In Reinventing the Meal(New Harbinger Publications, 2012), you’ll
learn how to reconnect with your body, mind, and world with a three-course
approach to mindful eating. Inside, you’ll find mindfulness exercises to help
you slow down and enjoy your food, pattern-interruption meditations to infuse
presence into your eating life, and unique stress management tips to prevent
emotional overeating. In Chapter 4, “Third Course: Reconnecting with Your
World,” author Pavel G. Somov, PhD, offers a variety of ways to connect
with your food, such as pattern-interruption strategies.
“Every rite has
its irrational, mystical center, its acme of concentration, its moment out of
time… Its purpose is ecstatic union, however fleeting, with transcendent
reality, with the ultimate, with what is beyond mutability.”
–Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews
The old-school meal begins with food,
proceeds with mindless eating, and ends with feeling stuffed and existentially
empty. The new meal begins with a first course of relaxation, proceeds with a
second course of self-awareness, and then progresses into mindful, conscious,
intimate appreciation of the world at large through food. As such, the third course
of the new meal is about both mindful eating and mindful interbeing with all that
immediately is. Having reconnected with your body and then with your essential
self, the challenge is to stay in touch with the world as you consume it.
Remember, when you’re eating, you’re eating
Earth and becoming Earth. So the goal is to stay humble and not let your mind
wing you away to the heavens of abstraction. The goal is simply to just eat. However,
while it’s easy to say “just eat,” it can be hard to do. The point of this
chapter is to make it easier.
Mindfulness Is Awareness of Choice
Habits preempt choice. Once a given
behavior goes on autopilot, we just keep on flying on the course set by habit.
Making choices is work, and the mind often doesn’t want to hassle with it. So
it leaves the dirty work of making choices to the memory of the body. Mindless
eating is basically muscle memory, whereas mindful eating is a series of mini
choices.
The body itself makes no choices, it just
repeats what it has done previously as trained by the mind. In terms of eating,
we have pretty much trained ourselves to ignore eating. Watching TV or checking
email is the steak we have for dinner; the food itself is just garnish. That’s
the wheel of automaticity, the wheel of mindlessness. Eating is one of the most
overlearned voluntary behaviors in the human repertoire of skills. So let’s
breathe some mindful choice into this mindless choicelessness. In the meantime
chew on this: mindlessness is choicelessness, whereas mindfulness is an
awareness of choices, that is, choicefulness.
Try This: Draw the Circle of Choice
Get three sheets of paper and a pen. Draw
a circle on each piece of paper, for a total of three circles. Please don’t
read any further until you have drawn your three circles. Once you’ve drawn your circles, look at
them. Chances are you have drawn all three circles in more or less the same
way. I bet that the placement of the circle on each page is similar, and that
all three circles are somewhat similar in diameter. Most likely, you even drew
all three by starting at the same point
(probably somewhere in the upper right) and drawing
them in the same direction. Did you consciously intend for these circles to be similar in terms of their
placement on the page, their size, and even
the starting point and direction in which you drew them? Probably not.
In a sense, you didn’t draw these circles–habit
did. These circles, as evidenced by their unintentional similarities, were
drawn too mindlessly, too reflexively, too mechanically, too
robotically–ultimately, too unconsciously–for you to take full credit for this
action. This was a reaction, meaning a reenactment of some
circle-drawing habit. True action involves conscious deliberation. Realize that
habits are just like these mindlessly drawn circles. They are mindless
behavioral feedback loops that endlessly flow into and out of themselves.
If habits are the wheels that keep life spinning in
circles, let’s toss a monkey wrench into this circle cycle. I invite you to
draw another circle. But this time, draw it mindfully, with the awareness of
the options available to you. Intend the choices that you didn’t make
the first time. Choose where on the page to place the circle, choose the
starting point, choose the direction in which you will draw the circle, choose
the diameter of the circle, and even choose whether to bring the ends of the line
together to make a full circle or not. Go ahead and do it and notice the
difference.
Enso Your Way into Eating
Enso is
Japanese for “circle,” a common subject of Zen calligraphy. An empty enso circle
symbolizes enlightenment and the void (emptiness). Why void? Why enlightenment?
An enso drawing, as I see it, documents the fleeting insubstantiality of
the moment and the enlightened awareness of its impermanence. As such, an enso
drawing is a pattern interrupter. It is a moment of presence, or
mindfulness, and a commitment to the moment, however fleeting it might be.
Most of us in the West eat off of circular plates.
