The concept has roots in Buddhist teachings. Just as there are forms of meditation that involve sitting, breathing, standing and walking, many Buddhist teachers encourage their students to meditate with food, expanding consciousness by paying close attention to the sensation and purpose of each morsel.
Continue this way throughout the course of a meal, and you’ll experience the third-eye-opening pleasures of a practice known as mindful eating. It really doesn’t matter what the food is, but make it something you love let’s just say it’s that first nibble from your favorite, hot, fragrant dish.
With most people shoving the food in their mouths even before it’s put down, this is where the hard part comes.Put the fork DOWN! For most people who have had the first bite, the second is inevitable, and we all know what happens after that.
The point of this exercise is to get people, especially children to masticate their food properly. Not only is this healthy, relieve stress and sheds many of the neuroses that we’ve come to associate with food, but it is also about experiencing food more intensely, especially the pleasure of it.
The last few years have brought a stack of books, blogs and videos about hyper-conscious eating. Which many also call mindful eating, which is passionately encouraging corporations and health care providers to try it and such experiments of the mouth and mind have begun to seep into universities across the globe.
In Rwanda in many homes eating is more of a necessity than an enjoyment; people are forced to swallow the foods whole due to lack of time or space in restaurants. School children are forced to eat quickly so then can have time to play before recess has ended. Meals have become and an all eating and no thinking.
Dr. Jan Chozen Bays, a pediatrician and meditation teacher in Oregon and the author of Mindful Eating: A guide to rediscovering a healthy and joyful relationship with food says “I think the fundamental problem is that we go unconscious when we eat.”
Life is becoming faster and faster, and so is everything we do, our awareness and ability to check ourselves has become something the doctors are doing, but what of our selves. Are we not to stop and ask yourself if what your eating is healthy, well cooked, or simply food for comfort? Which is how many of our children are increasing in the obesity levels.
The question shouldn’t be what the foods to eat are, in your mind but what is on your mind when you’re eating.
The point of the exercise is simply to eat, as opposed to eating and talking, eating and watching TV, or eating and watching TV and gossiping on the phone while tweeting and updating one’s Face book status, instead for 10 or 20 minutes you hold musing on, holding and patiently masticating, in keeping with a key principle of mindful eating.
Self-help gurus like Oprah Winfrey have become cheerleaders of this eating exercise, where a whole hour is dedicated to masticating, enjoying and holding the tastes of the foods they eat.
So should you be eating while reading this article please, don’t stop reading, finish reading and with all the food for thought we have given you, switch off your phone, log off your facebook page, wish whomever you are eating with “Bon Appétit” and then take your food seriously.
