It's day 2 of a spring self-directed retreat. A retreat I decided I must need because my home has descended into a mild state of squalor.
The insight I had on the second day of my last retreat was about the importance of my physical health. This one I'm meditating specifically on the importance of my environment and the tangled emotional relationship I have with housework.
Housework is tightly wound up in all the Buddha nature blockers. Faint heartedness because just looking at all this mess makes me want to crawl up into a ball. Judgement of others because I'm constantly living in reaction toward the people who I feel are imposing these cleanliness values on me. Seeing the untrue as true because the society I live in believes that your home and the state of your home tells everyone who you are, and I tend to accept this and have a low opinion of myself, no matter how much I am self asserting myself through rebellion. Seeing the true as untrue, because no matter how many insights I have about my precious self, when I look at my squalid home that insight gets flushed down the drain. And finally, self obsession. Without consistent cleaning rituals I am constantly being drawn into this recurring game of self-assessment.
I made a decision a long time ago that I was not simply going to accept my messiness. That I was going to work to develop better habits. It would be great to find a way that meditation gets carried over into that decision.
In the last two hours of meditation I found myself resting in timeless and boundless awareness, feeling that liberation from the conceptual. I am not the sock, the dustbunny, the chip bag on the floor. I'm not even really my body, so how can I be any of these things.
Cleaning meditation is such a nice, short way to liberate oneself from the obsessions and ruts of daily life. May I find a way to free myself and everyone from suffering, one dish, one folded shirt, one dustpan at a time.