Next time you see the circular shape of a plate, think, “enso!” Think,
“a symbol of void and emptiness not unlike my hunger.” Think, “an opportunity
for awareness!” Recognize the circular dish in front
of you as an invaluable cue and ask yourself,
“Will my next eating moment be just another mindless
spin around this carousel of eating? Will it be another vicious cycle of mindless overeating? Will I spend the next ten
minutes flipping through the menu circle of TV
channels with untasted food in my mouth? Or
will I break the pattern, select a new course, notice the moment, notice the world, touch reality, and see myself interact
with it?” Before you find yourself mindlessly
cleaning your plate, clean the cobwebs of
routine patterns from your mind.
Try This: Put a Finger on It
You don’t have to stop with enso-inspired
thoughts. You can literally enso your way into eating. Whereas classic
Zen enso calligraphy is brushwork, you can use your fingers. Put an
empty plate in front of you and trace the rim of the plate with your finger.
That’s an enso finger painting–but a fairly mindless one. Now allow the
empty plate in front of you to symbolize the void of your hunger, then make a
conscious choice about whether you will trace it clockwise or counterclockwise.
Then consciously choose a starting point and mindfully trace an enso of presence
around the rim of the empty plate. Practice this enso routine as a rite
of eating passage, a green light of presence and awareness, a way of giving
yourself permission to proceed. Consider this enso moment as a kind of
preflight inspection: “Here I am. I have showed up for this moment, fully myself,
self-aware, and aware of my choices–an eater, not an eating zombie.”
Pattern-Interruption Strategies
Choice-awareness training is intended
both as a general tonic for promoting mindfulness and as a specific tool for
leveraging more presence while you eat. The idea behind choice awareness and
pattern interruption is to take you off of autopilot and keep you off.
Mindlessness is blindness. Mindfulness is vision. Here are some approaches to
help you loosen up your eating patterns and to help you see–with your mind’s eye–what
you are eating.
Try This: Eat with Your Nondominant Hand
Switch the hand you use to eat with. If
you typically eat with a fork or spoon in your right hand, hold it in your left
hand, and vice versa. Note the confusion of the mind and the increase in your
level of mindfulness. Likewise, if using more than one utensil at a time, as
with a knife and fork, switch hands to break up habitual eating patterns and to
infuse more presence into the process of eating.
Try This: Eat with Atypical Utensils
Utensils are part of the hypnotic ritual
of eating. They cue our hands–and minds–to engage in a certain complex of motor
behaviors. As such, a utensil is an ignition key for mindless eating. Take the
utility out of utensils to inconvenience your mind and leverage more presence. Experiment
with using either “wrong” or unfamiliar utensils to appreciate the effect of
this strategy on the staying power of mindful presence. For example, use a fork
to eat soup or, yes, a knife to eat peas. If you aren’t familiar with using chopsticks,
try eating with them. Another option would be eating with your hands. Or try
makeshift utensils, perhaps a piece of celery as a spoon. Throw your mind a
curveball to keep it on its toes while it eats.
Try This: Adopt a Different Posture While Eating
Another avenue to increased mindfulness
is experimenting with different postures while eating. If you typically eat at
a table, try sitting on the floor. Note how this change in posture changes your
eating experience. Chances are, you usually sit while eating, so try eating
while standing up. This will keep your mind from falling asleep over your plate
and also help you notice the food.
Try This: Eat with Your Eyes Closed
Close your eyes to see–with the mind’s
eye of mindfulness–what you are eating. Mindfulness is “super-vision”: it sees
and “over-sees” with the eyes shut. Try this out in the weeks to come to keep
your mind on track while you eat.
Try This: Eat in a Different Setting
Places teem with stimuli. They become conditioned
cues for behavior. Redraw the map of your eating geography. Move to a different
side of the table. Eat at a different table to enjoy a different view,
including a different view into yourself. Eat in a different room to make room
for your mind. In short, change your eating habitat to change your eating habits.
Try This: Experiment with Exotic Foods
Change up what you actually eat. Trying
out unfamiliar, exotic foods will help
your mind stay put on eating. The tongue
is a thrill seeker; it wants an adventure. But without the tour guide of
mindfulness, the tongue will miss out on the gustatory scenery. Therefore, I
encourage you to combine new foods with the pattern-interruption techniques above
to leverage the mindful presence you bring to eating. This will help you notice
these new worlds of taste on your eating journey.
Finding the Flavor of the Moment
There are two ways of looking at flavor. One is to
see flavor technically, as a convergence of taste, smell, and texture. The
other take on flavor is more existential. By all means notice the flavor of the
food in the technical sense, but also notice the flavor of the eating moment.
