5.16 | Minimalism, Integrating Need
and The Art of Enough

>> Isha Vela: Welcome to Waking Up Wealthy, the podcast for visionaries and rebels who are ready to revolutionize their relationship with money and create powerful collective ripples with the money they make. I’m your host, Isha Vela, trauma psychologist, somatic practitioner, financial professional and minimalist, bringing you practical money tools, unconventional wealth perspectives, and Aquarian era business strategy to guide you in building wealth that’s aligned, ethical and empowering. Let’s wake up to the true meaning of wealth together. 

Hi there, dear listener, I am Isha, your host. And, I’m really excited about this episode of the podcast. I feel like season five has just started and we’re already in the fall, so we have a handful of episodes left. And, I’m curious to hear about what it is you’re interested in, what you want to hear more about. And of course you can always, send me a message, make a comment on YouTube if you’re watching over YouTube, or contact me over Instagram or write me an email. I would love to hear more of what you’re interested in. And this is a special episode for me because I’m going to be sharing with you my journey of becoming a minimalist. Opening up the curtains to recent developments, behind the scenes of my move to Bali and what’s happening here. And the theme of this episode is enoughness. Having enough, being enough, eating enough, being loved enough. Those are things that so many of us struggle with in our daily lives. This feeling, like the relaxed feeling that comes from Everything’s Enough. And it’s like a sense of satisfaction and completion that is just like your nervous system just exhaling. And we so many of people are just like in, in, the gripping, in the contraction of scarcity. And not enough. It’s really baked into our whole system. And enoughness is the central access of everything that I do of my message, because there are healthy limits and boundaries to everything. And I feel like this episode is coming to you right at the right time, astrologically, because this season, right now, as you’re listening to this, it’s really all about the boundaries that you create around like, okay, this is not serving me. This is good, right? And then you say no to some things. That’s a boundary, that’s a limitation. And then you say yes to other things. And what I see in the business world, in the economy, is this idea and actual manifestation of endless consumption, of continual increased growth. And it’s often a growth that comes through extraction. And so what I want to. The question I want to pose today, when is it Enough, like, where is that line? And my understanding is that every person is different. And for some people there is no end, there’s no bottom in that bucket. And there seems to be a hole in the bucket, let’s say. And when you look at that hole in the bucket through a lens of wounding, the people who are in the energy of not enoughness or never enough have deeply unfulfilled needs. Needs that were not met, that are, now that they’re now seeking to fulfill in ways that no external thing could ever, ever touch. Right. As much as we would like the food, the alcohol, the shopping, the relationships to fill us up, it never quite touches that hole, that empty place. And these deeply unfulfilled needs was what I was uncovering and integrating when I was studying Somatics, the healing of these unfulfilled needs. what was what ultimately led me to be a minimalist. And it helped me also resolve binge eating, which I talked about already in a few episodes ago. Food, is your money, mirror. So yes, everything is connected. And that’s why the, like going into those, going into the wounds or becoming aware of the wounds and how they’re manifesting in your life can be so life changing. And it can actually like doing one’s trauma work, some developmental trauma work can actually change the economy. Right? Imagine if each person was doing that deep healing, they were exploring those unfulfilled needs and then they realized like, oh yeah, like whatever, I don’t, I can fulfill these needs in other ways that don’t involve consumption. Everybody did that, right? Then we would be in a very, very different situation. We would run businesses differently, the economy would be different. So when I realized that my need, and I mean need in a general sense, not a specific need, but like the amount of need I had in my body that was, unfulfilled. It felt like the size of the Grand Canyon. It felt like this gaping empty hole. And because through my training I’d had the experience of feeling some of it, it was very painful to feel it. When you feel an unfulfilled me, trust me, it’s not a pleasant thing to feel, but it also doesn’t last very long. so after feeling how deep it was, I made a commitment to advocating for my needs and asking for what I needed when I needed support, when I needed attention, when I needed care, recognition, connection, hug, validation. Right? Just those, those things that we just need because we’re humanm, and because my need was so big, I made sure to distribute it in my requests through many people. So I’ve shared this before, but the reason I’m sharing it again is because this practice broke monogamy for me. because prior to that I believed, like many people, that only one person could fulfill all of my needs. And through this practice I began understanding the importance of community and villages for self care, to support self care and well being. And it is in partly, it is partly our individualism that makes our enormous needs wrong. And I can go into so much detail about this because, you know, human needs are vast. Human needs are vast. And it seems, completely nonsensical to me now that we invest in one person or in a very few people, in a handful of people that say a partner, a friend and a parent to fulfill all the needs. And our parents can’t do that job. And you know, our parents are human, they’re limited, as to what they can offer us in terms of need fulfillment. And in fact it’s not healthy for them to fulfill all of our needs. I think that like, the wounding is important to experience too. When I think about my own journey