Knowing when enough is enough is really satisfying.

Dao De Jing

A meal is an event. Eating is the process behind it. Paying attention to the process of eating is both self-fulfilling and self-emptying. As such, a meal that involves focus on the process is not just a nutritional event but also a meditative event. Buddhists have long understood this. Let’s learn from them—in essence, but not necessarily in form.

Oryoki Form

Oryoki, which is Japanese for “just enough,” is a form of eating meditation—a highly choreographed, protocol-driven practice that follows a strict procession of cues to keep the mind focused on the process of eating. On the technical side, an oryoki meal involves a set of nested wooden bowls (jihatsu), with the largest bowl (zuhatsu) being called the Buddha bowl and a set of eating utensils that are wrapped up, burrito-style, into a cloth. Oryoki has built-in pauses for chanting prayer and expressing grace or gratitude, and a formal opportunity for the donation of leftovers. Oryoki is a great example of a total reinvention of the meal! This ancient tradition is still alive and well in some circles. It’s still practiced in Zen monasteries and some Buddhist retreat centers.

Converting the Dining Hall into a Meditation Hall

Why did the oryoki meal evolve? Here are a few lay speculations of mine: Imagine yourself as a medieval Zen master charged with managing a Buddhist monastery. Day in, day out, you get a bunch of folks banging on your door seeking admission, refuge, protection—in other words, room and board. Unable to read minds and screen out dharma bums from sincerely motivated seekers, you come up with a brilliant scheme. You decide to turn the dining hall into a meditation hall. You come up with a highly codified eating protocol that emphasizes a precise sequences of movements that includes stopping when one is full, cleaning up after oneself, and liturgical chanting. This brilliant administrative solution kills several birds with one stone. First, you’ve got a captive audience: a hungry stomach means an attentive mind. Second, insisting on mindful …

We tend to think of metabolism in purely  physiological terms.  I’d like to help you broaden your view of  metabolism a bit.  I invite you to think of metabolism as information  processing.  Let’s take the act of eating, for example.  We can think of  eating in purely physiological, metabolic terms… or we can think of  eating as an informational process in which an act of tasting is an act  of knowing.

I describe this Info-Experiential view of eating in my new book, Reinventing the Meal, but here’s a similar perspective from Dr. Hari Sharma, MD, a Western trained proponent of ancient Vedic approaches to healing:

“When  the taste receptors first experience the different taste and textural  properties of a meal, an enormous amount of information is delivered  through the body (primarily through the limbic system), triggering basic  metabolic processes.”

“The body eventually metabolizes the  molecular constituents of the food, but it first metabolizes the sensory  experience of taste.”

“Long before the food is digested, its  influence has spread throughout the body.  A delicious meal is more than  a treat; the taste can be nourishing in itself.”

“The body  metabolizes the emotional content of every experience that it has,”  writes Dr. Sharma.  And that includes the experience of taste.

In sum:

to taste is to experience

to experience is to feel

to feel is to know

to know is to process information

to process information is to attend to the moment

to attend to the moment is to live mindfully.

Metabolize this!

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Resource: Reinventing the Meal

www.eatingthemoment.com

Woman tasting photo available from Shutterstock

The act of giving thanks is more than just a gesture of gratitude.  It is a unique teaching moment.  Indeed, by expressing appreciation for this or that we teach the world about what matters to us, about what is existentially significant for us.  With this in mind, let me ask you this: what contributions to your well-being will you be reinforcing this year with your gratitude?  Will you be showing gratitude for financial, material, logistical help you have received this year or will you be emphasizing the importance of the contributions of support, friendship and companionship?

If you are not sure, I have just a suggestion for you.  But, first, let us go on a brief etymology safari by looking into the history of the words involved.  Thanksgiving Day is a celebration of harvest.  The English word harvest derives from the Sanskrit verb kerp which means “to gather, pluck, harvest.” (1) If the verb kerp (in the meaning of “harvest”) rings the bell, it’s because it is part of the oft-used Latin phrase carpe diem, which, of course, means “pluck (capture, harvest) the day (while it is ripe).”

Carpe diem is not just an invitation to make use of the moment; it is also a message of mindfulness, an invitation to harvest the here-and-now poignancy of the moment.  I propose that this year you celebrate the harvest of mindfulness.  If being mindful is, in fact, an existential value of yours, consider using your gratitude to express a special appreciation to those who helped you be more present and grounded during the year.

