Washing up meditation
Anything you do with awareness is meditation. Just quietly concentrating on your own breathing is meditation. Chores are a great way of practising. Enjoy the feeling of the warm water on your hands. Look at each plate, cup or spoon. You are making them shiny and new again. You are doing this as an act of love for your family or friends. Just be there in the moment…
Thanks Marie. I have been reading Simple Abundance and the author talks about housework as acts of meditation and love as well. It is just starting to make a difference, rather than looking on chores as drudgery, I am beginning to see them as a way to express myself and how I care about my home and my family.
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Being there in the moment…bowing to dishes at the kitchen sink…
“The true task of spiritual life is not found in far away places or unusual states of consciousness. It is here in the present. It asks of us a welcoming spirit to greet all that life presents to us with a wise, respectful, and kindly heart. We can bow to both beauty and suffering, to our entanglements and confusion, to our fears, and to the injustices of the world. To bow to what is rather some ideal is not necessarily easy, but however difficult, it is one of the most useful and honorable practices. To bow to the fact of our life’s sorrows and betrayals is to accept them; and from this deep gesture we discover that all life is workable. As we learn to bow, we discover the heart holds more freedom and compassion than we could imagine.” – Rumi, Persian poet
Outside the kitchen window…white summer clouds in a blue summer sky…
“Just as a white summer cloud, in harmony with heaven and earth freely floats in the blue sky from horizon to horizon following the breath of the atmosphere – in the same way the pilgrim abandons himself to the breath of the greater life that leads him beyond the farthest horizons to an aim which is already present within him, though yet hidden from his sight.” – Lama Govinda, The Way of the White Clouds
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One of the best meditation CDs is an old one by Dr Andrew Weill. On it, he says one of his favorite ways to meditate is by doing dishes. Meditating is a form of hypnosis. Anything we do to keep our conscious mind busy while our unconscious mind helps us relax or adopt a new behavior is a form of hypnosis.
I’ve used meditation and hypnosis before most of my 10 breast cancer surgeries and 8 chemos. I see a hypnotherapist who makes me custom tapes to listen to. After one of my surgeries, the anesthesiologist stopped by my room to tell me he didn’t have to use as much anesthesia to keep me at the level the surgeon required, and he was very puzzled about it.
I explained the custom hypnosis tape I’d listened to for 2 weeks before surgery: It said my body would begin to relax on a muscular skeletal level so I wouldn’t need as much anesthesia & pain meds & would heal quicker. He said he’d heard of that, but I was the 1st patient who’d used hypnosis. Also, I took NO pain meds at all. I rlove both meditation & hypnosis.
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Terrfic comments as always! I really needed to read this post today myself, as having returned from vacation, I can feel that old feeling of drudgery starting to creep in when I contemplate the housework…a feeling I had been released from when I was on vacation. This is a new way of looking at it and I am grateful for that.
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Just about to tackle a sink of washing up now…I was putting it off but now my attitude is changed by reading your post, I will do it with a more willing heart and sense of awareness.
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What a simple but effective meditation
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Since reading this last week, I’ve been trying to practise this meditation and I have to say it’s been making a big difference to how I tackle the dishes!
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