as a parent and I remember thinking like, I would try to fulfill all the needs because since I was doing that work, I didn’t want my kids to feel like I wasn’t fulfilling their needs. But at some point I was like, I don’t think this is serving them. I think they’re becoming like total brats. And so what that did for me was to help me realize that it wasn’t about fulfilling all their needs. It’s really about like helping them advocate for their own, allowing the wounding to be there, accepting that the wound needs to happen as part of our human experience. And that is in the process of integrating it that we have this profound learning and that’s the learning that we’re really here for. So as I began feeling that Grand Canyon hole sized need, I no longer felt compelled to fill it with things that I was filling it with before. I was never a huge shopper, but I did love my clothing and shoes. And I found myself one day inspired by something I’d seen online about like Buy Nothing day or Buy Nothing week. And I was like, ooh, that’s kind of cool. All right, cool. And I challenged myself to have a buy no clothes summer, which was an edge for me because I was like, I was coming out of winter, I wanted to look cute, you know, like my summer was my time to look cute. but the summer I challenged myself to get creative with what I already had. I just kind of looked through my drawers and I was like, I think that I have enough. I think I don’t need to buy anything else. And so what I found was like, I found myself tempted to be cute and get things, that I liked. And so I would notice myself going through the temptation wave and being like, oh, yeah, that arc of like, oh, it would be really nice. And then like, letting it go, right? And it’s okay, I can let it go. And by that, by the end of summer, I had ridden sort of these, like, crested these craving, arcs. And I felt a lot more grounded by the end of the summer, around what was enough for me, I found like, yeah, I didn’t need to buy anything. In fact, it was like, more than enough. There’s lots of clothes that I ended up not wearing. And, I was okay. It had all been enough. And then I began exploring that enoughness concept in other domains. there was, ah, one summer, I believe it was. I forget, I don’t know anymore what it was. I think it might have been 2018 or 17, where I, I had an ayahuasca journey. And that had a profound, effect on my connection to nature. And since that time, my concept of enoughess was inextricably tied to impact on the planet. Right. So through that experience, because of that experience, I began to be more aware of like, how plastics, how my use of plastics, was impacting the planet. Like, whenever I would throw a piece of plastic away, like, I would feel it in my body like a, like a punch in my gut. And I was like, right. And I would see other people throwing away plastic and I would feel it as a punch in my gut. And I started making my own beauty products, specifically like toothpaste and deodorant. And that kind of like, obviously saves on, you know, squeezable, tubes that I now find on the beach everywhere and those deodorant cartridges. and I started buying used clothing and u, and anything that I could buy used. I tried to buy used kitchen appliances versus buying things, new furniture especially. And the more I healed that part of me that was like, hungry for like, like that was like the need in me that was, that felt hungry and graspy. The less I needed externally, the more I felt like, robust inside myself. Almost like my spine got straighter or the. My inner body, which sometimes felt hollow, was like, filled up. And I, I’ve talked about this like, you know, this is silly, but the hollow versus the solid chocolates. It really felt like I was like a hollow bunny chocolate versus a solid one. So again the more I heale that hungry part of myself, the less I needed externally. And, and I got to a place of realizing that what I was, what I truly needed to be satisfied and well was so much less than we’re taught to need. And this happened over a long period of time. And this again this was like, this was an integral part of my un colonization journey. So this was step by step, side by side. The UN colonization was not separate from becoming a minimalist because un colonization for me is about returning to a more natural way of being which means divesting from capitalism which so much takes us out of our essential self and brings us into like replaces needs with products. And so I just became less of a consumerist as I uncoloonized myself. Myself with a capital S. And I’m not going to say everyone’s going to become a capitalist, sorry, a minimalist, working with this particular archetype or wound around need. but it’s likely that you’see profound changes in how you consume and how you, how you take from other people, right? How you get your needs met through grasping and taking. because the shadow side of this need is taking and taking without consent. and the reason we take without consent is because we don’t believe that if we ask for it it’s actually going to get fulfilled in healthy non extractive ways. So for example a child who grows up asking for what they need and trying to communicate what they need whether it’s verbally or through cries and that needee doesn’t get fulfilled, they kind of give up and collapse. And so there’s a decision that is made or a conclusion that has come to that is like I’m not going to get it fulfilled. I’m so, I’m notn to, I’m not going to reach out. I’m just going to take wherever I can get it to fill it up because I really need it. Right? So, so it takes on this sort of backdoor kind of energy. I’m going to get my needs met but I’m going to do it sideways. It’s like a secret kind of sideways taking. And for the people whose unfulfilled needs are combined with sociopathic personality traits they will be just very obvious and self righteous in their taking as we see in our current administration. All right, so that was the whole side quest, ah, around like the minimalism piece and what type of experience I was going to have here in Bali because I was already very, like, very far into my minimalism. And I actually, I was telling somebody