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How to Clean Your Bathroom Like a Zen Master

How to Clean Your Bathroom Like a Zen Master

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 Dear Permission to Be Powerful reader,I went from being a copywriter for Tony Robbins—to being a janitor at a Zen Center. And honestly? I love it.For years, I lived to perform. To prove myself. To get straight As. To be superhuman.I can’t understate how much pressure was placed on my back—writing to millions of people, trying to capture Tony’s voice, and sound incredible while I did it.I ran up to twenty miles every Monday before work — to make sure I didn’t crack under the pressure.That’s how seriously I took it. And now I sweep floors. Vacuum…Scrub toilets….I’ve dreamed of a simple life for a long time. A simpleton’s life, finally.Here, I don’t check news, I don’t scroll, I don’t even have access to porn or the endless stream of low-grade stimulation that used to eat my life in pieces.The structure itself keeps me clean.The shift is huge but logical. After a bitter divorce, after being fired by every copywriter’s dream client, what I really needed was not a rebound gig—it was healing. Early bedtimes. Early wake-ups. Predictable days.Cleaning, here, is the perfect practice ground. The difference between cleaning mindlessly and cleaning with mindfulness is night and day. My supervisor can tell immediately when I’ve checked out—attention evaporates, corners get missed, detail dissolves. Mindless people are chaotic; they leave evidence. You can trace their thoughtlessness in the mess they leave behind.The Zen Center is a transformation factory.The bells decide. I don’t negotiate with myself anymore. I don’t lose time to indecision. I wake up, I bow, I work, I eat, I sit. It’s all handled. My mind can finally rest. It’s funny—most people think rules are restrictive. For me, this place is freedom. Predictability is freedom.When I first got here, I realized something: This is the order I’ve been seeking my whole life. Everything here has a place—a flashlight next to every fire extinguisher, a label on every cabinet, a time for every sound. It’s beauty disguised as discipline.This place is routine to the max—the exact structure my ADHD brain always needed but could never hold on to in the outside world. Every minute accounted for. Every task thought through. They didn’t just build a schedule here; they built a system. They thought of the best way to live and got everyone to agree to it up front.Some days I meditate three hours…An hour at dawn, half an hour at lunch, another ninety minutes at night.It’s gruelling, but it’s also medicine. I have complex trauma—layers of it—and Zen has reached places therapy never could.After a seven-day meditation retreat, we’ll meditate from 4:30 am to at least 9:30 pm.I feel like I’ve earned ten years of wisdom in just seven days.When I meditate at dawn... Breakfast follows.We sit on cushions at a Japanese table barely a foot tall. Everyone’s posture is perfect. Nobody slouches. The food is vegan, beautifully prepared, and you never waste a bite. You leave no trace. That’s a Zen rule.And at noon, every day, we meditate.It resets my brain from whatever chaos accumulated during the morning.Then we have lunch.Someone spends two hours preparing that meal, and it tastes like care itself.The conversations here are unlike anything I’ve known. Gentle, funny, quietly brilliant. At breakfast, I sit with people who’ve been meditating for twenty years. One man has been here three. He’s tired of the corporate machine, too. We understand each other.And when I clean the Zendo—the meditation hall—I do it with reverence.The Zendo is sacred. The lights are dim, almost dark, except during cleaning when they’re unnaturally bright. You see every speck, every flaw. Everything must be perfect: each cushion fluffed, each surface dusted, nothing out of place.When I finally sit there at night for evening meditation, it hits me: I’m the one who prepared this place.I scrubbed the place from top to bottom.I made this space ready for everyone, including me.It adds weight to the moment. At the center of the Zendo sits the Buddha statue. You bow before entering, bow before leaving. It’s not superstition, or worship—it’s devotion.You learn that mindfulness isn’t just about thought. It’s about how you move, how you touch things, how you close a door.Mindless people are chaotic in a way that mindful people are not. They leave evidence of their distraction—crumbs, dust, chaos.The mindful leave nothing.Zen is a two-thousand-year-old practice.I think about that often.It’s humbling to realize we’re doing the exact same rituals our predecessors did centuries ago—same bows, same bells, same silence.In a world obsessed with novelty, there’s something powerful about a tradition that never needed reinvention.Psychotherapy has been around maybe a couple hundred years; Zen has had millennia to mature. I trust that kind of age. It’s proof that it works.The thing is, I used to think enlightenment would look like ...
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