It does not matter what you are watching or what you are paying attention to; it is simply your watchfulness and awareness that becomes meditation. -Osho
We spend a huge chunk of our lives at home, sometimes alone, sometimes with family. On average, we spend more than 10 hours a day at home. Even though we identify a lot with our careers, jobs, or business, so much of our time goes into simple tasks at home or daily chores – cooking, cleaning, bathing, laundry, and so on. On a dull day, let’s say you work for 10 hours and sleep for 8, leaving 6 hours at home. These 6 hours or 25% of our daily life we spend at home; how can this time be used effectively to make our lives better?
The things we do at home may look boring and repetitive, as a mundane activity that we just have to go through. We return home after a tiring day at work, mentally listing all the chores: “I have to clean my dishes, I have to make my food.” This word “have to” makes it sound so boring, so unexciting. And that’s how we end up seeing it – 25% of our life reduced to something we just have to go through.
No, this is not the right way to discard 1/4th of our life as something to endure, as a “have to.” What if it could be a time for meditation, a spiritual practice, and an inner journey into the depths of who you are? And I don’t mean it by simply sitting at home and meditating, but what if observing how we live in our homes becomes a spiritual practice? That’s what this article is about – a vision to make our tiny homes into a great teacher of life.
Awareness
The way to learn is through awareness.
Awareness is simply knowing what is happening at this moment.
Imagine you are standing in your home. You know a chair is nearby, so you are aware of it. This is awareness: noticing the world around you right now, in your home, knowing if it is clean or dirty, messy or neat, dark or light, empty or full. All this knowledge at any given moment is your awareness of your home. Apart from home, there is you – your body and mind. Thoughts are always running through your head, and emotions and sensations are going through your body. To notice all these at any given moment is to be aware. One might say, “Well, this is easy; I am already aware of everything.” This is a very, very far from the truth.
Have you ever noticed that food tastes different when you cook on an empty stomach and feel hungry, compared to when you are full and have no appetite? It affects how much effort and care you put into cooking your food, and that greatly affects the taste of the food. Have you also noticed that sometimes, when you are angry, you chew food aggressively, and at other times, you are so caught up in your thoughts and emotions that you don’t even realize how the food tastes? These things are simple and very easy to miss. But like this, 100s of things are happening without our knowing or awareness of it right at this moment.
Have you ever noticed that food tastes different when you cook on an empty stomach and feel hungry, compared to when you are full and have no appetite? It affects how much effort and care you put into cooking your food, and that greatly affects the taste of the food. Have you also noticed that sometimes, when you are angry, you chew food aggressively, and at other times, you are so caught up in your thoughts and emotions that you don’t even realize how the food tastes? These things are simple and very easy to miss. But like this, 100s of things are happening without our knowing or awareness of it right at this moment.
The other day, I was washing my dishes in the kitchen, which I am not that fond of. Initially, I was just washing dishes without any awareness of my body and my mind. After a while, suddenly I became aware of my body – I noticed how much my body, especially my legs, were tensed while me washing dishes. After some time, I became aware of how my mind was thinking about office work.
Like this, everything we do in life, 24/7, so much is going on the outside, and even more things are going on in our body and mind. Definitely, it is not easy to have awareness of everything. It will take years to come to such a state of awareness where you are actually aware of both outside and inside at the same time. But it is only through practice and practice that awareness deepens in life.
You might ask, why such awareness is needed?
Have you ever noticed? You take a nice vacation and book yourself a good hotel. The moment you enter your hotel room, you see that it has just been cleaned before you arrived, the bed sheets are clean, and clean towels are available. Sometimes you find yourself with a nice view outside your windows. Immediately, there is a shift in your mental state, a feeling of newness. You feel excited and alive, and you are looking forward to your few days of stay. One thing is for sure: that the home where you live, the outer world, affects your mind, the inner world.
Another example: You just moved into a new home that you recently rented. You noticed that the previous owner arranged things in a way that doesn’t feel right to you. Right away, you began changing things to suit your preferences. Little by little, over a few weeks, the new home lost the old owner’s touch and started feeling like yours in many ways. Another thing is certain too: our mind—our inner world—also shapes the home, the outer world we live in.
This is why the awareness has to be two-fold. We will have to be observant of how we are affecting the home we live in, and how the home we are living in is affecting us. By this, it becomes a spiritual process – a process of learning.
An Analogy: Outside World (Home) and Inner World (Body and Mind)
Let’s draw an analogy between our home (outer-world) and our mind (inner-world). This will help in understanding meditation and the spiritual process more deeply.
Empty House ←→ Empty Mind
Have you ever walked into a home that is totally bare, with no furniture in it, looking quite clean? Immediately, you will feel a sense of peace and silence in this space. This is quite similar to an empty mind that has no thoughts, distractions, or noise. A deep silence, emptiness, and peace are the qualities of an empty mind.
