This is episode 2,314 of the Daily Meditation Podcast.

I'm Mary Mechley and I welcome you back today to our series we're exploring.

And the theme for this week is following along with the 80-20 ritual.

You might not think of the 80-20 concept as a ritual, but it truly is.

When I lived and studied the Japanese tea ceremony in Japan, this was an important principle.

For each ceremony, there was always a focus or a theme.

And that's what I share with you here on the podcast.

Well, also, as we prepared the tea, we made room for what might happen in regard to the guests, in regard to the weather, in regard to how the food or the tea turned out.

We always allowed a little 20% buffer, so we showed up doing our best, performing the hundreds of movements that entail the Japanese tea ceremony.

That had been performed so many times with so much practice and so much precision that we could simply be during the tea ceremony.

We didn't have to worry about what step came next because it was already considered, and we had already rehearsed and practiced it so many times that during the tea ceremony, we could be very present.

And this is what the 80-20 ritual in your life is all about.

So your challenge for this week is to go on an 80-20 quest for yourself.

Think about what part of your life you would like to apply this 80-20 principle.

Maybe for you, you've been working way too much, or maybe you've been procrastinating, and you need to allow yourself a little more grace, still continuing to work, doing your best, but also doing your best to have a more balanced life to maybe do more self-care.

So that when you work, you don't feel burned out, you feel really refreshed and energized.

When I lived and worked in Japan for a company, a few times throughout the day, we were served tea, green Japanese tea.

And I remember thinking that I was going to rush through my tea break and get more work done.

What I noticed is that my colleagues, who were all Japanese, I was the only foreigner in my division of over 200 people, they would all sit and relax, close their eyes, meditate, sometimes people would sleep, sometimes people would get up and do some movement.

But they were, by themselves, relaxing, going more inward.

They weren't looking at their phones or on their laptop or standing in groups, talking, they took this time for themselves.

And what I noticed is that they emerged so much more refreshed than I did after my stints of working through my tea breaks.

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