yesterday, like, yeah, I had a baggage allowance of two per person, and I ended up just using one per person because we got rid of everything. And there, there are things that I wish that I’d brought with me in retrospect, like some of my favorite kitchen things, like my kitchen knives and maybe like a cast iron pan or something. but, yeah, like, you know, I knew that my experience in Bali was going to be just about putting my bare feet on the ground and really rewilding because I think that I had gotten to a place with my minimalism, with my unloonization journey, where I could no longer be like, living in a city or just not having, like, nature completely surrounding me and nature as dominant. I wanted nature to be dominant. I wanted to be sub to nature. so as you probably know, In April of 2024, I invested in a small co. Invested with my, with my business partner and in he a 10 room hotel that has been empty for. Had been empty for several years during COVID So it was, you know, Covid was especially impactful for Bali, which, you know, it’s an island that relies solely on tourism. Almost everyone here, I would say, like 90% of the economy is tourism and people go to college to study, you know, restaurant service, really like tourism based, education. So it was a really hard time for the people here. A lot of people found themselves in dire straits economically. They weren’t doing well. and if you’ve ever lived in a jungle, you know that when a house is empty for more than a month, the jungle just takes over. You’re constantly fighting it back. so while I was in the US Preparing for the move, Haype was fighting back the jungle so that the space would be prepared enough for me to be able to land there, for me and the kids to be able to land there. So prepared enough. What did that look like? So when Hype moved in, they saw that there was mold, there were plumbing issues, there was a roof leak, there were some pipe leaks, there were external walls that have not, had not been, treated and where water was penetrating. So there was a lot more that needed to be fixed that we had not expected. And we thought the owner would take care of those costs because he’s the owner and we are the leasers, but he, in fact did not. And that’s a whole other big controversy here in the Banjar slash neighborhood. So that experience colored our. Right, that, that fact that the owner wasn’t doing his part colored our experience of, of the place. So when I arrived in March of this year, 2025, the big question was whether we were going to stay and invest the energy and the money to repair to get up to a port felt rel that same amount of money and save our energy by moving to a villa where we wouldn’t have the energetic investment of managing the construction and the upkeep and the ongoing maintenance of a place. So that’s basically the question that we’ve been grappling with, is whether to stay and invest in the place or user energy in the numerous other business ideas that we, that we have. So some deeper expectations that I have been working to release since I’ve been here. honestly, I thought my experience in Bali was going to be different. U. it was basically like letting go of what I thought it was going to be versus what it actually is. M Because even though, again, I’m a minimalist, I knew that I was going to land barefoot in the jungle. I did have an idea that I was go goingna live sort of better than how I’d been living. And in fact I do. And this is sort of where the question this is sort of how interesting this is. So I thought that I was going to live better and that meant having a major lifestyle upgrade. Okay. So when I arrived, it was a bit of a shock to me because I didn’t have access to a kitchen. It was a kitchen downstairs. But another one of our housemates uses that primarily. And so I felt like I was in her space. It didn’t quite work for us. so I was starting. I was eating out three meals a day. I was having to wash dishes in the bathroom because we didn’t have a sink. It was basically indoor camping and definitely a downgrade in some ways that are significant to me because I love to cook. As you know, I, you know, I don’t really love going out to eat. I mean, here it’s definitely. I’ve developed a taste for it. but it was a downgrade in a lot of ways, that were significant to me. And one thing that I knew for sure and that I continue to know for sure is that I want to continue living with hyp fee. I really love the energy of living with another family. I think it’s super important to me. My system loves the interdependence sharing space with another family. There’s. We just have so many values in common. And that just enhances the experience of living abroad for me. And of course there’s also practical aspects to living together, such as sharing household TKS tasks and being able to, you know, lean into another person in case of an emergency, in case you’re sick, which I have been a lot actually here. But the increase in the quality of life was very pronounced in that way. in June, you know, we were both fed up with the owner with indoor camping and we said, okay, we’re committing to getting the villa. Like, we’re done with the energetic investment, and it’s goingn, you know, we almost closed on the place and the universe found, almost found the most bizarre way to make it a no. and I don’t need to go into the details of that. It just didn’t feel like a safe bet anymore. It felt like, oh, that’s more complicated than I want it to be. I don’t think I really want that. And so over the summer I’ve been sitting with a question of what is enough? What is enough look like in this context. And I’m sharing this with you because I want you to ask yourself that question of what is enough? for example, if I were to get my own room because I was sharing a room with my youngest child, would it feel like enough space for me to, you know, have this, like, have my individuality and also feel like, yes, I have the connection to community. If we installved a sink, andall bought a cooktop, would it feel like enough of a kitchen for our family to gather around? Because for me and my children, the center of our home is our kitchen. And so gathering around for a meal and cooking