I Just Concluded My Wednesday Evening Meditation Group, and this Thought Arose

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

When asked to define meditation, the late Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, said:

“It’s doing one thing from beginning to end.”

The solitary focus on one thing is meditation

• Meditation could be making the bed

• It might be folding the laundry

• It could be sitting zazen

• It might be drying a dish

You get the point

But how often do we fold the laundry or wash the dishes while listening to a podcast or the weather report?

We usually do more than one thing at a time. We call it multitasking and feel we’ve gamed the system somehow.

But in so doing, we dilute the hidden potential of our otherwise mundane tasks —the gateways to meditation disguised as simple chores.