Some of you will be familiar with this practice as a version of it appears in the 8 week stress reduction programme…nevertheless it does no harm to be reminded of practices past from time to time; we consume food on a daily basis therefore there is always an opportunity to bring more attention and awareness to the experience of eating.
Instructions
This week when you are eating and drinking don’t do anything else. Sit down and take the time to enjoy what you are taking in. Open all the senses as you eat or drink. Look at the colours, shapes, surface textures. Attend to the smells and flavours in your mouth. Listen to the sounds of eating and drinking.
Reminders
Post a note on the table where you eat meals that says, “Just Eat.” Also post this note wherever you are likely to snack. You could experiment with posting ‘preventative’ notes on objects that tend to distract you while you are eating, e.g. the TV or the computer or a book. Write the word “Eating” with an X through it as a reminder not to eat while using it.
At first glance this practice may appear a little daunting so I suggest that in the initial stages you hold the instructions lightly and try to let go of any ideas of success and failure, of ‘doing’ the practice well. Instead, try simply to ‘be’ with the experience of eating as best you can, whenever you remember. Should you catch yourself wolfing some food down in the middle of the week on the run as it were, congratulate yourself; this ‘noticing’ is your moment of mindfulness and gives you another opportunity to bring yourself back to the present moment and the richness of your eating experience.
Looking forward to hearing your comments and please, feel free to use this blog as a forum & have conversations with each other – no need to wait for me to respond!
Please Share the Intention
Image courtesy of the12thplaya
I enjoyed my mindful scrambled egg this morning! But then again, I usually enjoy mindful eating. I like the colours and textures of my food. The saltiness and sweetness. I don’t have much of a palate (because I don’t have a great sense of smell – it tends to come and go). So these other qualities become more important. Mindful eating is firmly a part of my life. In fact I’m always surprised if I find myself with someone who’s just eating without noticing their food, which is what I used to do! My one coffee of the day is fully savoured… but I’ll frequently knock back water and tea while doing something else, without giving it a second thought. So mindful drinking is something I’m going to pay attention to this week. Maybe I won’t get much done or maybe I’ll end up dehydrated or maybe time will expand…
Last week’s practice came and went pretty smoothly. Either I got all my filler words out of the way in that first post, as James remarked, or they were slipping by unoticed, behind sunglasses or in macs with up-turned collars (coats not computers) :-)
I enjoy eating so this will be a very good practice for me since I hope in the end to enjoy it even more:-) I have most of my meals alone at home and I always read a book or a newspaper at the same time. Often my mind wanders to plans for tomorrow or to other things, so I seldom focus my entire attention on the food. So breakfast today was a bit difficult. My mind wandered away all the time and I tried to bring it back. Sometimes I find it useful to speak to myself in my mind: “Now I reach out with my left hand to take some more food on the spoon …”. But sometimes that doesn’t work. I hear my inner voice telling me this while I, myself, think of the phone call I have to do when I have finished my meal! For lunch I had a lovely omelette and a cup of Rooibos tea and I managed quite well to keep focused … until I had just half a cup of tea left and I nearly rose from my seat to return to my computer. That was hard, telling myself to slow down, to just notice this urge to return to all the “musts” and bringing my attention back to the tea, its colour, its temperature and its taste. So easy and yet so difficult! It will be very interesting to follow my thoughts (and hopefully yours, Melissa, and others) as they develop this week.
So easy yet so difficult hits the nail on the head Lena – given I am fortunate enough to eat everyday, I have developed so many habitual behaviours around the process that just to pause, slow down and reflect on the experience of eating can be a wonderful teacher: it shines light on the incipient forward press of my thinking, jumping to the next perceived ‘entertainment’ rather than staying with the richness of my current experience. I can also ‘use’ eating to change the way that I feel: to cheer myself up, to not to have to think about something unpalatable, to distract myself, to wake up my inner critic!
This is something of a pet subject for Jan Cozen Bays, author of “Elephant”. For those interested, she has written a book on Mindful Eating. Another excellent resource is the Centre for Mindful Eating which has lots of articles, talks and research on a mindfulness based approach to eating.