together is a really important part of our family. So when we didn’t have that, it felt like our family felt sp blinted. That’s why it was so important to have that in place. yeah, I just felt like my family was suffering under the weight of the indoor camping and it wasn’t supporting their thriving. So in the process of making that one decision, whether we were going to stay or go, has just been felt incredibly complex because there were lots of different needs and desires that we had to take into account. there was location, there was children having access to other world schooling communities, there was a question where we of whether we truly wanted to be project managers, that kind of thing. Because if I didn’t have children, I could live in like, I can live in the most remote area and be completely happy. But I did still feel Like I needed to have, provide my children with social outlets, books, because they’re teenagers. Right. and so what I felt myself considering was what was enough. Because at that point, I’d realized that I didn’t, I didn’t need the Vilea experience. I’d had so many experiences with beautiful, luxurious places. Whether it’s a restaurant or staying overnight somewhere. I didn’t necessarily need to live in a space that was luxurious. It just didn’t light me up or thrill me in the way that it had when I first arrived. Because when I first arrived I was just like, oh my God, this is incredible. And look at the. And it was just the luxury of the nature of plants everywhere and so, and just the beauty, the luxury of the beauty of the nature combined with wonderful food or just the view and all of those things. So when I asked myself what was enough, I felt like it was really about having a sink and a cooktop that I could fix myself some basic meals and having. Getting my own room that is investing the money and the energy with project management was a game changer because, you know, my youngest was starting to need her own space and I had been sharing a bed with her since she was a baby. So I’d never. I’ve had my own room, but I’ve never slept alone. So sleeping alone now is like I am spread eagle down the bed. I’m just kind of like kicking around and yeah, spread eagle down the bed. So it’s been really important for me in ways that I didn’t even realize. this past August we completed a week of intense renovations and we’continue into this month, with the aim of being done by the end of the month. And we have no idea what’s going to be unfolding next. We are letting it happen organically and there are many ideas of what is going to happen next. We are floating ideas for other businesses. We are in daily conversations with our guides to see what that will be. And so I, we are just trusting and I am trusting in the unfolding. I think there is a really important balance to strike between, you know, trusting in the unfolding and trusting that it’ll all be okay with that future planning with the preparation, like I am setting aside money for land, I am, you know, making my investments, you know, setting aside emergency fund money still like building up that six month emergency fund, increasing to one year emergency fund, you know, just things like that, like, you know, hope for the best and plan for the future and also just be in the now. So really that juxtaposition there. So I want to leave you with some thoughts and questions about sufficiency, satisfaction, enoughness, that when you find yourself in any sort of scarcity, be it money, be it love, certain conditions, and you’ll identify it as a desire to hoard or feel unable to be generous. Like, I’ve been in situations where I felt money scarcity and there was an opportunity to donate or give money, and I felt like, well, I’ll just give $20 when I could really actually get 50. Right. More than. More than double. So I want you to be just aware of those little moments where it’s like, oh, I feel unable to be fully generous in the way that I want to be. That, you know. Right. When you feel any sort of scarcity like that, you know, it is the wound of insufficiency. And so I want you to be aware when that’s happening and in what situations that shows up for you. And I want to invite you to just pause and feel and specifically feeling into your lower abdomen, make putting your hand just between your. Your navel and your pubic bone, breathing into that space. U. I want you to be aware of what’s happening and let yourself just kind of be with that for a moment. Feel the need, if you can. yeah. Feeling the unfulfilled need is one of the sneakiest wounds, aside from shame, because your system will do anything possible to not feel it, to bypass that sensation. And that’s why it’s important to stop doing whatever you’re doing and bring that attention inward in a way that is very intentional and granular. Because your system will want to skip over it and it’s ingenious and it’s bypassing. Right? It’ll be like, but I just need a piece of chocolate, or I just need a drink, right? And so’ll it’ll do something like that. So the next time you’re enjoying a meal, give yourself the opportunity to stop eating when you’re no longer hungry versus stopping eating when you feel full and notice what comes up for you. This exercise, exercise alone will challenge you. It’snna. It’s gonna. It can be a tremendous challenge if you have used food as a, way to fill yourself up. The next time you’re buying yourself some clothes, ask yourself if you truly need the thing that you are buying, because I can guarantee that more often than not, the answer will be no. And when you consider the impact of your actions, the impact that your actions will have on the environment or on other communities, do you still want it? Or more importantly, do you still need it? So stay abundant, my dear family. and I’m sending you abundant love. I’ll, see you on the next episode. Thank you for listening to today Today’s episode. Remember to hit the subscribe button to get notified of new episodes dropping on the new and full moons of each month. And if you haven’t already, leave us a five star review on itunes to make sure that everyone who needs this transmission receives it. Until the next episode, I’m sending you feier Fear love.