Zen & the Art of Making Your Bed

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My day officially begins when the bed is made.  Here is the process that repeats itself each time:

The bottom sheet and light brown blanket get pulled over the bed…no lumps in sight.  Then two body pillows get stacked, followed by four sleeping pillows, which are fluffed and leaned in pairs next to one another.  Next come six colorful throw pillows.  They are arranged by size and placed in different shapes according to my creative mood.  Finally, the down-filled comforter gets folded in half and then half again and placed, hotel-like, at the bottom of the bed.  Oops, I forgot the cashmere throw, which gets dangled at the edge of the bed.

This is the routine that happens each morning.  And because it is a task that must be repeated, I realized that it ought to turn into a “moment of zen”.  Ahh, you can just hear the distant birds chirping and the smell of orchards from the relaxation grotto!

But seriously, it is about practicality.  Becoming aware of your thoughts is not easy in the busy life that you lead.  Molding a daily practice into your routines is the best way to multitask your way to health and happiness.

Concurrently, it is about trimming the fat from your mind.  You have as many as 60,000 thoughts each day. There must be a way to whittle that number down.  So I developed a technique or practice that helps you become more aware of your wandering thoughts and replaces them with “present moment thinking”.  For example, when making the bed, the thoughts in my mind might go like this:  “I’m pulling the sheets tight. I’m fluffing the colorful throw pillows.  I’m folding the down filled comforter.  I’m arranging the cashmere throw.”

I know this doesn’t sound mind bogglingly difficult.  It isn’t meant to be.  But there is a process that needs to unfold.  Here are some guidelines:

• Before beginning the practice, notice your mind wandering.  Hear your thoughts stray to the past or future.  This awareness should “activate” the technique.

• Next, pull your attention back to the activity.  In this stage you fill the entire task with short, voluntary statements of present action.**  The more specific the better.  Observe if you are placing any emotion into your statements of present action.  Try to hear the thoughts in your mind as neutral and with no intonations.  Just keep repeating the same statement until the present task changes.  Yes, it sounds mind numbing, but that is the trick to allowing your mind to quiet down.  (Who wants to keep thinking the same thoughts over and over, but the reality is, you do, all day long, and don’t even know it.)

• Next stage is to decrease your reliance on these statements.  Allow longer pauses between each one and fill that space with breath awareness.  (Yes, it always comes back to the breath.)  When you hear a wandering thought poking at you, come back to the statements of present action.

• The final stage is to do the activity without any thoughts.  Imagine doing one activity, everyday, free of a working mind…paradise is found!

The point is not to stop your mind from thinking.  The thinking mind is natural.  It is your deep connection to thought that you are seeking to distance yourself from.  You need to practice being awake while living.  Thinking about the meeting that went all wrong while driving is not being “awake at the wheel”*** This practice, if done with your full commitment, will awaken you to new sensations and sensitivity of living.

Now go make your bed.

**Note: Last weeks blog mentioned that thought is “involuntary, automatic and repetitive”(Tolle).  In this exercise you are, to a larger degree, creating voluntary repetitive statements in the activity.  Each time you do the activity, the statements will be the same because the steps don’t alter (like brushing your teeth or washing the dishes).  Eventually, if you practice this long enough, you will feel the statements of present action moving involuntarily in your mind, into your awareness.  This means that the activity is becoming deeply rooted in the present and you are connecting to the “involuntary, automatic and repetitive” qualities of the thinking mind.

***Jonathan Fields