining hours in the day. To put it simply, when we wake up, we need to hop on the appreciation train. 

There are two rules to starting your day mindfully:

1. It needs to feel good doing it.

2. It needs to be completely and entirely focused on you.

Your mindful morning practice is not for anyone else. It’s not to be seen by your friends, your partner, or your followers on social media. This is your sacred time. How many hours in our days are spent focusing on other people? Responding to other people’s emails, working and chatting with others, sharing life with someone else. There is plenty of time in the rest of the day to share and give, reciprocate and serve. But this is not the time for that. This is a time for you. This time in the morning is meant to dazzle and delight you, it’s meant to open you up to the magical mysteries of your inner world, to nourish yourself and remind you that life is worth celebrating. Your mindful morning practice is not the time to scroll on social media or respond to emails. It’s a time to get quiet and listen to the inner whispers of your heart, the whispers that can only be heard when you get really still and silent. 

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