Lena, I found myself drinking a cup of tea while reading your post yesterday evening – how ironic is that! Day two and a habit slipped right into like a comfortable slipper. I laughed out loud when I realised :-) But I also noticed in that moment that I had a dilemma about either continuing to read, or continuing to drink, but mindfully. I couldn’t quite resist reading to the end of your post first and putting the tea second, which is interesting in itself…
Funny, Melissa, I was having my afternoon coffee as I was reading your post! But actually, I made an exception for drinks outside meals. One thing at a time! I tried today to have a more relaxed and playful approach during breakfast and lunch. It felt better and I think I am beginning to let go of the feeling that I have to do the exercise in the right way. There is no right way, I know, James! I noticed again that I eat rather fast and that I rush through the meals and impatiently finish my drink at the end of the meal. I also noticed a feeling of regret when preparing my meal and coming to think of the fact that I had to eat the meal without my book or paper! Habits are hard to break. I notice with the evening meal that I have a slightly different approach. Because I realise that I have made it a habit to let the dinner mark the end of the working day. So I will try and explore my thoughts and moods and feelings when having dinner tonight. Thanks James for the links! I will keep them and read them.
Hi, it seems I’ve even doing a different exercise from everyone else this week. I’ve been doing “Appreciate your Hands” – number 4 in the Wild Elephant book. Will you be coming back to that one next week, James?
I guess it doesn’t matter too much. We are all developing mindfulness one way or another, and in the end it has to be a very personal thing for each one. It’s still nice to know others are in the same process. But I am looking forward to savouring my food next week!
Hi Geoffrey, I decided leave out the “Appreciate Your Hands” practice for the moment as it came rather hot on the heels of “Use Your Non-Dominant hand” – I will revisit it later in the year. My apologies it it created any confusion. I agree with you, mindfulness practice is a personal thing, but knowing that others are practicing alongside creates a sense of common purpose that is tremendously supportive.
Enjoy the “When Eating Just Eat” next week and as you can see from the curiosity generated in the comments above, you may well find some willing participants to keep you company for a second week!
Hi, it seems I’ve been doing … – what’s happened to my typing?
Has anyone else discovered how incredibly noisy eating toast can be ?
Ah yes Tessa, it’s a bit like trying to eat in your own personal cinema, I take a nice bite…..crunch..crunch…and before I know it I’m tapping myself on the shoulder saying…..Shhhhhhhh!
I think I will go on with mindful eating at least for breakfast for a while, since the noise in my head has not slowed down (and I don’t mean the noise from the food:-). My mind still wanders all the time in different directions and it is hard to concentrate on the food. Maybe there is too much to direct my attention to when eating: the colour, the texture, the temperature, the different tastes, the pace, the feeling in the mouth, the noise (!) etc. I get confused and also I hurry through the meal as if I’m going to miss the train or something if I don’t finish soon enough.
Yes, it’s interesting – that urge to get to the end of something… to get it done. It’s almost harder to be doing a single something (like eating or drinkling) than to be doing nothing at all. I think it’s because doing nothing at all doesn’t have an end point. Apparently this urge to get somewhere is to do with ‘discrepancy based processing’ which basically is the way our frontal lobes work out how to get from ‘here’ to ‘there’. It’s why we have managed to invent and create so many amazing things. But it’s also why lingering, allowing, being etc can be hard for us and need cultivating. Right. Must dash :-)
The feeling that we need to hurry through what we are doing or to ‘get it over with’ to reach something more fundamental is common to a lot of experience, not just eating. It is so engrained that oftentimes we are hardly aware of this incipient disquiet, this desire for our experience to be different from the way it is in this moment. With regard to eating the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh (who is in the UK at the end of march – more info here) has this to say:
So, this is what we are doing…training ourselves, gently bringing ourselves back to the richness of the experience.
Henceforth I shall be experiencing oranges in a new light :)
That’s a very beautiful quote, James, thank you.
Thanks for those very interesting thoughts Melissa. And thanks for the lovely quote, James. I have read one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s books and now I remember him talking about this eating of an orange :-). Another thing I now remember is that he says there are two ways of washing up the dishes: either you wash up to wash up or you wash up to get it over with. I will just go on practicing while trying to remember to be gentle with myself.
Lena for you…
Thank you James. I have put the quote up in my kitchen, next to the sink as a gentle reminder.
Post a note on the table where you eat meals that says, “Just Eat.” Also post this note wherever you are likely to snack. You could experiment with posting ‘preventative’ notes on objects that tend to distract you while you are eating.
How about making sure you do not have the foods you are trying to give up in the case?