The Zen of Scrubbing Toilets

ーFinding Focus in the Toilet

“If you clean, you clean your mind as well.”

That is what the head priest told me. At first, I thought it sounded beautiful. Almost poetic.

Then I spent three hours scrubbing floors.

There is nothing poetic about wiping dust from wooden corridors in winter.

I think this happens in work, too. There are days when time passes quickly, and days when it moves painfully slow. I feel it myself.

Especially on days when I have plans after work. I check the clock. It says 12:00. I work a little more and think, It must be around 2:00 by now. I look again.

12:30.

What? Did time stop?

But it is not that the clock is broken. And it is not that something is wrong with me.

The difference is simple: whether I am truly focused or not.

When my mind is split — half working, half already thinking about what comes next — time stretches. Every minute becomes visible.

But when my attention settles into what I am doing, time disappears.

That is what I felt while cleaning. I was not trying to be present. I was not aiming for emptiness. I was just wiping floors.

And yet, that ordinary, repetitive work pulled my mind into one place.

No future plans. No background noise. No escape.

Just this movement. This breath. This moment.

Maybe “no-mind” is not something you achieve by thinking about it. Maybe it happens when you stop giving your mind somewhere else to go.

If Zen is about emptiness, then cleaning might be the most accessible, most ordinary way to return to the present. I scrubbed floors. I cleaned toilets. I even wiped down dim, unused rooms at the back of the temple. At some point, I realized: this is… emptiness.

And honestly? I focused the most while cleaning the toilets. Yes, really. If you want my recommendation: start with toilet cleaning.Nothing concentrates the mind quite like it.

It lasted only moments, but it was enough. By the time I looked up, the morning had turned into early afternoon. The hours had disappeared. And the feeling — quiet, subtle, ordinary — was unexpectedly pleasant.

I have tried many ways to clear my mind. I went to India. I practiced yoga. I attended meditation classes at temples. I journal. I think a lot. Maybe too much. My mind has always been busy, crowded, restless since I was a teenager.

As a Japanese person, cleaning is something woven into our education. We clean classrooms from childhood. I have been cleaning my whole life. But I never imagined it had this kind of power.

Of all the spiritual techniques I tried, the simplest one — holding a cloth and wiping a floor — was the one that brought me closest to emptiness.

Not because it looked profound.

But because there was nothing left to escape into.

Maybe silence is not found in special places. Maybe it appears when your attention is fully on the moment, no matter how ordinary the task.

And perhaps the most radical, most beautiful moments of presence are not the ones you read about in books, or see in Instagram captions. They are the ones that happen when you are scrubbing a toilet, folding a towel, or wiping dust off a corridor.

A broom. A cloth. That’s enough.

And somehow, in that small, quiet act, the mind finally settles.