A Hidden Practice, Found While Ironing

Sometimes, my work is not on the mat. It is standing at an ironing board, in the heat, sorting sheets and towels that came from the kitchen or the rooms.

I teach yoga, meditation, and share something of the Buddhist path at the wellness centre where I work. But part of my role is also housekeeping — and ironing, in particular, is a task most people would rather avoid. I don’t mind it. I have come to feel, quietly, like a kind of hidden yogi while I do it — though I say this carefully, because “hidden yogi” is not a fixed thing one simply is or isn’t. It is more of a spectrum, a direction one leans toward, some days more than others.

On the Hidden Yogi

A hidden yogi wears no particular robe, no recognisable uniform. No one points them out. No one watches them, because there is nothing marked out to watch. And I think this is exactly the point, not an unfortunate side effect of it: without an audience, there is no performance to give. The practice is not shaped for anyone’s eyes. It exists only for itself — for the practitioner’s own depth, their own quiet cultivation — and yet, precisely because it asks for no recognition, it is free to move outward anyway, influencing the space around it without announcing that it is doing so. A room ironed with attention feels different to walk into than a room ironed with resentment, even if no one present could say exactly why.

This also asks something of how we define “practice” itself. Practice is not only what happens on the mat, the meditation seat, the classroom, or behind an office desk. If it lives only there, it is still, in a sense, wearing a uniform — bounded by time, place, and the audience of a class. A hidden yogi’s practice has no such edges. It can happen at any minute, on any task — folding, sorting, waiting, walking a corridor with towels — because the mat was never the practice. The mat was only ever one convenient place to remember it.

Simplicity, Practiced

While ironing, I notice my own bodily movement — the reach, the fold, the small rhythm of the arm. I notice where the mind wanders, and gently bring it back. I sort the linens in a way that makes the rest of the work simpler, lighter. There is nothing dramatic in any of this. That is exactly the point.

I am also aware that, in these moments, I am creating nothing to upload, nothing to post, nothing asking to be seen. There is real value in the content shared everywhere today — I don’t say this to criticise it — but there is also a quiet cost to how much of it there now is, a kind of noise added to noise, each post asking a little more of everyone’s attention. What I find instead, in a task as plain as ironing, is the opposite motion entirely: less, not more. A single sheet, folded once, folded well. Nothing added. Nothing performed. Simplicity is not the absence of value — it may be where value was hiding all along, underneath everything we felt we needed to add on top of it.

On the Shelf, Briefly

I iron each sheet, fold it with care, and place it on the shelf in order — a small, deliberate architecture of straight edges and matching corners. And then, often quite soon after, someone comes to change a bed, and that same order is taken apart. What I built is unbuilt. Nothing remains of the shelf as I left it.

At first glance this could look like simple impermanence — and it is that, certainly, everything arising only to pass. But I think it points to something a little more precise than “it didn’t last.” The order on that shelf was never, even at its neatest moment, a solid thing existing on its own. It only appeared because of a guest needing a bed, my hands folding, a moment of time holding still long enough for me to notice it. Take away any one of those conditions and there was no “order” to speak of at all — only the appearance of one, held together briefly by circumstances that were never mine to keep. This is close to what Mahayana Buddhism points to as emptiness (śūnyatā): not that things vanish, but that they were never solidly, independently there in the first place. Their dissolving doesn’t destroy something real — it simply shows what was already true.

So I don’t feel loss when the shelf is undone. There is nothing to mourn in something that was only ever a temporary shape, held for a while by conditions, then released back into them. If anything, folding it again the next day is not starting over — it’s simply the shape appearing once more, exactly as briefly as before.

This leans, too, on something old and more familiar to me — the Daoist idea of 不爭 (bù zhēng), not contending, not forcing the energy one desires, but meeting instead the energy that is naturally already there. Ironing does not ask to be admired. It only asks to be done, attentively, one fold at a time. And in that plainness, oddly, I find something very close to practice itself.

©️ [Year] Yiyang Tian. Originally published on yiyangpractice.co.uk.