Do you recall how you felt the last time you cleaned out a junk drawer? Or how you felt when you donated old clothes to a thrift store, picked up trash, focused on gratitude, or walked in nature to clear your head? Feelings of relief, weightlessness, calm and perhaps contentedness often emerge from instances like these. There is a reason for this: In all cases, a sense of cleansing and simplifying took place.

Every year, more and more clutter seems to fill our lives physically, mentally and externally—social media and streaming services fill our time and minds with stimulation; giant online stores encourage us to impulsively buy more material items; pollution continues to clutter our environment. The average U.S. household alone is estimated to contain 300,000 items! Minimalism is being recognized as a satisfying solution to get rid of the things that don’t truly serve us or the world around us.

The increased appreciation for minimalism has emerged in conjunction with the steadily increasing societal shift toward treating ourselves and the planet better. Both notions involve getting back to basics, toward what nature intended.

As an example, in the quest to maintain health and prevent disease, natural and holistic health care are much more recognized and utilized in mainstream medicine than in previous years. This minimizes the need for extra medications, appointments, surgeries, insurance costs—the whole gamut. I think most of us can agree that we would prefer to visit the doctor less, and that we would rather have a fridge full of nourishing food than a cabinet chock-full of pills for most ailments that could be prevented with healthy food.

When it comes to a healthy planet, moving from waste to minimalism helps keep nature protected. The less we waste, the less work has to be done to keep our world clean—and of course, clean air, land and water are essential to the survival of all life. 

Our October issue of Natural Awakenings Milwaukee magazine dives into the multifaceted notion of minimalism from three interwoven perspectives: minimalist simplicity as a means to decrease clutter and busyness, ecological simplicity which ties minimalism to sustainability, and conscious simplicity which acknowledges the benefits of minimizing at a deeper personal or spiritual level.

Minimalism can look different for everyone. Perhaps you downgrade your thousands of belongings to a mere 100 things, as did Dave Bruno, author of The 100 Thing Challenge: How I Got Rid of Almost Everything, Remade My Life, and Regained My Soul. Or perhaps you get rid of one item a day, or you reduce mental clutter with daily meditation. All of this can foster a more fulfilling life. In this issue, we offer a plethora of tangible ideas to help you declutter your home, your mind, your schedule and the environment.

When we get rid of the things that don’t matter very much, we end up with so much more of the things that do.

In encouragement of a simplified life,

Jordan Peschek, RN, Publisher