Before enlightenment; chop wood,\u00a0carry water.<\/p>\n
After enlightenment; chop wood,\u00a0carry water.<\/p>\n
The above is called a Buddhist koan, a proverb that emphasizes the importance of mindfulness\u00a0and presence while you\u2019re performing everyday tasks.\u00a0For me, this koan has\u00a0two meanings. The first suggests that personal growth isn’t about escaping the\u00a0ordinary. It\u2019s about finding meaning and fulfillment in the present moment\u00a0while performing ordinary, repetitive actions. The second is that regardless of\u00a0one’s spiritual or intellectual achievements, inner peace\u00a0comes from being completely present while we\u2019re doing anything.<\/p>\n
Back in the late sixties, I spent a day with a girlfriend,\u00a0Camilla, making a Greek dish called Moussaka. It was a long process of
gathering ingredients, melting butter, flour, milk and bay leaves, and whisking\u00a0them over a low heat. It was a slow meditative process and when we were\u00a0through, we felt peaceful and fulfilled.<\/p>\n
At dinner that night with a few friends, they all loved our\u00a0feast except for my boyfriend. He tasted the Moussaka and declared it tasteless
and a waste of time. I felt insulted and hurt but what I didn\u2019t understand\u00a0until later was that the time I spent cooking with Camilla, the feelings of\u00a0peace and fulfillment were the prize. The issue wasn\u2019t about how the food came\u00a0out or who appreciated it. It was about feeling content while I was doing the ordinary\u00a0act of preparing a meal for friends.<\/p>\n
The late tennis champion, Arthur Ashe said, \u201cSuccess is a\u00a0journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the\u00a0outcome.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is a Zen story about a young monk in a monastery who\u00a0dreamed of becoming enlightened, of being a great man. But every morning, the\u00a0Abbot directed him to chop wood for the fire and carry water to the kitchen for\u00a0cooking.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll I do is chop wood and carry water,\u201d he grumbled one\u00a0day. \u201cI want to be great like you.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing great is not what you think it is,\u201d the Holy man said.\u00a0\u201cI spend all my time reading scrolls and studying. When you stay focused on the\u00a0moment, not the past or the future, when you place your attention on what needs\u00a0to be done, the idea of greatness and enlightenment becomes less important than\u00a0being present in life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Being enlightened doesn\u2019t mean sitting on a silver throne,\u00a0spewing platitudes and having people bring you whatever you want. The way I see\u00a0it, it\u2019s about being real, humble, vulnerable and accepting, being an example\u00a0of compassion when compassion is difficult. As the young monk continued to chop\u00a0wood and carry water, he stopped feeling like a victim. He realized that although\u00a0nothing was changing on the outside, everything was changing on the inside.<\/p>\n
Any time we commit to doing something with determination and
humility, we\u2019re taking a step on the ladder to higher mindfulness and
compassion. In Zen lore, when the Buddha was seeking spiritual transformation,\u00a0a ferryman transported him across a river to the city. Initially the Buddha overlooked\u00a0the other man\u2019s deep connection to the flow of the river as a path to\u00a0enlightenment. But when he spent his time indulging in the material wealth of\u00a0the city, he realized that he was not on the path to inner peace. He returned\u00a0to the river and became the ferryman\u2019s apprentice, guiding other individuals to\u00a0seek their own spiritual understanding.<\/p>\n
I was reading a talk by Pema Chodron about the rewards of doing
the ordinary. She said, \u201cWhatever you\u2019re doing, the magic, the sacredness, the expansiveness,\u00a0the stillness, stays with you.\u201d She talked about using cooking as a spiritual\u00a0practice. She said that when we aspire to be mindful in the simplest of activities,\u00a0all of our emotions come into play. We burn things or we ace them. We undercook\u00a0things or we take them out of the oven at the perfect time. We fail, we\u00a0succeed, we’re clumsy, we\u2019re adept and most of us don’t like washing dishes.\u00a0But we do it because we crave peacefulness and contentment.<\/p>\n
If we spend our morning worrying about what we have to do in\u00a0the afternoon or what we did yesterday, we\u2019re wasting an opportunity to soothe and\u00a0comfort ourselves. To feel the rewards of peace and compassion. If we become\u00a0present and do what we have to do that is not extraordinary, we\u2019ll find peace in\u00a0the ordinary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Before enlightenment; chop wood,\u00a0carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood,\u00a0carry water. The above is called a Buddhist koan, a proverb that emphasizes the importance of mindfulness\u00a0and presence while you\u2019re performing everyday tasks.\u00a0For me, this koan has\u00a0two meanings. The first suggests that personal growth isn’t about escaping the\u00a0ordinary. It\u2019s about finding meaning and fulfillment in the present […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2717,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2718"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2719,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2718\/revisions\/2719"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}