I would imagine there must be many who don’t like empty spaces at all; it would make them anxious. This is why so many people do their best to fill their homes with furniture as fast as they can. I have always loved empty spaces, bare minimum things in a home. If you love empty spaces, it’s good – you know the taste of silence, the peace of emptiness.
This space of empty house and empty mind has a powerful quality of potential for creativity. The empty houses give you a chance to place new furniture in any way you want to. The home can be shaped in an unlimited number of ways. Hence, this emptiness creates a space for creativity, which allows decorating the house with something new, something different. This is exactly how an empty mind is – a beautiful space for new potential and creativity.
Rigid Furniture (Bed, Sofa, Kitchen Appliances, Water System, and Electrical Wiring) → Subconscious Beliefs and Personality: Fixed ideas about who we are.
Usually, large furniture like beds, sofas, and wardrobes, along with essential utilities such as kitchen appliances, water systems, and electrical wiring, are placed inside an empty house. These big and extremely necessary furnishings finally give the home a certain structure. Once in place, they’re very difficult to move. But without them, it would be almost uncomfortable to live in your home. These immovable items inside the home provide structure, increase the home’s usefulness, and at the same time, bring a rigidity to it.
This is exactly how the subconscious mind is formed. As a child, we have an empty mind. We are born into a family, parents, culture, and society. To live with parents and society, the child starts to adapt to the outside environment. Slowly, little by little, as the child learns and survives in the family and society, it forms very rigid ideas of life and people. This rigid set of ideas and beliefs becomes the subconscious mind. As you become an adult, these subconscious beliefs and ideas shape your behavior in life. They become your personality, and you identify with them, thinking, “This is who I am.” Like rigid furniture, the subconscious mind has utility—it helps you survive in the family and society you’re born into, and it provides you with a structure for life. But with it comes rigidity, creating a fixed personality.
For example, if you are born into a family where your parents are against you getting angry, and they teach you from childhood never to get angry at anybody, that can create a subconscious belief in you that anger is wrong—you should never get angry. As you grow older with such a belief, as an adult person, you wouldn’t have the capacity to get angry, even if other people hurt you or exploit you. You just tell yourself, “This is who I am, this is my personality. I am not an angry person.” The idea that “I am not an angry person” has become a part of your subconscious mind now. Why was this idea created in you as a child, to better adapt to the parents you were living with? It had great usefulness in not upsetting your parents. Like this, your subconscious mind is full of beliefs that were useful at some point in your life.
Every home that any person lives in is a unique mix of many things. There will be empty space (the original state), a set of rigid furnishings, and other useful things lying around to be used. This gives every home its uniqueness.
So it is with all of us. All of us have a set of rigid subconscious beliefs shaping our lives, useful thoughts and emotions, we are conscious of, and a part of our mind is silent/empty. This makes us all unique in our own ways.
Renovating and Deep Cleaning ←→ A Change in Personality
What if you want to radically change your home’s appearance and atmosphere? What you need is a complete renovation, which includes removing rigid furniture, bringing in new pieces, and doing a thorough cleaning of the entire place. Essentially, this means returning to a completely empty house and adding new appliances and furniture to give it a fresh look.
This is exactly the same for our lives and minds. What if you want a radical change in your personality? Maybe because you don’t like the way it is, or you want to experience life in a different way than you have been your whole life. What is needed is to go back to the state of the mind that is empty and silent.
Often, self-help books out there tell you to change your life using some tips and tricks of” Do this, do that, be like this, be like that.” It is like trying to change a house by rearranging small items from here to there. This is why real radical change never happens by small adjustments in the mind. Why? Because the rigid subconscious beliefs remain the same, like the home remains the same if you rearrange small items like a chair and a table from here to there.
To have a real change in life is to go back to the original state of the mind – emptiness and silence. The process to reach this state of silence is meditation. Hence, in a way, meditation can be seen as a process of cleaning the mind. Fundamental to meditation is the awareness of the content of the mind. The only way to clean is when we know that something needs to be cleaned. Because sometimes subconscious beliefs are so deeply hidden in our minds that we are totally unaware of them. They guide our lives like a program running autonomously in a computer, without our own knowledge. This is why to clean is to deepen your awareness of the content of the mind. The deeper the awareness, the deeper will be the cleaning. But it is a slow, tedious, and difficult process, as subconscious beliefs have to be wiped clean from the mind. It will also be a very painful process, like removing old stains from the corners of the house. So to have a real change in life is to spend an enormous amount of time being aware of the content of the mind, and making that awareness deeper and deeper. Hence, meditation → deep cleaning of the mind requires extensive time in solitude.
