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Here are some powerful reasons to develop and feel joy or positivity in doing mundane, boring, deadbeat chores or jobs that give you no pleasure or positivity!

Why it’s important to find joy in the dull and deadbeat?

There is a saying in Zen, before Enlightenment you must chop wood and carry water!

After experiencing enlightenment, you must chop wood and carry water!

It’s actually the mundane that is the practice. The practice is focusing and experiencing the mundane!

Joy arises not from the task but from your presence within it, your presence in the doing of it.

Within the Shaolin way, discipline is freedom.

The Shaolin monks scrub the floor not for joy or fun but to tame the ego, to refine their focus, and to sharpen the spirit. Every single boring and dull act or chore that you don’t want to do is a blade that polishes the Warrior Spirit within!

Within Buddhism, all things of the universe are in impermanent and that includes boredom. Even a boring and dull task is a flowing river, and it’s never the same twice. Observe it. Engage with it. Each breath you take, and each movement you make is an opportunity to awaken the deep within.

Cosmic yoga, an action without attachment!

Doing a dull task or chore without seeking any pleasure or satisfaction, benefit or gain liberates you from any form of craving. Joy and happiness aren’t stolen from the act or the deed, it arises from freedom obtained from within it.

Zazen, stillness in motion!

Folding laundry with a full awareness and focus on the here and now, on the doing of it now, keeping your mind on the chore equals meditation. The body moves, the mind rests. The mind is not feeling dull, it’s just still, its acceptance!

The dull task isn’t a prison; it’s actually your training dojo. Enter it respectfully with a bow, enter with humbleness, without ego and it becomes sacred because that moment is your teacher.

Ways to find joy in the dull

A shaolin, Zen, and Buddhist view on ways to embrace the mundane!

In this crazy obsessed world with much stimulation, profit and excitement, mundane, boring, dull tasks, those repetitive, unglamorous, ungainly and unprofitable or even unrecognised jobs are often seen as arduous burdens even painful and aching as you just don’t want to do them.

They are like a background noise in your life like doing dishes, folding laundry, putting clothes away, cleaning floors, sitting in slow dawdling traffic or taking on any form of endless unprofitable admin work.

Yet from the perspective of Zen, Shaolin discipline and Buddhist wisdom, these are the tasks that contain the seeds of an elevated awakening, a crystal-clear clarity, and even deep joy if you approach it with the right view along with the right mindset.

Here’s the reasons why!

A very famous Zen saying, before Enlightenment, Chop Wood, carry water. After Enlightenment Chop Wood Carry water. This is not just a cute koan. It’s a profound teaching. The actual goal of practicing is not to escape the boredom or the dullness of daily life but to embrace and to enter it fully. In the Zen way, the mundane isn’t an obstacle it’s the gateway.

When we are scrubbing the dishes, we do so with a full awareness feeling the warmth of the water and the circular motion of our hands, the quiet rhythm of the act leads us to become attuned or one with that actual moment. In that moment, in that unity your ego dissolves away. The task is now no longer dull or boring, it’s just what is.

Within this moment there is an odd elevation or lightness to it even a delight in doing something so dull and boring for its own sake. The Zen practice teaches us that when the mind is truly stilled and in the present moment, focusing on even the smallest chore becomes very special almost sacred.

Within the Shaolin way, Shaolin monks train for hours in very basic and dull repetitive movements that go on for hours such as punches, horse stance, breathing techniques. Not because they’re entertaining us with great feats but because discipline sharpens the soul or the spirit.

Discomfort and pain, boredom and pointless repetition are not the enemy to be avoided or hated but allies to be respected as they are our teachers.

Each time we engage in a dull mundane task or chore and meet it with focus and mindfulness instead of aversion or resistance, we are training the same inner mental mind muscles that the Shaolin cultivate such as mind focus, patience, tolerance and endurance. You don’t always get to pick the arena you find yourself in but you can choose to show up as a wise insightful warrior!

In this way the Shaolin says the mundane and the boring becomes the grindstone that polishes a blade of heightened awareness.

When entering into the moment to do an ungainly and unprofitable chore or task, allow that moment and that experience to sharpen and focus your mind it’s very easy to keep your mind focused on the task that is unpleasant or dull.

It is a teacher that helps to keep your mind on that moment that you can use to train your mind to keep your focus in the here and now.

In Buddhism one of the main causes of all suffering is attachment, to pleasure, excitement, expectations of any desired outcome and includes various forms of stimulation and lifts within your ego. When a dull boring task or chore does not stimulate us, we immediately avoid, avert or resist it.

This resistance that you feel is built on an illusion that some moments are more valuable than others and other moments are less valuable and we seek out the moments that stimulate us best or that reward us the most and according to Buddhism that is the trap!

The truth is everything is impermanent even boredom.

When we lose or release our grasp from any form of craving for excitement or indulgence in elevating ourselves or our egos and allow ourselves to fully experience the task at hand as it is, we step into the present moment, the moment of the here and now and we stop measuring value by profit or pleasure to be gained and begin to see the inherent freedom of simply just being, just being in the moment, just doing.

It is in this understanding and this moment that the authentic joy is found, the real joy and not the joy you are chasing after, for ego stimulation or a reward. The joy is in the open awareness of our own space after just doing without anything attached to it. Liberation begins when we cease chasing and start observing.

Cosmic yoga teaches us to act not for a reward but out of just pure presence and dedication to the moment, so when we are sweeping the floor, folding laundry or filing documents away, during mundane ungainly chores without expecting any appreciation, thanks, admiration or even a good feeling, you begin to taste a unique and authentic kind of joy, a joy that is selfless due to disconnection from attachments, from expectations of the task or the chore.

The point of this is to undertake the chore where your ego doesn’t get to feed itself. Remember you are slave to your own ego which is likened to a heavy mind plonked on top of the real pure mind and that the authentic self lies underneath the selfish ego and id which must be stripped back.

In this moment of doing the chore you are no longer working to enhance an outcome or a self-image, you’re just serving that moment and this is how a dull, boring action becomes a spiritual offering. It’s not about what the task gives you it’s about what you give to the task.

On another level, everyone enters a chore or a task to receive a reward, a reward from the self within the self and to the self.

Within Zazen, the quite seat, it teaches that your stillness is not of any absence of movements but it’s the actual absence of the resistance that lies within one’s ego. When we apply this principle to action, the outcome is something deeply beautiful where we can move with the stillness inside without feeling a force before us or behind us, without feeling a force pushing or pulling us to experience or receive an outcome such as a gratification or a reward which is always a feeling.

You don’t need incense or a spiritual robe or to be in a mountain temple, just sweeping a floor if done with total presence becomes the way. In this sense your body moves, your hands act but your mind rests, it is resting now and that’s the wisdom, that’s the secret, the dull and boring task is not trying to bore you even further, it’s inviting you to wake up.

As your mind is on the chore, it is not ahead of itself, it’s not ahead of the chore, in a simple way it’s not waiting for it to end, it’s not waiting for it to be finished, there is no urgency or energy drive to get it complete.

The same way nothing is behind you, you’re not thinking outside of the moment on other things, you are just in the moment using that moment to focus and train your mind and this can lead to a realisation that it’s not the chore, it’s your mind and your ego that’s driving you to the next thing, it’s this realisation that you are resting the process, you are resting all the inner arising nonsense.

Wake up!

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