And as you accentuate the importance you place on mindfulness, consider giving mindfulness back.  Thanksgiving dinner is an excellent starting opportunity for this.  Indeed, Thanksgiving is the beginning of the national season of binge-eating which, of course, culminates on the New Year’s morning with various dieting resolutions.  Let it be different this time.  Model mindfulness during the Thanksgiving dinner with the help of social savoring.  Instead of loading up your dish with favorites, sample the unfamiliar and invite a mindful …

An eating meditation inspired by a verse from Rig Veda (an ancient Indian text of sacred hymns):

Two birds with fair wings, inseparable companions,

have found a refuge in the same sheltering tree.

One incessantly eats from the peepal tree;

the other, not eating, just looks on.

What is this enigmatic passage about? Who is this “other” bird that is not eating and just looking on? We’ll get to that in a second…

My guess is that most of the readers of my posts about mindful eating are more motivated by weight loss or weight management than by the meditational aspects of mindful eating.   And yet, mindful eating is a wonderful platform for daily meditation.

You see, eating is inevitable, but mindfulness isn’t. When we use eating as an opportunity to awaken ourselves from our zombie-living, we stand to glimpse that elusive, essential sense of self – that silent bird of consciousness – that witnesses our day-to-day behavioral frenzy. Mindful eating – to borrow another metaphor from Buddhist philosophy – is an opportunity to glimpse your Original Face, to come in contact with that immutable, changeless, indescribable sense of presence that is the backdrop to everything else we think, feel or do.

What am I proposing?

A simple thing, really! Now and then, as you eat, pull back for a sec, and ask yourself:

• Who is this who is eating?
• Who is this who is right now governing this amazing machinery of flesh that is eating right now?
• Who is this who is silently supervising this marionette, this puppet of the body as it forks, and knives, and spoons, and chews, and swallows?
• Who is this who is now asking oneself “Who is this?”

As you struggle to answer this arguably confusing and recursive question that folds back onto itself, know that you are looking straight into your “original face,” that you are acknowledging that fundamental, inexpressible, yet very real sense of self-presence!

And this “you,” this bird of mindful presence that is looking on, is always full, complete, lacking nothing whatsoever, in its primordial perfection!

Adapted from “Reinventing the Meal” …

Clean kitchen countertop… what will it see today?

Clean decluttered dinner table… what will it see today?

Clean morning-fresh meditation-fresh mind… what will it see today?

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Have a day of mindful eating!

Share your own mindful eating moment at Mindful Eating Tracker

Tracking your “mindfuls” (your mindful eating moments) is simple: notice and share.

Here’s mine from this Sunday breakfast:

Black beans.

White teeth.

Transparent mind.

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That’s all.

Share your own mindful eating moment at Mindful Eating Tracker

I’ve been offering mindfulness-training as a form of impulse control and craving control to my clients for years.  Here’s one way to introduce mindfulness as a craving control strategy for overeating:

See the Dissatisfaction (of the Desire) as It Passes (Rather Than Looking for Satisfaction)

A craving is a desire.  Desire – as strange as it sounds – is a state of frustration.  To want is to feel incomplete, to feel agitated and thwarted until a given desire is satisfied.  Wanting is restlessness.  Wanting is dissatisfaction.

Mindfulness involves two essential mechanisms: applying a certain kind of attention and practicing dis-identification. 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’s about noticing or witnessing without attachment to or identification with what is being noticed and witnessed. This is where dis-identification 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 as 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 notice it and 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.

In sum, mindfulness allows you to see through the …

There are those who produce energy and those who consume it. Plants are energy producers. They are known as autotrophs because they are nutritionally autonomous, requiring only sunlight, air, water, and minerals. Self-feeding, they don’t have to kill for living (with the rare exception of carnivorous plants, such as the Venus flytrap). And then there are the rest of us. Animals of any kind—mammals, birds, insects, fish, and us humans—consume others, we are heterotrophs (hetero meaning “other”). That’s our existential hell: to live we have to kill, and there’s no way around it (at least not yet).