Meditation: A necessity in life – A continuous cleaning of the home
There is always a seeking for newness in life. It is the experience of new things that makes us more alive. To truly live life is to experience freshness and newness daily. It is not only a luxury but a necessity in life to be alive. Meditation is the way to be more alive.
When you don’t clean your home, it naturally becomes dirty and messy. Slowly, if you never clean, the dirt and mess will keep on increasing. The experience of such a home will be dull. We know this instinctively, and this is why we know that daily and regular cleaning of the home is a necessity. Otherwise, the house will become dull. A home that has been cleaned recently feels fresh.
Similar to the home is our life and mind. Naturally, it becomes messy and dull. In fact, you can say that this is the nature of the mind, to become messy and dull.
For example: “Today you shared a personal secret with a friend as an act in vulnerability, and you trusted that he would keep it a secret. But later you found out that he didn’t keep it a secret. So the nature of the mind is such that, you will assume people are like this, they can’t be trusted with your vulnerability. Automatically, you become less vulnerable to the other friends and people in general as well, because now you have learned that people are not to be trusted. But the reality is that friend was not to be trusted, and this does not apply to everyone you meet in life. This is how mind becomes dull and rigid by life experiences, and naturally it makes our whole experience of life less alive, and dull.”
The mind is great at making theories, generalisations, and conclusions about life and people. This is why the mind immediately draws conclusions from life experiences and generalizes them, and projects them onto other people. “If someone hurts you,” →Mind generalizes that people are like this, “if someone is kind to you.” → The mind would generalize this, too, as people are like this. “You met someone from one country and you liked them.” → The mind would conclude that people are good from this country. And if you become aware of your mind, you will see that your mind is continuously trying to generalize people and life experiences. The more aware you become, the more you will realize that the mind is making absurd generalizations about life and people, that is not at all real. This is how the mind becomes dull, and that leads to a life void of newness and aliveness. This is why a continuous cleaning of the mind daily is absolutely necessary in life.
Daily Meditation: A special time must be dedicated in a day for meditation, an hour or so. Just sitting with yourself, doing nothing, looking at all your thoughts and emotions coming to your mind, becomes meditation. You will notice that the thoughts that come to your mind are usually about events that have happened today or yesterday. Those are the events that have affected you more than others in good or bad ways. There is a myth that you need a special technique to meditate. Not true. This simple process of spending time with yourself alone, letting the thoughts and emotions pass by, becomes meditation. This will clean the mind naturally and keep it fresh. If you do it regularly for months, a sense of freshness will arise in your life automatically without any effort on your part.
People who don’t meditate daily or have a way of cleaning their minds regularly are self-harming themselves. If you see that cleaning your home daily or regularly is a necessity, then you must see that the same thing applies to our own minds.
Living Alone: A Spiritual Practice
Up until now, I have tried describing what meditation means, and to work on your own mind with home as an analogy. Still, my initial idea of using the 6 hours we spend at home, making it useful, remains underexplored. The best spiritual practice is paying attention, becoming more aware of yourself and the home where you are. And if you live alone, it is a sweet chance for something great to happen in solitude. Living alone – is a great and precious opportunity, because your own home is only and only influenced by you, and nobody else is there, so what you see in the outside of yourself is, in fact, a reflection of your own mind. Nobody else is involved. This simple fact brings great possibility. To watch your home and also watch your mind becomes meditation.
One condition is of need, when you want to be meditative, when you are simply spending time with yourself alone in your home, is to be vulnerable, to be who you are. What I mean by this is not pretending and being honest. When guests come to your place, you make your place a bit better, a bit different than how you usually keep your home. Yes, this is practical and needed. We all do this. We do this because we are afraid of getting judged by others in a harsh way. So we take cleanliness, beauty, and smell seriously and make it as good as it can be before guests arrive. To be vulnerable, I mean, is to drop this trying to keep your home in a certain way, when you are alone by yourself. If you are messy, be messy; if you are chaotic, be chaotic; if you like to be very, very structured, be that. But whatever comes to you, be that – of course, in a legal way 😀. Don’t listen to other people telling you that you should keep your home like this, like that. And it is very, very easy to be like this when you are in your home alone by yourself, when no one is watching. What happens by this is that your subconscious mind comes out without any barrier, and reflects back on how your home looks. If your mind is very messy and chaotic, your home will automatically reflect this. If you are very controlling in nature, it will also reflect in your home by it being too structured. And so on. So the key message here is, be vulnerable, in your home, with yourself, when no one is there at least. If you can be this, meditation automatically happens.
By doing this, each moment you spend in your home becomes a spiritual practice. Because as your mental state changes, so does the state of your home. You will see that when you are depressed or anxious, the room is different from when you are happy. Everything that is happening inside of you – emotions, thoughts, and actions affects your home. Your home changes with you organically and automatically. This will be a beautiful thing to watch. By this watchfulness of yourself and your home, you grow in awareness and maturity.
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