The Path to Reinvention: The Art of Minimalism and Living a Meaningful Life

By Connie Alba-Cohen

The constant drive for more has filled our lives with a deep unhappiness and has only moved us further away from experiencing a meaningful life.

But that doesn’t have to be the reality anymore.

In The Path to Reinvention, learn how to create the life you want to live, re-envisioning yourself without the emotional, physical, and mental burden that comes with constantly managing and organizing stuff.

You’ll discover:
- How a consumerist culture has taught you to want more and never be satisfied with less.
- What minimalism is and how it can be adapted to your unique circumstances and priorities.
- How to embrace a life of meaning beyond the fears that come with the work of reinvention.
- Step-by-step process for reframing your mind and implementing minimalism in every area of your home and your life.

With decades of personal and professional experience incorporating and designing a meaningful, minimalist existence, Connie wants to now make it more possible than ever for everyone to gain happiness through their own reinvention.

There’s no better time than today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Connie Alba-Cohen
• Release date: Jul 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463650172

Connie Alba-Cohen

Connie Alba-Cohen is an author, speaker, and designer who was once completely stuck living a life that had lost its meaning and purpose when she found herself faced with the prospect of reinventing herself through a huge life change. With courage and purpose, Connie pursued a life of minimalism, becoming an expert at beautiful and simple home staging to represent the clutter-free life available to us all. Extending her practice into every area of life, Connie has fully reinvented herself, and every day, enjoys the freedom and contentment of leading a meaningful life.

Book preview

The Path to Reinvention:

The Art of Minimalism and Living a Meaningful Life

Connie Alba-Cohen

To Juan Manuel, always there for everyone…

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Part One: What Is Minimalism?

How Did We Get Here?

What Minimalism Can Do for You

Common Misconceptions About Minimalism

Part Two: How To Minimalize Yourself

How Minimalism Affects Your Reinvention

Staying Mindful

Breaking Out Of the Consumerist Cycle

The Dreaded Just in Case

How To Make a Change

Understanding Your Journey

What To Do When the Road Gets Rough

Part Three: How To Minimalize Your Home

What Makes a Home, a Home?

Things To Remember

The Room-By-Room Guide

But What About Sentimental Items?

Minimalism In Difficult Times

Minimalism Outside Of the Home

Conclusion

Resources

INTRODUCTION

Thank you for picking up my book. I am so glad that something about it called to you, and I’m excited for you to learn and grow with the help of everything I’ve discovered and experienced.

Before we begin, I’d like to tell you a little about my history and myself – introduce you to the Connie I was and the Connie I am today.

I am a person, just like you and just like everyone else. And as many do, my life was marked by a habit of buying and keeping things, holding onto them even when they stopped serving a purpose in my life. But I wasn’t always like that.

I was born in Mexico as one of five children in a middle-class family. Growing up, I shared a room with my sister and I loved spending time with my friends. Our family was close, and we spent time together doing things instead of getting things. We had one TV in the house and one telephone. My parents came from a generation that lived with the basics, and focused on building memories, not creating closets full of stuff.

When I was 17, my whole family moved from Mexico to the San Fernando Valley in California. I didn’t want to move, but it was something that was good for the family as a whole. Even after only a short period of time, it was very apparent to me that the contrast between Mexico and the United States was huge. In a sense, I had to learn how to live in a completely new culture, and this culture had different values and priorities. More than anything, I was driven to fit in, and fitting in meant having and doing the same things as everyone else.

I started to build a materialistic streak when I began to work as a paralegal in my early twenties. I started to look at my life for what it was missing instead of what it had in it, and felt friendships and relationships grow as we all fed off of each other, always looking for the next thing we wanted to have.

When I met my now ex-husband at the age of 25, we realized quickly that we both came from the same background, and from that we formed a real bond. We both wanted the exact same things at that time: have a family, send our children to the best schools, and build a really happy life together.

We approached getting married in a really practical way. We wanted to be responsible about finances, so we decided to open a bank account that we would each contribute to on a regular basis, and we would get married once we’d saved enough to cover the whole wedding. Following that, about two years after we met, we had a small wedding that we could completely pay for ourselves.

We actually felt like a really good match because he was more reserved and would hold himself back in every area, and I was not. I pushed him to try more, do more, and then he would keep me from going too far. For a while, we helped to balance each other out with not overspending in all areas, but we definitely lost sight of that over the years.

I had married someone who was extremely responsible, particularly with money, and when the time came to buy a house together, we bought one that was expensive for our budget. I remember telling him that we are young and this would be the house we’d raise our children in and where we’d make our favorite memories.

We had already started making memories in the house before having children, especially at the holidays when I started to decorate my home as if it was a department store. All of my friends and I had off-site storage to manage the multitude of decorations specific to each holiday. I felt a pressure to belong and doing things just like everyone else did felt really good, it felt comforting.

All of those feelings got much stronger and more confusing when I had children. I had wanted to continue working, but I also wanted to be home with my babies, experiencing those crucial early years together with them. So, I did stay home with them, and in a sense put my own life on hold – a decision I’ll never regret, but one that exacerbated many issues that were already present.

With the birth of my first daughter, it didn’t take long to be introduced to a world of judging, where women who went back to work were judged, and women who didn’t go back to work were judged. I felt the judgments to the core of who I was, and internalized those feelings, even coming to judge myself at times. But I still put on a show of everything being fine.

I was the wife of my husband and the mother of my kids, and somewhere along the way, I forgot who Connie really was – my self-esteem was taking a huge hit. I was trying to fill that emptiness with things and putting on a presentation in my home. I was trying to mask my emotions with buying things, convincing myself over and over that I was happy because how could a house full of so many beautiful and fun things have anyone sad within it?

By the time we had our second daughter, material things as expressions of status and emotion had become extremely important to me, and all our rooms and closets and cupboards were filled to capacity. I loved receiving compliments about how lovely our house was, how beautiful our clothes were, and what great toys we had for the girls.

But as with everything that is built on a rocky foundation, none of it provided true fulfillment or lasting happiness. Facing the fact that my marriage was over presented me with a life-changing decision: take the house or take the money so I could pay for my children’s college. If I had stayed in our big house, I would have been money poor, but house rich, and would be surrounded by things that could only hold me back.

This is the time where all of my emotional triggers appeared. I had built every memory with my children in our house, but now I had to put their future above my being surrounded by comforting memories in that house. I went through needing to separate myself from my emotions so I could focus on my future, and that changed everything for me. It was extremely difficult, and was a decision made by force of circumstances, but it was the decision that brought me to my current place and the greatest peace I’ve ever felt.

As I began the process of reinventing myself, I had reached a point where I was coming from a 4,000 sq. ft. house to an apartment that was 900 sq. ft. I had a little storage unit where I put stuff, and when I went to it again after one year, I noticed that I hadn’t missed or needed any of the things in there. I decided in that moment that I was not going to be paying to have my things kept gathering dust when they were never going to have a place in my life again.

This action made