I first heard the term voluntary simplicity almost twenty years ago when I was given an assignment by Yoga Journal to write an article entitled Living Simply in a Complex World. Yes, that’s the same article that eventually launched Life On Purpose into the world.

Over the years, Ann and I have continued to explore the relationship between living on purpose and living simply. It’s been an ongoing experiment that has waxed and waned through the years. Recently, a client of mine turned me on to Mr. Money Mustache — a cool blog with a catchy name. According to Mr. Money Mustache’s Facebook page, he’s a “thirtysomething retiree who now writes about how we can all lead a frugal yet Badass life of leisure.” That’s right, thirtysomething retiree…that’s not a misprint.  (And he really does have an awesome handlebar mustache to boot.)

I started reading several of his blog posts, and found them both instructive and inspiring so I shared some of them with Ann who also became inspired. That’s when we realized we had discovered a lot of our own ways to live simply in this complex world over the past twenty years. Many of them seem so obvious to us at this point that we hadn’t realized that other folks might benefit from them…until we started sharing them with some of our friends and learned otherwise.

So, starting now and on into 2014 we’re going to come out of the ‘voluntary simplicity’ closet and share both the mindset changes we’ve found that have helped us to experience the joy of a simple life without it feeling like we’re depriving ourselves as well as some of the tips and techniques we’ve found that really work…starting with:

Purposeful Play

Play is an integral part of my life purpose statement (living a life of purposeful, passionate and playful service). Over the years I’ve expanded this into one of the tools for living on purpose which goes like this:

Purposeful Play is working on a project, goal, or task in such a way that you’re willing to play and experiment with it while having a particular plan or intention.  The secret to purposeful play is being committed to a particular result or outcome without being attached to that outcome.

There are 3 important parts to this tool for living on purpose:

1. The experience or way of being you enter into a project, goal or task. In purposeful play you’re ready to experiment, to explore and to discover — there’s a lightness and playfulness.

2. At the same time, your actions are not random but are guided by an intention or purpose.

3. Last of all, the freedom to be playful comes from staying committed to the project, goal or task without getting attached to the results.

And of course, it’s also in my Purposeful Prayer that I use to create my day: “and playfully—in awe and wonder, free and flowing, with a willingness to explore and to experiment…”

I share this because I have found that bringing a sense of play/exploration/experimentation to the subject of simplifying one’s life works really, really well. It helps to keep me light and unattached to the results. I mean, after all, if you try something to become more frugal or to simplify your life and it you find it doesn’t works for you, it’s easy to go back to what you were doing before. Life really can be that flexible.

For example, I’m in the midst of experimenting with our phone service in large part because of some ideas I learned from Mr. Mustache. Now, it’s not that we haven’t every changed our phone service. In fact, I wrote about one of our phone experiments back in 2009 (Really? Could it have been that long ago? Yep. You can read about that experiment here).

From Mr. Mustache I learned about Republic Wireless that has an unlimited data/text/call plan for just $19 which is about half of what I’ve been paying for another plan with only 300 minutes of call time. Yes, it does require my purchasing another phone for $99 but I figured I’d make that back in just a few months especially when I add in the idea that I can transfer my line land number over to my cell phone and let go off the land line expense. (I was also able to sell my old cell phone on eBay clearing about $60 so I’ll break even in about two months.)

What I really love about the Republic plan is that they use a phone that automatically switches over to wireless when there a wireless connection available. Since I work from home, that means I can use our wireless connection which is much stronger than our connection to the cell phone towers. Elegant.

Now, I share this as an example of an experiment. It’s an experiment in process and I realize it may not work for everyone else, but so far it’s working pretty well for me.  I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, if you want to give Republic a try, they have a neat 30-day Trial program. If you sign up through this LINK, you’ll get the first 30 days for free and I’ll also receive 30-days off my own plan.

The main point I want to leave you with is the invitation to join Ann and me in 2014 as we further playfully experiment in voluntarily simplifying our lives as we continue to live on purpose.