4 Keys To Your Best Homestead Life

If you are desiring better health, more happiness, connection with people and the land and greater abundance in your life then you are likely reading the right article.

If you are interested in growing your own food or even starting a homestead or farm, then you are absolutely reading the right article.

You are going to learn the center point for all of these life improvements and where to start with any of them.

Ready for the punch line?

It all centers around the homestead – the holistic homestead to be precise.

Let’s talk about that real quick before diving into the core components that each associate with desires such as happiness, wealth and health.

The Holistic Homestead

A picture is worth a thousand words, right? So check out this diagram of what the holistic homestead is:

As you can easily see, the homestead is the fulcrum from a variety of actives from gardening to your income source, and each of these span different areas of our lives such as mind or body.

You can read more about the Holistic Homestead here.

So the big take away here is this:

Shifting your life to be more homestead oriented is an action step that correlates and supports improving your life. 

Sounds pretty good, right? And it makes sense.

Body health is attributed to quality food, no toxins and exercise right? When you orient your life to the homestead life, your gardening practice alone will help support bodily health, not to mention create a connection with your food, the land and maybe even a greater power, which supports the health of your mind.

Pretty interconnected, right?

That’s why it’s holistic – there is a complete picture here and any one component that is missing creates an imbalance in life.

So what are the 4 components and how do they relate to the holistic homestead?

1) Health

To be your best self you need to live life with the most optimal health – both mind and body. But what are the actual actives that compose a healthy lifestyle on the homestead?

Growing Your Own Food

• The healthiest food is the food that you grow. You can ensure there are no chemicals, that is is as nutrient dense as possible and that it has low food miles.

Herbalism 

• Most modern medicines are based on a plant component, and these healing plants are still at our disposal to replace medicines that sometimes have adverse side effects. Everything from teas to salves to antiseptics.

Wild Foraging 

• There are foods around growing in the wild that are incredibly nutrient dense that you can east! Anything from Oaktree acorns to dandelions. Wild foraging expands our diets to local foods and local nourishment.

Cooking

• It’s no secret that processed food is the root of many modern illnesses. Of course, with a homestead lifestyle, we want to grow our own food, but that also leads you into cooking from scratch (as in minimally processed foods), which ensure your foods are of the highest quality. Cooking becomes the center of most any homestead and tell me, who doesn’t like to eat good food?

2) Happiness

In addition to healthy, you quality life depends on a high degree of happiness. So what are some of the ways in which a holistic homestead supports happiness?

Connection To Food

• There is a reason why so many people call it the good life. It’s because they feel connected and connection brings happiness. Have you ever grown your own food? If not, there are almost no words to describe the feeling of pulling your first tomato off a plant you grew yourself and took a bite.

Connection To Land

• Getting your hands in the garden means you start forming a relationship and understanding of the ecological process necessary to actually grow food. This, in turn, starts developing our connection to land, place and eventually the bigger picture of how delicately life is sustained on earth.

Connection To Source

• Many people will tell you that their homestead life seems to bring them one step closer a greater being, call it what you will. The quietness, the fresh air, the low-stress life all open our senses to more delicate energies that are all around us.

Community 

• Most homesteaders are community oriented and it’s in these quality interactions where people support others that we can find an additional level of happiness. Family and friends, at the essence of it, are the most important things in our lives, right?

Mindset

• Happiness is hugely dependent on mindset, and the mindset of the holistic homestead is focused on creating a good life, not a victim life. Through this lens of living “the good life,” your mindset will begin to shift and limiting beliefs can fall away opening up room for greater happiness.

3) Abundance

A good life is built on having enough of the things we need to fill our basic needs. Things like food and money, which a homestead centered life can provide.

Life

• Likely if you start a homestead you will either be adding plants or your land will have a natural forest, to begin with. You start to see the quantity of life that is around you, the trees, grasses, birds and more. This, in turn, fills an inner need, at a basic level, to feel life all around us.

Food

• Abundance is often a word used when a person first enters a homestead garden – and for good reason – there is food growing everywhere! Maybe even more than one can actually use. Abundance is more than money or things, it’s everything in our life that is in a healthy quantity.

Money

• For many who start their own homesteads, the ability to create their own income becomes part of the lifestyle. It’s for this reason that the homestead has additional control over their income and let’s be honest, there is a basic level of income needed to be happy and healthy right?

4. Social Cause

Humanity, Permaculture & Sustainability 

• As you can imagine, the holistic homesteader becomes in tune with the rhythms of nature, the delicate balance that is life. It’s for this reason that the need for social awareness rises – topics like polluted watersheds, soil degradation, eco-system destruction to name a few. In becoming aware of these topics the holistic homestead begins to understand there is a deeper purpose and meaning to our lives – to be an advocate for future generations, the ones that we are being lent this planet from.

How do we start shifting our lives to be more holistic and include all aspects of health, happiness, abundance and social cause?

We recognize that we have the capability to design our own lives.

Life Design

There are two types of people – people who believe life happens to them and people who believe that they make life happen.

The people that believe life happens to them… and well, it does just that because they are not steering the ship. They are the people that feel subject to the circumstances of the world. They say, “this person did that to me,” “I can’t because the world is this way.” And so on, this cycle continues.

Then there are people who believe that their actions, mindset, and beliefs can help them create the life they desire. These also tend to be the people we deem as successful – they don’t believe that they are subject to the circumstances of life. They create their life and successes and, by successful I don’t mean rich, famous or celebrities. I mean people that we might look up to – like anyone in the self-sufficient, homestead community. The people that are actually DOING it. Making it happen.

So, which would you prefer? Would you prefer to believe that you have no control over your life and are therefore subject to everything everyone else does?

Or would you prefer to believe that maybe you have control, over at least a large portion of your life, and can therefore actually choose what your life looks like?

This is the essence of the idea of designing your life – and starting your dream homestead all starts with activity choosing to design the self-sufficient life you desire.