This dynamic is too natural to be an issue of ethics. Nature is beyond ethics. Ultimately, I see heterotrophic eating not as a matter of ethics, but as an existential predicament: we’re trapped in a death-propagating cycle. But—and this is going to sound like science fiction—we don’t have to stay on this circuit of existential hell. We can evolve. In our dim, distant origins, we share a lineage with plant life. This opens the door to the possibility that we can, at least in theory, also learn to produce energy. We can learn (or relearn) how to photosynthesize (see related post, Metabolic Independence).

In the meantime, I leave you with a call for ahimsa—not with a call for nonharm or nonviolence (at this point, that’s only possible for plants, not for animals), but with a call for harm reduction. Kill (to eat) only as much as you need, and do it with compassion and gratitude, whether you are of the meat-eating or plant-eating persuasion.

Let me close this with the words of Jiddu Krishnamurti:

“A person is not virtuous because he doesn’t eat meat, nor is he any less virtuous because he does.” (1977, 166)

A person is virtuous because he or she is conscious of others. And wherever there is consciousness of others, there tends to dwell compassion.

Adapted from Reinventing the Meal

image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterotroph

What is the future of eating?

This is one of the questions that I try to answer in  my new book, Reinventing the Meal: How Mindfulness Can Help You Slow Down, Savor the Moment and Reconnect With the Ritual of Eating.

Transhuman Fermentation

Still a cultural underground, transhumanism is a gradual churning of techno-genetic possibilities. As a social movement, transhumanism is still in the stages of fermentation. From the evolutionary standpoint, transhumanism is an attempt at self-guided evolution, a project of customizing the body to meet the needs of the mind.

But what does the mind fundamentally need from the body? Faster information processing would be nice. An extended health span would be nifty. Who wouldn’t like faster legs, sharper vision, or more acute hearing? Heck, having a functional pair of wings wouldn’t hurt either. Top all of this off with bulletproof skin, and it might seem as though this human dream of functional augmentation was complete. But it isn’t. It’s lacking the most fundamental piece: greater metabolic independence. Indeed, what minds seem to really like is sovereignty. And sovereignty is synonymous with greater energy independence. Of course, all metabolic independence is relative. No life is ultimately independent of its environment.

As I see it, a transhuman project of metabolic independence could take one of two general paths: that of direct human photosynthesis at a cellular level (let’s call it the path of Homo solaris) or the path of the Energizer Bunny. The former is a path of genetic modification and perhaps surgical augmentation or a wholesale nanosurgical alteration on a cellular level. The latter path might involve some sort of “future skin,” a kind of biotech chimera project of swapping elastic solar panels for patches of skin. The specifics are beyond me. In fact, it’s likely that there are solutions that lie beyond the capacity of my imagination. But one thing seems clear to me: Whether motivated by compassion (for the life that we consume) or by self-determination, we will—if we are fortunate to survive as a civilization—seek greater energy autonomy on an individual …

What is inoculation?  Inoculation introduces an organism to a nominal threat with the purpose of hardening the organism.  Motivational inoculation is a series of challenges (in the form of questions) that help crystallize intrinsic, fail-proof motivation.  Here’s some motivational inoculation for weight management.

Inoculation 1:   What is my stated motivation for this weight management attempt?

Inoculation 2:   Have I tried to lose weight for this reason before?  If yes, then on what basis do I believe that a reason that wasn’t strong enough for me to stick to the plan before would be sufficient this time?

Inoculation 3:  is my reason to lose weight for me or for somebody else?  If for somebody else, then what reason will I have to keep on track if my relationship were to change with this other person?  What if my relationship ends?  What if my relationship stabilizes and he/she no longer cares how I look, how much I weigh? What reason will I use then to stay on track weight-wise?  And why am I not using that reason now?!

Inoculation 4:  Is my reason for this weight management project situational in nature?  Am I trying to lose weight so that I look good at somebody else’s wedding?  Shine at a school reunion?  Get a date?  Competitively snub somebody else?  Am I trying to impress random minds on a spring break beach?  Is my weight management attempt part of my seasonal body-transformation as I get out of the “weight camo” winter clothes into a more revealing wardrobe?  If so, what will help me stay on weight management track when the situation changes?  And why am I not using that reason now?

Inoculation 5:  Is my motivation for weight management in line with my definition of psychological health?  Is my motivation for weight management in line with my life-values, my priorities, my spiritual/existential compass?  If not, why am I misguiding myself?  What would be a motivation for weight management that would express and extend the rest of my life-values and life-priorities?

Inoculation 6:  Would …