62 WASH YOUR DISHES WITH NATURAL AWARENESS

Many people are familiar with an excellent instruction in classical mindfulness practice of turning an everyday activity into a mindful activity. Suggestions for such informal mindfulness practice include brushing your teeth or showering with focused or flexible awareness, for example, or remembering to be mindful each time you open your car door.

But how can we bring natural awareness into a routine daily activity? Certainly, repeated practice can develop a habit, thereby making natural awareness more available to us throughout the day.

Years ago, when I first started meditating, I waitressed at a Japanese restaurant. I hoped to practice mindfulness in daily life as much as possible, but I was getting discouraged at work. The restaurant was so loud and chaotic that I found it hard to focus. So I made a decision: every time I pushed on the swinging door between the kitchen and the dining area, I would be mindful. I practiced noticing the feel of my hand against the wooden door as I pressed on it.

I must have noticed my hand fifty-plus times in the course of each night, and after a while, an interesting thing began to happen. The short moments of focused awareness began to bleed into the rest of the night, and soon I found myself aware in a much less focused, more global way. I could be aware simultaneously of the sounds and the sights around me, and my balancing sushi tray, and my body, and the customers, and my coworkers. I began to relax into what seemed to be a natural awareness, without exactly knowing that was what I was doing.

My experience in the restaurant can help us think about how to bring natural awareness into daily life. Let’s look at a complex activity like washing the dishes. For me, washing the dinner dishes could also include watching my daughter demonstrate her latest invented dance, a rush of table clearing, and, well, whatever chaos is happening around me as I try to wash the dishes. Focused awareness on, say, the feel of my hands on a dish (while it could be a great place to start) may be too restricting, especially if my awareness is being drawn to so many things.

So instead of having a single focus, I open my attention in a broad way. I wash, and I notice what it is I notice, where my attention is drawn. I relax, unclenching my belly, softening my body, and I feel an expansive sense of awareness with the full experience. Sometimes I’m watching the incredible show of me washing the dishes and watching the dance routine. I notice thoughts coming and going, sometimes capturing me, and then I practice melting back into this global sense of natural awareness. I’m often quite content, even though the story I tell myself is that I don’t particularly like to wash the dishes.

Perhaps natural awareness practice is the perfect practice for parents, since with kids, there’s always a certain amount of chaos and complexity going on around us. But any busy human can benefit from it.

It is also possible that natural awareness might be more suitable than classical mindfulness for complex activities, although both are valuable. Any kind of awareness is good awareness in my book!