📿 Mental Love Notes From My Kitchen

Short meditation sessions, practiced on my feet.

Hello you, Adreanna here with this week’s dispatch of The Laundry —

There’s a traditional meditation instruction that that goes:

“Short sessions, many times.” 

As in: Just sit down. Let yourself be quiet and held by the invisible netting that keeps you afloat. Feel the breath in your body. Stay watchful of what arises here, but don’t touch it. Release yourself from doing anything active at all. Sit like this for 2 minutes. Sit like this for 5 minutes. Sit like this for as many minutes as you are able to wrangle down to earth without worrying about length or quality. Practice this again, and again, and again, and again.

At least: this is my personal interpretation of the instruction, especially now that my minutes to practice exist in short spurts between mothering, and not on an expansive continuum that stretches out into the horizon. Short sessions. Many times. 

I’ve historically put the emphasis on the “many times” piece of this phrase. I’m a stickler for repetition and cheerful zealot for the belief that anything done repetitively gets baked into the bones.

I’m also someone who historically has expected to be really good at something the first time that I try it, and will throw down my racket and walk off the court if it doesn’t come easily to me. All to say that I understand how someone might try meditation once, twice, maybe a third time for measure, and then give up because they don’t see the benefits. It’s a cumulative practice, like piano or tennis. It’s a practice that can feel clunky, awkward, or even abrasive at first, and only begins to feel…generative, clearing, energizing even, when we take it to the court “many times.”

This week, I’ve been paying special attention to the opening instruction— the “short sessions” piece of this phrase. I’ve been watching how opportunities for short practice are continually appearing and reminding me to practice on my feet. Anything can be a practice, really: a practice in staying open, of dedicating attention, of remaining fully present. This is a theme that we repeatedly return to here at The Laundry: meditation practice (of the Buddhist variety) as a way of navigating daily life. 

This week, I found the opportunities for practice to be abundant. Namely while doing three things: gardening, being productive, and putting away the dishes.

GARDENING

Or “dirt work” as our friend Robert called it. It’s my favorite thing to do in warm weather. I sometimes wonder if there are two types of gardeners — those who like digging and planting, and those who like weeding and pruning. Of course the world isn’t binary, isn’t split into two “types” of anything. I’m sure that most gardeners exist on a spectrum, like gender, sexuality or politics. I personally fall on the Kinsey scale of the gardening spectrum that favors weeding and pruning. I enjoy the editing process. 

However one likes to garden, there’s something disruptive about it, potentially even destructive about it — if you’re looking from the perspective of the ants, earthworms, beetles, and other small creatures whose habitats are being ripped into and are sometimes harmed in the process. This harm is unintentional, of course. They’re just casualties of the larger intention, which is shaping the garden.

I could be wrong, but I think most of the harm that we cause IS unintentional; very few people (that I know of) set about their day with the motivation to offend, overlook, injure or destroy. Often harm is just carelessness, a casualty of their larger motivation. Remembering this helps me to take insult less personally; helps me to operate from a place of forgiveness. I forgive others for the harm that they have caused me, and I forgive myself for the harm that I have caused.

As I garden, I find myself apologizing to the ants, the earthworms, the beetles, the soil— for my unintended harm— and in turn, releasing resentment towards others. Sometimes, I am the beetle. Sometimes, I am the gardener.

BEING PRODUCTIVE