learn · 2026-10-09 · 4 min read
What washing dishes for free taught me about ego
Ten months after my first ten-day course I turned up at Dhamma Mahi, a retreat centre in France, with about a hundred and fifty euros in my pocket and no plan for what came after. I had come to serve. That's the word the centres use, and at the time I thought it meant helping out.
What it actually meant was this. Servers get three hours a day in the meditation hall. The rest of the time, from around five in the morning, you're on your feet. You set the hall, you lay the cushions, you cook for the students, you clean, and then you wash up for a hundred people and do it again. Ten hours. Unpaid.
I had never really done physical work in my life. And my English at the time was, generously, don't-understand-ish. So for the first five days I simply did in silence whatever I was pointed at.
I hated a lot of it.
Not mildly. There were stretches at the sink, and stretches with a mop, where what I felt was straightforward anger. My ego had found something to react to and it reacted at volume: I'm doing ten hours a day of work I wouldn't do at home, for nothing, for strangers, while they sit in the hall I paid nothing to sit in either. The arithmetic of resentment is very fast and very convincing.
On the sixth day I did something small and slightly artificial. I started, deliberately, to smile.
It wasn't sincere at first. It was a decision. But it moved me out of the tight, clenched "working" state I had been holding for five days, and something followed it that I didn't expect. I went to the kitchen manager and asked a different question.
For five days my internal question had been what do I have to do now? On the sixth it became what can I do now?
Those two sentences point in opposite directions. The first one is about the minimum. It measures the task against what's owed, and it always comes out feeling unfair, because that's what it's built to do. The second one has no unit of fairness in it at all. It just looks around the room.
The moment I switched, the moment I started looking at the people around me with plain goodwill instead of accounting, it became immediately more cheerful and immediately clearer what to do. That's the part that surprised me and still does. Not only did the work feel better; I was better at it. I could see what the kitchen needed.
That's the focus of attention, exactly as the technique describes it, applied to a sink.
It isn't easy to hold a happy, kind mood among ten other people, men and women, hour after hour, asking every time what's needed next. It takes something. But it takes less than resentment does. Resentment is the more expensive of the two and nobody tells you.
By the end of the ten days all of us on the team were working cleanly together, joking sometimes, laughing, and every one of us was running a parallel piece of work on ourselves underneath it. At some point each of us understood what it actually means that food is cooked with love. Not as a slogan. As a felt state, close to bliss, arriving out of having given ten days of your time to people whose names you mostly don't know.
I came out of that kitchen with a strange, unglamorous list of things I hadn't gone in for: my English pulled up by the team around me, some French, real experience cooking vegetarian food, the discovery of what sprouts are, the habit of eating a meal slowly and calmly (I tell the food side of that in the Food Detox edition of my course), an understanding of how a course works backstage, several friends, and a new seed planted in me, which was dāna. Giving.
Afterwards a Cambodian neighbour on the team kept telling me: you've sat one course, now sit another ten days as a student and you'll be strong. I had nowhere to go and nothing to go on. So I stayed. Twenty days in all, service then practice, and by the end of it I felt like I was riding the crest of a wave.
I've written elsewhere about what serving a course actually develops: the part of the mind you only reach when nobody is watching you mop a floor. This isn't that article. This is only the five days before it, which I think get left out of the telling too often.
Because the useful thing here isn't that service is good for you. It's that the switch was one sentence, it was available to me on day one, and it took me five days of genuine unhappiness to find it.
I didn't become a better person on the sixth day. I asked a different question, and the answer arrived faster, and the hours got shorter. That was all, and it's been there every time since, in kitchens and in plenty of places that weren't kitchens.
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