Do you think it is easier to clean the house after a deep clean? Or is it easier to clean it every day?
The answer to that can depend on many factors – what was the state of the house? Is it in a location which gets more dust? Do the people who live in the house care about keeping the house clean? What does ‘clean house’ mean to them? How much time are they willing to spend on cleaning the house?
If you are wondering why I am talking about cleaning – hold that thought.
As some of you know, I did a twenty-day Vipassana meditation course last month, and since then, we also did a one-day sit locally with other meditators in the area. I was telling my peers at work about the one-day sit. And folks who work in technology have some nerd/geek inside of them, as in they think of life in tech analogies. So one of them said, ‘So, the one-day sits are like clearing the cache for you, and the longer courses are like disk fragmentation.’ My answer was, ‘Yes – the longer that you can fragment (clean) your disk, the more daily maintenance becomes that much easier.’
Now think about our minds – from the time we are born, we fill it with ways we should behave in certain situations, words we should use, how we trust people or not trust them, and like or dislike certain items. And most of these items are stored in our minds because we never take the time to examine them and see if we still need them. It’s like pathways that the Colorado River has carved in the grand canyon – we keep going down the path without ever examining it – long after our destination has changed.
Meditation is to our mind and body what deep and daily cleaning is for homes. I recently attended a talk by Raj Sisodia, author of Conscious Capitalism – who suffered from chronic back pain. And once he went on a few healing retreats where he got in touch with his body, his back pain disappeared. We spend billions on treating back pain – inserting metal fuses, steroids etc. when all we need to do is clean the dust and grime that has settled in our body and mind for years. And once the house is clean, the germs and illness will go away automatically. The word ‘dis-ease’ literally means not at ease.
What does cleaning our body and mind mean? It means being aware of what is happening in our body and accepting whatever arises. Sometimes the pain or stress we face in daily life is so much that our delicates minds cannot deal with it, and it is all repressed in our bodies somewhere. And it is that hidden away mental pain that shows up as body pain. If we sat and dealt with daily stresses instead of suppressing them through other things, we would indeed be healthy.
Sadly, this is not a common practice – only a few people I know talk about cleansing their minds, meditating, yoga, and journaling – activities that put them in touch with their bodies. How often are you cleaning your mind and body?