Making the Shift
Shifting to a sustainable lifestyle may involve making radical shifts in how we spend our days. Integrating these changes into our lives involves first shifting toward wanting to make each change:
As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, you should keep it. If you were to give it up in a mood of self-sacrifice or out of a stern sense of duty, you would continue to want it back, and that unsatisfied want would make trouble for you. Only give up a thing when you want some other condition so much that the thing no longer has any attraction for you, or when it seems to interfere with that which is more greatly desired. Mahatma Gandhi ("Vishnu-Bharati" 242)
Reading sustainable blogs and books and watching videos (see RESOURCES sections below), taking classes on sustainability and joining local sustainable communities are all effective ways to shift mindset. Also making smaller shifts leads to larger shifts as the benefits of each shift becomes clear. What follows is an effective path for shifting into a sustainable lifestyle.