New Daily Meditative Practice

I’ve started a new daily meditation practice. It is interesting how it started. Who would have thought that my solution to a daily frustration would turn into a meditation practice? I’ve been doing this daily meditation practice for over a week now and it really adds something to the flow of my day. I work from a home office and because work is always close by, it can be hard to transition from “being at work” to “being at home”. Before I started this daily meditation, I would constantly check my work computer in the evenings. “Hmm I wonder if so and so responded to this” etc. And some days it felt like I never really stopped working.

Now there is a clear transition period between work hours and home hours. This meditation practice gets me away from my work computer when work should be done. It gives me some mental space to think about the day, what has already happened – what I have left that I want to accomplish – what I should make for dinner. I also feel more grounded when I am through and I feel like I have accomplished something good for my family.

What is this wonderful daily meditation practice you ask? Well, it is something EVERYONE can do. Are you ready?

It’s the …………………………………………………… DISHES!

Our dishwasher is probably from the 90s and the whole process just seems to take so much time. And half the time, a good portion of the dishes don’t even get clean! One day I just got sick of it and decided to turn our dishwasher into one MASSIVE drying rack. And you know what, I haven’t looked back since. Before, it would take one to two days to have the dishwasher be full enough to warrant running a load of dishes. Then you’d have to wash the dishes, then you’d have to open it up and let it dry, then you’d have to dry the pools of water that were left on top of these brown cups we have (gross), then you’d have to carefully inspect everything as you put it away because 2 out of 3 times some grit from the dishwasher would be left on and you’d have to do an additional quick wash. Then you’d start the whole cycle all over again.

Now we use far less dishes because I wash them every day, so it is a manageable size to wash and to put away later. The dish washer is always “clean dishes” so we no longer have the discussion “Is the dishwasher dirty or clean?” All the dishes and pots and pans get clean the first time around. And I use the soapy water to clean the counters at the end of it all too. Plus (and this is the big PLUS) it’s very meditative. I relax as I do the dishes, I process thoughts (and there have been a lot lately!) and I just learn to BE in the moment with my hands soapy and the rhythmic clatter of dishes as I toss them in the rinse water. Sometimes even Ni will help me rinse and place stuff in the drying rack, which gives us a chance to just talk and be present, in the moment, together.

I used to hate dishes. Now there are so many benefits to doing them, I really don’t mind them at all.

Is this daily meditative practice for everyone? Probably not. Will I continue doing this? As a true Minnesota would say……………… You betcha!