The Daily Meditation with Brother Richard
Mindfulness Meditation: Dedicating Daily Tasks with Awareness
22 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome back.
Chapter 2: What does it mean to dedicate presence in meditation?
In today's meditation, we continue to follow the teaching of one of our great meditation masters in the Christian monastic tradition, St. Therese of Lisieux.
Chapter 3: How can we breathe out calm during meditation?
In our earlier session, we introduced her little way, the way of putting love at the center of all things, the way of beginning again each day. In today's meditation, we're going to look at the practice of consciously dedicating presence, no matter what we are doing or how we find ourselves.
Chapter 4: What everyday tasks can we bring awareness to?
So let's begin.
Chapter 5: How can simple actions become a form of meditation?
Arriving to this moment of meditation, just pause for a moment. Consciously be aware that you are leaving one way of being and stepping into another for these few moments. Really feel the transition from whatever came before to this moment.
Chapter 6: What intention should we set for our day?
Again, you might like to use a ritual gesture to mark the transition.
Chapter 7: How do we place love at the center of our daily actions?
But you can also inwardly make the intention to truly enter this time of meditation. And then taking your seat or resting back in the seat that you're already in, we begin. Sensing into the body, we feel its posture and we gently open the posture to one of awareness, wakefulness. We allow the spine to uncurl
the shoulders to drop, the eyes to close or at least the gaze to be lowered, arms and hands resting on the lap. We feel our contact with the ground and with the earth beneath the ground. Entering this time of meditation now, we follow the path of breath. really becoming as aware as possible of the ebb and flow of the breath, its rise and fall.
And feeling the movement in our body of our breath, we try and find that tiny moment where the cycle of breath begins again each time. What are the first, smallest, tiniest movements of the body for you as you breathe? Finding those moments, checking in with ourselves with open-hearted curiosity. Every time we meditate, we come to know the breath a little more deeply, a little more fully.
So sitting in this time of meditation, we sit now with the fullness of awareness of the breath. Breathing out, I breathe out all tension, stress or worry. Breathing in, I breathe in peace, calm, light. breathing out especially from any point of tension, from any point of old injury or pain or sickness.
As we breathe, we rest in the cycle of the breath, really feeling the movement from in-breath to out-breath, from out-breath to in-breath. And as we breathe, sitting stable in the present moment, we can bring to mind any of the tasks that we have yet to accomplish today. We do so from a place of absolute stability and peace.
Just simply noticing the ordinary activities of the day that still await us. This might be as simple and as basic as washing our hands, using the bathroom, eating and drinking, doing whatever our work might be, or simply relaxing. All of the ordinary elements of the day that still await us.
and then gently still connected to the breath in absolute stability and peace, we can ask ourselves, what would it be like to bring meditative awareness to all of these activities? Not that we would be formally meditating instead of doing them, but that we would bring relaxed, awake awareness to bear on each one of them.
Within the tradition, dedicating awareness to the actions of the day includes dedicating the merit of these activities recognizing that we can surrender them as prayer, that we can live them as prayer, that we can do them not just for ourselves, but for others. Washing my hands, I can wash my hands to cleanse them. But in the moment of washing, I can be aware of the water flowing over my hands.
I can have gratitude for the gift of water. And I can also go further and offer this action, this experience as a prayer of intercession for all those who do not have water, for those who are in need. I can cultivate with this an inner and deeper sense of gratitude for the gift that I have received and an intention to share my giftedness with others.
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