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There is nothing to be added
There is nothing to be integrated
 only that, which is to be
stripped away.
                                       – Ramana

                                 Photo by Ikescorpio

Bill MacLeod who shared this quote, during The Journey Intensive last week said, when he first heard this quote it had been a life changing moment for him. It enabled him to lighten up by stripping away. He also commented that it was like being in the zone, in the the flow,where you acknowledged your natural genius. Bill, I should say is  somewhat unusual in my experience of people in the alternative healing world. He has a corporate CEO background and the solid build of a rugby front row forward. He also has a very charming manner and a great sense of humour.

As I heard the saying he quoted, a light came on for me and I wrote this saying down in my collection book (one habit I have established as part of simplifying my life.)

There are various areas of my life, where "There is nothing more to be added" needs to be applied.

What it really meant for me was that is was time to stop looking outside myself for the "magic answer", time to strip away the superfluous things.

At a practical level, there are many areas of my life that I can apply this to starting with getting my computer into a user friendly state:

  • Strip away the noise from my email boxes- yes I do have more than one! I tried  to have just one email box. I redirected all my outlook email to Gmail. In the process of this, my inbox became flooded with returned email as a result someone or some robot spoofing my email address to spam others with. So simplifying things can become a complicated process.
  • Rationalize the social networking  sites I belong to,  Facebook, My Blog Log, and Blog Catalogue will be my top 3  and a new group I joined recently Personal Development Partners.
  • How many forums can a girl honestly participate in, as well as make a meaningful contribution. Leo from Zen Habits recommends: Read my Haiku Productivity post on Zen Habits for more on this … basically, you have to restrict yourself … just choose the top 10 blogs that are most valuable to you, and choose like 5-6 posts to read per day. Same thing on your forum … just choose 5-6 posts to read and respond to, and mark the rest as read. You can’t read everything!
  • Strip out Google reader- Marking everything as read yesterday, was a freeing feeling. Now to simplify the number of feeds. Do I delete everything and start afresh-this would save any temptation to  get distracted. There is the fear of loss that I might miss out on something! On there other hand, there will be more tomorrow.

What’s you strategy for dealing with feed reader bloat?