Time hides itself; it slips away when unattended. It takes presence of mind to
experience a moment in time. Ask yourself, “What is significant about this eating
moment?” But try not to sink too deeply into this thought; try not to let your
mind soar too far aloft. Just open up to the significance, if any, and let go.
Allow yourself to be aware of the irrelevancies of the
eating moment. Take them in and note them, but avoid pondering them or
considering them to be any deeper than they are. Here you are, Earth yourself, eating
Earth, while Earth itself is spinning along on its cosmic ride–the significance
of the moment need not be much more than that. Be at home in the moment, mixing
mouthfuls and mindfuls.
Ask yourself, “What is the flavor of this moment?” At
a minimum, if you are mindful you are in touch with reality, touching the world
by eating it, being touched by it as the food massages its way inside you, feeling
touched by all that lived, breathed, worked, and died for you to have this
eating moment. You are touched by all of this but not overwhelmed. No undue
sentimentality is required. Simply eat–just eating quietly and gracefully, with
awareness. Note the significance, but don’t cling to it. Feel subtle awe of
this life process without being paralyzed or taken aback by these invisible
connections that unite us all in the triviality and momentousness of eating.
Find the moment-specific poignancy of this experience
and let it pass. In searching for this flavor, release any expectations. It
need not be existentially jalapeño. A plain vanilla moment would do just fine.
Practice Just Noticing
Mindfulness involves two essential mechanisms:
applying a certain kind of attention and practicing disidentification.
Attention can be active or passive: that of an active observer or that of an
uninvolved witness. This distinction is easy to understand through contrasting such
verbs as “to look” versus “to see.” “To look” implies an active visual scanning,
a kind of goal-oriented visual activity. “To see” implies nothing other than a
fact of visual registration. Say I lost my house keys. I would have to look for
them. But in the process of looking for my house keys, I might also happen to
see an old concert ticket. Mindfulness is about seeing, not looking. It is
about just noticing or just witnessing without attachment to or identification
with what is being noticed and witnessed. This is where disidentification comes
in.
Cravings (for dessert or something specific to eat,
or just to keep eating) come and go. Mindfulness–as a meditative stance–allows you
to recognize that craving is a transient, fleeting state of mind, and just one
part of your overall experience. Mindfulness teaches you to realize that this
impulse to keep on eating is but a thought inside the mind. Yes, it’s part of
you, but it isn’t all of you which is exactly why you can just notice it, just
see it without having to stare at it. In sum, mindfulness– as a form of impulse
control–is a strategy of controlling by letting go of control.
Mindfulness of Fullness
Mindful eating is a subtle balance between enjoying
yourself and not getting too carried away by the undertow of this enjoyment.
Keep your mind on a tether of its body: stay progressively more attuned to the emerging
sensations of fullness. Make use of the fullness-sensitization eating, you
already had a chance to note the pleasant distention of your stomach as you
filled up on air and water, setting that as a kind of fullness cue to watch
for. So as your mind sails through the third course of actual eating, keep your
attention anchored to the dynamics of your tummy.
The bigger issue is not awareness of fullness per se
but your willingness to make use of this information. This will help you
consciously deal with the desire to keep eating when you’re already full.
Mindfulness definitely comes to the rescue here. The following techniques are a
few ways you can combine breath-focused relaxation with mindfulness to help
yourself stop eating.
Try This: Rest in Fullness
Get a piece of paper and a pen, then
trigger an impulse to eat. Think about some food you like or, better yet,
expose yourself to it directly, putting that food right in front of you. Next,
put on your mindfulness cap and notice cravings and thoughts of desire as they
arise. Each and every time you notice a craving thought, draw a small dot on
the piece of paper. Then refocus on your breathing. Do this for a few minutes.
Now take a look at your drawing. It’s a
series of dots–and a series of spaces. Each dot represents a craving, an
impulse to eat that you registered on the radar of your awareness.
Now let’s apply this to fullness. Next
time you eat, have a piece of paper and pen at hand and watch for the onset of
fullness. Once you feel full, sit back and notice if you have a desire to keep
eating. If you do, sit it out for a few minutes while you watch your mind. Each
and every time you have a desire to keep eating, draw a small dot on the piece
of paper, refocus on the sensations of your breathing, and rest in the fullness
of the moment. After spending a few minutes doing this, make a conscious choice
about whether you’ll continue eating or not.
An important note: What you decide is
irrelevant at this point. What matters is that you practice mindfully pausing
after the onset of a pleasant sensation of fullness.
Try This: Pause in Midmeal
As you’re eating your meals in the coming
weeks, occasionally stop eating and put your utensils down. Wait for your
stomach to say, “Hey, aren’t you going to finish the food on your plate?”
