Singing the Chores Complete

Our inner song & sensory realationships

I really look forward to certain weekend chores.
I didn’t always, so this is new.

It is sweeping and vacuuming specifically.

This weekend, I had some cleaning chores, not just at my place, but also at the Yoga studio I frequent and do an energy exchange at.
Energy exchanges are brilliant - I receive credits to use at Yoga and Pilates classes and in exchange I work for a few hours every month in the studio.

The studio is fairly big, so sweeping takes a while.

It was a rainy Saturday morning and it was very quiet since I got there early.

As I started to sweep, I thought of putting on some music, but neither did my hands let the broom go, nor did my feet move. So I just continued.

Through the quiet, I heard the sounds in the street outside and the unsteady rainfall. Within the studio, it just just the sounds of the broom on the floor and my breath.

And then I started humming.
It wasn’t a song I knew exactly; more like a combination of familiar tunes lightly strung together interwoven with my breath at the pace of sweeping.

I swept and sang and sang and swept for what felt like minutes or hours, I cannot tell. The feeling was remarkably light and not something I usually experience when I have to clean my flat.

Before I knew it, the entire space was done and students for the morning classes started to lumber in bringing with them mud and dirt from the outside.

And the cycle would continue.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Relationship

This experience stayed with me for the rest of the day.
I thought about how much song and music in our world comes from the outside in.
While that is amazing and music and sound frequency moves us and heals us and often tells our story that we dare not utter; this experience was something else entirely.

This was my song at that moment.
And it was almost as if, while the broom revealed the clean original floor, my song revealed an original version of myself. My thoughts, feelings, the week I just had, conversation I did and did not have, things I needed to do later and the likes where not present.

I wondered if when we embrace silence, we get to hear more of our songs, smell our fragrance, feel ourselves out and taste the flavour of our Being, from within.

This is one of the joys of 3D (3 dimensional space and reality). We get to have these deep intimate sensory experiences with our day, with our God, with our cleaning products, with ourselves and with each other.

Through these experiences, a union intimates, between Self and the immediate environment we find ourselves in.

Like any union, it opens us up to a relationship that is felt and experienced through all our sensory inputs. This is different than a transaction we may be used to completing when we are separate from our environment.
So the act of cleaning our floors can either be elevated in our relationship and awareness in our present activity, or stay static in the chore-consciousness.

Photo by Reuben on Unsplash

Senses

My next jump was to ponder and remember how all our sense organs create a relational experience of our world. As such, packets of information that we may not access often build up.
So, how do we access them? How do we witness what lies there trapped in smell-memories and touch-imprints?

What if we didn’t scratch an itch on our scalp automatically the second we felt it?
What if we took a deep breath first and with our intention and feeling directed it to that patch of scalp?

What we we did the same with aches and twinges in our joints?

How does touch feel to us? Do we even like the touch we receive, even our own?

What if, even though we don’t like a certain food, flavours or smells, once in a while we try a bit of it anyway to see if our palette has evolved?

Would we find a bit more of ourselves outside the construct of how we see ourselves, who we think we are and our place in the world?

I thought of songs I don’t like and my immediate desire to change skip to the next on my playlist.
Don’t get my wrong, I love my Spotify playlists; I also realize that most things in my life are curated by me and hold the bias of my preferences.
Do I reject songs because it reminds me someone I want to avoid, or a phase in my life I’d rather forget?

Photo by De'Andre Bush on Unsplash

This has unknowingly made me a little impatient and intolerant of what is outside my preferences.

And of course, while this is something I can ‘work on’ within myself, that isn’t my intention.

My practice now involves allowing memories and sense experiences to rise and to just let it be. My intention is to witness the dance of my attractions and repulsions.

Instead of working on myself, it feels more sensual to relate with what I already have and feel and peel away what doesn’t need to be there.

This has been activating my relationship to desires as well.
Instead of a linear dynamic between likes and dislikes, it feels more like a holographic map of where I feel resonance, where I do not, informed with the why from the sense organs and sensory experiences across time and moments.

All of this came to me through the moments of silent sweeping and singing a soft tune of my own creation, that I cannot recreate.

When I got home after this experience at the Yoga Studio, I tried to ‘get to this place’ for my chores at home, but could not.

This was a reminder that we cannot achieve these experiences.

They just come, when we are in perfect surrender to our present moment and our inner songs sweeps our chores complete.