6 Weeks to Invite Mindfulness Into Your Life
Week 5 - Enjoy Your Food
How often do you throw your food together in a haste, rush everybody in your house to the dinner table, sit down and start gulping down your meal? Hurry up and enjoy that meal!
Wait... why don't you take a breath... and slowly - with purpose - enjoy that meal? Don't you want to taste the true essence of the seasoning or the ripeness of the vegetables? How about actually taking the time to smell your food? Do you even see your food?
Why not try to mindfully eat one piece of food, or even one meal this week? You can do this on your own or with your partner, or family members. Notice the difference between the frenzied and harried meal and the mindful meal.
First things first, you will need to eliminate distractions at the table, that means turn off the music or t.v., quiet the conversation to silence if possible and put away any reading materials. This meal is going to take front and center on the dinner table stage.
Once you sit down to enjoy this mindful morsel of food or meal I want you to look at it. I mean REALLY look at it like you've never seen it before. Notice the color and texture of all the elements of this meal.
Next I want you to lift one piece of food up to your mouth and smell it. How often do you do that? Is the smell pungent, spicy, sweet, rich? Does it evoke memories of past meals or people in your life?
Now it's time to bring the food up to your lips, let the food graze your lips as you notice the texture of the food and then put the food in your mouth. Do NOT chew it yet! At this point you might be in agony because you just want to eat the dang food already, or you might actually find pleasure in this process thinking that this could be the most flavorful piece of food that you have ever ingested.
Let the food move around in your mouth, again noticing textures and noticing flavors. Is it becoming mushy or slimy? Is it salty, sweet, hot, bland? Continue to pay attention to how it feels in your mouth. You may think to yourself that you had no idea that this piece of food that you might have eaten 50 times before felt like this. You may actually think about how you've never even given a thought before about what this food truly feels like. You've inhaled it in the past and it served its purpose, right? You got full.
And NOW, yes now, it's finally time to slowly start chewing it. (It's about time, right?) At this point you have increased your awareness of what this simple piece of food really tastes like, congratulations you made it through your first mindful bite.
You can stop this experiment here, or continue with a mindful meal. If you continue on, keep eating slowly and with purpose. Taking care to really see what each bite looks like, feeling the texture of each bite and tasting the true flavor of your food. You'll be amazed how a simple little piece of food can be bursting with flavor or how the texture can be so different than you once thought it was.
Just notice...