Notice the body’s knock on the mind’s door. Recognize that this is just a
fleeting impulse to continue. Whenever you feel the desire to keep eating, tap
a finger on the table. You don’t have to fear this impulse to keep eating. You
can satisfy this impulse in a moment, but for now let it pass. It’s good to practice
this early in the meal, when you aren’t as full and the desire to keep eating
is stronger. This will help you get better at resisting the temptation to keep
eating when your stomach is already pleasantly full.
Practice: Creating an Evolving Ritual
In building a ritual of mindful eating,
part of the ritual is to deritualize the process of eating. In the three-course
new meal of relaxation, meditation, and mindful eating, it’s a good idea to
ritualize the first two courses: relaxation and meditation. But do leave
yourself a degree of freedom when it comes to actual eating. Recall that the
point of choice awareness and pattern interruption is to get in the way of
eating rituals and thereby keep the mind alert and awake while you’re eating.
Let the eating part of the new meal be an
evolving process of experimentation. During some meals you might keep yourself
mentally awake by using your nondominant hand. During other meals you might
keep your mind from falling asleep by using atypical utensils. The point is to develop
a habit of breaking habits. Consider this a ritual-breaking ritual! Keep
thwarting your eating habits to keep eating mindfully.
Conclusion: Ready to Ritualize?
You now have a full-fledged, total
body-mind self-care ritual that is welded into the very platform of your day-to-
day eating:
1. First course: Relaxation
2. Second course: Meditation
3. Third course: Eating mindfully
This three-course meal allows you to
reconnect with your body, reconnect with your mind and sense of self, and
reconnect with the world at large through more conscious and attuned eating.
We’ve covered all the basics here. All that’s left is to practice. But unlike
other projects of skill acquisition, this one doesn’t require anything
fundamentally new of you. You don’t have to set aside any separate time for this.
Whatever else you do on any given day, you will almost assuredly be eating. The
new meal approach is simply an opportunity for you to transform this daily
activity–which is underutilized at best, and chronically dissatisfying at
worst–into nothing less than the yoga of eating. Savor your new meal and its
convergence of relaxing lungfuls, soothing nosefuls, humful mmm-fuls, soulful
self-fuls, and mindful mouthfuls. That ought to fill you up!
An Amuse-Bouche of Pattern Interruption
Guess what time it is! It’s time to dump a bucket of
pattern-interruption ice on the eating zombie. It’s time to jolt yourself awake
into unmediated presence. It’s time to contemplate the bottomless mystery of
eating with a dose of philosophical provocation.
Gut Check, Identity Check
There are 75 trillion cells in your body. There are
750 trillion bacteria in your gut (Levy 2004). Within “your own body,” your own
cells are outnumbered by at least a ten-to- one ratio. Now you see why I used quotation
marks around “your own body.” So who are you, eater?
Eating Is Life Giving
When you eat a fruit, such as an apple, you are
stepping–wittingly or unwittingly–into someone else’s reproductive cycle,
becoming involved in a kind of ménage à trois with a tree and Earth in a
life-giving project. In fact, when you eat a piece of fruit, you are literally eating
a plant-based sex organ. A fruit, botanically speaking, is a sexually active
part of a flowering plant. When you consume an apple, you eat its fleshy,
sweet, pulpy ovary tissue, and then you participate in the process of seed
dispersal by throwing out the apple core. Naturally, if you shred the apple
core and its seeds in a kitchen garbage disposal, there isn’t any life-giving going
on. But if you eat an apple and toss the core into your backyard, you might
just be participating in the birth of a future apple tree. Ponder this apple bite
from the tree of knowledge before your next meal.
Life in a Leaf
What is a leaf? According to early twentieth-century Russian
scientist Konstantin Merezhkovsky (as paraphrased by Rob Dunn), “The pale green
chloroplasts in plant cells evolved from bacteria ingested by plant ancestors…
The green of forests was not plant matter at all,…but instead the ancient
cyanobacteria held up by trees in every leaf, like so many guests standing in the
window of a house, candles in their hands” (Dunn 2009, 144). Merezhkovsky’s
views of life-forms as composites were echoed later in the century by such
American biologists as Ivan Wallin and Lynn Margulis. According to the theory
of symbiogenesis, or evolution by mergers of organisms, “Key organs of
eukaryote cells (mitochondria, chloroplasts, flagella, cilia, and centrioles)
had their origins in ancient bacteria engulfed by another cell” (Dunn 2009,
142). My point is this: each leaf is not just a being; it is a microcosmos.
Even a cabbage leaf–even if separated from the head of cabbage–is alive. So when
you have a chance, eat a leaf of spinach and swallow an invisible world!
