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didn’t even know what I liked or who I was
anymore.’ Bennett Vogt immersed herself in
space clearing, a form of feng shui, and
now applies those ‘purifying principles’ to
the excesses of daily life as we live it today.
‘It’s no secret that we live in a culture that
is—more than ever—overwhelming,’ she
writes. ‘We drown in things and swim in
stress. And even if we had enough time to
process everything, we are so overwhelmed
that we have no idea where to start. If you
sweep out everything that is superfluous,
more space is created on all levels.’
To feel more space in life, she says, we
must take the following five steps, the ‘Five
Ss’: Slowing down, Simplifying, Sensing,
Surrendering and Self-care. This way you
learn to find the underlying causes of your
stress and to fix them in little steps.
Because yes, society is partly to blame
for the heavy schedules we all have, but
according to Bennett Vogt we are also
complicit: ‘We tend to have set patterns
and an inner resistance that prevent us
from putting the solutions into practice.’A LITTLE DISTANCE
I found out what she means by inner
resistance in the lesson about unplugging:
disconnecting your smartphone and
computer. From then on, I didn’t just ignore
my phone when I woke up and went to
sleep; I also no longer automatically
reached for it throughout the day. I had
to write down how that made me feel.
Frankly, uncomfortable. Or even flagrantly
irritable, like when I took the train to Paris,
France. There I was, doing nothing, while
everyone else was scrolling and checkingfeeds and liking their little hearts out. I
wasn’t able to read either, because of
someone talking loudly behind me. “Could
you speak more quietly?” I snarled at an
older man sitting behind me. He was
startled into silence and I was immediately
ashamed of my behavior. Maybe the poor
man was deaf, or maybe he was very lonely
and happy to have finally found someone
on the train to have a chat with. Maybe he
was talking so fast because he couldn’t
believe his luck. What an idiot I am
sometimes, I thought.
This type of frustration is exactly what the
course aims to address: standing still is not
always fun. You stumble on all kinds of
thoughts that you need to be aware of if
you are to achieve de-stressing. That’s why
Bennett Vogt links the lessons about
slowing down to learning to observe. In
the Spacious Detachment lesson, she
encourages you to take some distance from
what you’re feeling in such a moment and
observe it with kindness. ‘Take a breath and
think: So, this is tension’ or, ‘Take a breath;
So, this is pain’. I had already been working
with this technique, taken from Stoic
philosophy, for a while and find it incredibly
effective. You don’t reason the feeling away,
you don’t suppress it: it’s just allowed to be
there. After a while it ebbs away all on its
own. On the train to Paris, taking some
distance from the situation worked very
well to tackle my discomfort. I felt myself
becoming calm, as I watched my children
sitting across from me on their smartphones,
and as I watched the landscape roll by.
Everything was just fine. I thought of one of
the mottos of the course, ‘the meaning ofFIVE THINGS I DO
DIFFERENTLY NOW- I take the time to
wake up. I don’t
check my phone
until breakfast. - I no longer reach
for my smartphone
whenever there’s
a spare moment. - What I no longer
need, I throw away.
Newspapers, for
example, or a
torn blouse. - I tidy up my house
before I go to bed. - I take my time
when I go to sleep.
I drink a cup of
tea in the dark
and think about
the day.