Do anything with reverence.

Doing anything with reverence will change your life. When we do things with reverence we feel a deep sense of respect for what we do. That respect focuses our attention on the task at hand, because respecting something asks of us to put all our effort into doing our best. Like cooking for the person we love to celebrate a relationship's first anniversary. We want the meal to be perfect because we wish our partner to be happy. So we put all our effort and our attention into cooking. We cook with reverence.

This can be true for the experiences that we commonly qualify as having no value, like walking to a train station. Because we only walk to the train station to take a train, the mind does not consider the action of walking to the train station as being useful. Therefore, it likes to think about other things and we aren't fully present. Doing your actions with reverence refocuses your attention on the present moment, because you recognize that the present moment demands your respect. Slowly slowly, doing anything you do with reverence will change your perception of time and will change your notion of self-respect. It will change your perception of time because during your day you will spend less time in thoughts, which mostly dwell in the past or in the future. It will change your notion of self-respect because whenever you respect something you train your capacity to respect. The capacity to respect is a quality of being, a feeling, a creative movement of spirit and thought. That movement exists in and of itself and can then be directed to the actions you do or to yourself. Doing anything with reverence has a direct consequence on how good you will become at respecting yourself. And the most beautiful thing is that this also works the other way around. The more you learn to respect yourself, or treat yourself with reverence, the more you will learn how to do actions with reverence. When you respect yourself you learn how to treat yourself kindly. When you treat yourself kindly, you find self-acceptance and joy.

So next time you do something that you consider does not require your attention, like putting your clothes into a washing machine, do it with reverence :).