Eating Is Life Taking
Eating isn’t just life giving. It is also life
taking. To eat is to kill. This is true not just for carnivores, but for
vegetarians and vegans. Unless you are surviving on carrion or fruit fallen
from the tree, there’s a good chance that something living had to
die–purposefully or accidentally– to become your food.
The argument that a carrot doesn’t suffer when pulled
out of the ground whereas a lobster does when boiled alive is speciesism–a subjective
value judgment and an arbitrary assignment of importance to particular species
of life. Sure, it’s easier for us humans to relate to being boiled alive than
to being yanked out of the ground. Being rootless, we have no reference point
for the latter. But, fundamentally, anything that is alive wants to live. If we
eat a living thing, we kill it. So there are no saints among animals.
Animals–whether the lion or the lamb–kill to eat and live, whereas plants
photosynthesize to live. Even an ascetic vegan surviving on a handful of
uncooked fruits and nuts is still predatory upon plant life. So let us eat, as
we must, but not with guilt–rather, with grateful humility.
Primordial Cooking
Which came first, swallowing or digestion? If you
said swallowing, you’re in for a surprise. When prokaryotes–our earliest
ancestors (who still inhabit Earth in the guise of bacteria)–first evolved,
they were basically living stomachs floating freely in the primordial ocean. Prokaryotes
accomplish digestion outside their cell membranes by surrounding themselves
with “a kind of halo of digestive enzymes” (Stewart 1998, 78). Prokaryotes
digest first and then swallow. Now digest this: When you cook, are you not
predigesting (preprocessing) that which you are yet to swallow? Case in point:
Which takes less work to chew, a boiled carrot or a raw one? In a sense, your
stomach is an anatomically internalized kitchen.
Eating Outcasts
Breaking bread with someone is a form of intimacy.
But eating can also alienate. As Lucille Schulberg wrote in Historic India,
“A primary impulse behind the caste system was probably the fear of spiritual
pollution through food” (1968, 140):
[The Indians believed that] the mana, or
‘soul-stuff’ of human beings was the same as the soul-stuff of food, especially
vegetable food. Unbroken cereal food–grasses growing in a field, seeds waiting
to be gathered–retained their soul-stuff when they were handled; anyone could
touch and eat them safely. But once grain was softened in cooking or seeds were
pressed for their oil, their soul-stuff mixed with the soul-stuff of the person
who prepared the food… A taboo on sharing food with an outsider–that is, with
anyone not in [one’s] own caste–was a protective measure against such spiritual
pollution… The higher a caste, the more restricted its menu.
A couple of questions for you. Do you believe that
the “soul-stuff” of food is the same as your “soul-stuff”? If you do, how does
this inform your eating? If you don’t, how does that influence your eating
practices? Also, in what ways are you an eating outcast? How does your eating style
isolate you? Ponder how what you eat might have stratified you socially.
A Seed of Awareness
Botanically, a seed is not the potential for life;
it’s already a life–a tiny plant life with a lunch box of its own food,
awaiting a journey of life. In my book The Lotus Effect (2010), I shared
a story about 1,300-year-old lotus seeds that managed to germinate and grow
when given a chance. Eat a handful of seeds to meditate on how innocently your
metabolic needs result in killing. Here you are, taking care of yourself and,
at the same time, denying a living thing its chance to grow and flourish.
Wrestle for a moment with the question of which is more important, you or those
seeds. My answer is you, of course. If those seeds could eat you to survive,
they would. Life is inevitably self-serving. As long as there is a self, it is going
to serve itself a serving of environment. That’s just how it is. So, even as
you contemplate this inevitable zero-sum metabolic scenario, enjoy your
sustenance. No guilt, I say–just compassion and gratitude!
Eating Kills
Life is movement. Movement creates friction, damage,
and erosion. Eating, as part of this process of living, is no exception. free
radicals, and countless forms of metabolic wear and tear. Studies of calorie-restriction
diets uniformly show that eating less leads to decreased morbidity and
mortality (Walford 2000)–up to a point. Of course, no food means no metabolism
means no life. However, too much food means too much metabolic wear and tear
means premature death. So ponder the irony that the very food that allows you to
live also hastens your demise, even if you’re eating goji berries, with their renowned
antioxidant properties. Any eating event is an instance of metabolic wear and
tear. Life is its own opportunity and its own risk. Strangely enough, life
kills itself. Life is messing with us, playing with us. Since this is
inevitable, let’s choose to laugh at this peculiar paradox of arising and
ceasing, at this peculiar wave of creation and destruction.
This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from Reinventing the Meal, published
by New Harbinger Publications, 2012.
