Top Tip #4 – Delight in the Mundane

The whole essence of mindfulness is to be fully where you are, and to be here comfortably in the present moment without any desire to be anywhere else. Once we realise that nothing other than now exists, it makes perfect sense to be here, fully engaged in reality rather than away in our heads, lost in an unreality and absent from life. Why would you swap even the rosiest day dream for the miracle of your existence?

Of course it’s easier to want to be where you are when you are sunning yourself on the beach than when you are stuck in front of a computer in the office, or up to your eye balls in washing up. But in truth you can only ever be where you are and the wanting to be somewhere else is taking the shine off your life. So next time you find yourself stuck in the mundane, stop, let go of your resistance to what is and engage fully with where you are.

A woman from one of our Mindfulness courses inspired me to write this, she told me that after our last class she had made a conscious effort to be here in the now as much as possible,  and to use whatever she was doing at that moment as a focus to bring her  back into the now.  “I’ve never enjoyed scrubbing the floor so much” she said “it’s my new meditation, in fact all my house work is a meditation”.  She had discovered the miracle of mindfulness; she had discovered how when we bring our full mindful attention on to any task, we transform it. It goes from being a chore to an expression of the moment. We get to see the light reflecting back off the clean surface, we experience the movement of our arm, the sound of the brush and the light in the bubbles.

Is scrubbing the floor any better or any worse than sitting down drinking tea?  No it’s simply what we are doing now.  Mindfulness teaches us that what we get out of each moment, the intensity of our life experience, is not so much determined by where we are or what we are doing but by our depth of presence and how fully we are engaged. What we get from this moment is our state of being in this moment. Finishing the floor cleaning is no better than doing the floor cleaning. Do it fully and discover the delight in the mundane.

Adrian

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