Mindfulness Challenges

What have you learned about yourself after becoming mindful of the sensations in your stomach as you ate a meal?  Some people discover that their habit has been to eat upon first arising in the morning because that is  what they were taught to do when they were kids.  However, it is possible that the better time for you and your body to ingest food is much later on in the morning, like 11 or even 12.

Or, perhaps you always wait until 10:00 am to eat something. It is possible that the best strategy for you is to eat something immediately after popping up out of bed.

You will know the best time to eat first thing in the morning by listening carefully and connecting in with the sensations that your stomach sends out to you.  Become mindful of your eating habits. It is possible that the your long established habits of eating are not in tune with the needs of your body.  Some people need to graze throughout the day and the idea of having two or three full meals is simply not well-suited to the needs of their body. Every body is different.

Research clearly shows that the less that we eat, the longer we live and the happier our body actually is.  There is a saying that if we stop eating when we are four-fifths full, we will maintain a state of continual balance and wellness.  If we, as a habit, eat until we are full; that last fourth or fifth of food will guarantee that we are feeding our doctors and our healthcare professionals.  We don’t need to eat until we are totally full, Our stomach – and the sensations therein – tell us when to stop eating. We just have to pay attention, to become mindful!

Being mindful of the sensations in the stomach, then, yields incredible insights about what our bodies need from us.  Believe it our not, there are mindfulness workshops that involve the challenge of eating one single raisin. The task is to take time to connect in with the texture, the flavor, the aroma, the temperature and the color of the raisin.  Many people who attend those workshops report a great surprise with the realization that they are full after eating one single raisin.  Why is that the case?  It’s because they have engaged the full experience of pleasure in eating rather than simply crunching down food mouthful after mouthful without being mindful of the full experience of the:

• colors
• smells
• temperature
• flavors
• textures

of the food we choose to eat and place inside our body.

A second most important reason to be mindful of the sensations in our stomach is that many people confuse anxiety and loneliness with being physically hungry.  If we really connect with our stomach and the sensations that our  stomach sends to us, we can disengage the feelings of anxiety from the sensations of hunger.  Clearly, it’s not going to help the anxiety if we try to override that with eating when the body does not need to be fed.  Similarly, it’s not going to help loneliness to over eat. The loneliness will still be present.

A resolution for both challenges is to be mindful of each and every bite that we take of the food that we choose to eat.  To be mindful of the true essence of what it is that we put into our body, to acknowledge the difference between food that is live and food that is dead; to acknowledge and honor the difference between food that nourishes our body and food that damages our body.  Once that food reaches our stomach, we know the difference because the sensations of our stomach will tell us what our body needs to nourish us back to health.

Many blessings and may you have a marvelous time as you continue to be mindful of the sensations in your stomach before you eat, during the course of eating and after you eat, always asking the questions –

1. What’s there? 
2. Am I too full? 
3. Am I not full enough? 
4. Did I eat when I was hungry?

Or, did I eat for other reasons, because –

• I was anxious
• I was afraid
• I was lonely

Disengaging the motivation to eat out of fear from the motivation to eat because we are hungry will bring you a long way toward coming into full balance, health and wellness. Become mindful of the stomach and lo and behold, you will reap humongous rewards.

Robert

© Parkinsons Recovery

What is the deeper meaning behind situations where we find that we are impatient with what is happening, whatever the situation might be.  There is a good chance that underneath impatience is a thought form.  That thought form is,

“There is not enough time.  There is not enough time in the day for me to be able to do what it is that I need to do and that I want to do. 

I call your attention to the reality that is simply your own thought form. There is plenty enough time to do whatever it is that we set our intention to do. If we think that there is not enough time – if that is the thought form that we hold near and dear to our hearts – then of course, guess what?   There won’t be enough time to do what it is that we would like to do and we want to do.

There is a companion issue associated with being impatient.  If you are impatient with a particular task or many tasks during the day, it is often the case that we think to ourselves,

“I’m ready to be done with this because I have something much more fun and much more interesting that I want to do right now.  I don’t want to run out of time so that I can’t enjoy the task I really want to do.”

For example,  let’s say that as you are washing the dishes after dinner you find yourself rushing through because there is a video that you are craving to watch.  You have been thinking about watching this video all day long.  You want to get the dishes finished quickly because you want to be sure you have enough time to watch that exciting video.  The thought is,

“Washing dishes really isn’t very much fun.” 

In other words, you are not present to the chore of washing dishes.

The reality is, everything we do can be a fascinating experience even if we have done a task 1,150 times (which would be washing the dishes for most of us!). Each task is an occasion to have a new experience.  If  the chore involves – as in my example – washing the dishes, then,

• Feeling the water of over our hands. 
• Feeling the texture of the soap. 
• Watching the dishes change as the soiling clears. 
• Placing the dishes in the dish drain as they form a unique mosaic. 
• Listening to the sounds that surround us as we wash the dishes. 
• Smelling the dish soap.
• Watching the bubbles.
• Feeling the texture of being present in the moment as we feel our clothes nestle against skin. 

Enjoying each and every moment of that experience means that each time we wash the dishes it winds up being a totally new experience which keeps us endlessly interested, attentive and mindful.

There are no experiences that are boring in themselves. We only make them so with our attitudes and with our thoughts.  We impose a static label of boredom.

If we’re rushing to get through an activity because we want to go to another, we are living in the future.  We are projecting out on something that is about to happen.  You know as well as I that when you get to the next activity oftentimes it does not meet our wonderful expectations of how interesting, how pleasurable and how engaging it will be.

If we actually reflect back on that previous activity that we had declared to be routine and boring – something we have to do because we have to do it – chances are we might actually recognize that doing that previous activity was actually interesting. We just didn’t spend enough time on it.

It is easy to be impatient when chronic symptoms present themselves; impatient that they vanish, impatient that those symptoms resolve quickly.  When we’re in the moment, all of that rattletrap in our minds suddenly  vanishes.  We occupy our thoughts, our emotions and our feelings to what it is that we are experiencing now.

As you have observed the extent to which you have been impatient over the past several days, have you found you are impatient more frequently than you had acknowledged previously (as was my case)? What was your answer to the question,

“Now when I get through with this, what next?” 

How many times did you find yourself asking the question,

“What next?” 

You know and I know that the ultimate final answer to that question is death.  Are you really rushing then as fast as you can to that end state of death?  Is that what this is all about?

Slow down!
Be present in the moment. 

I can assure you that as you monitor the degree to which you find you are impatient, you will be able to more mindfully be present to each and every moment.  Stress will be reduced. When stress is reduced, symptoms will dissolve like a snowball in the summertime.

Robert

© Parkinsons Recovery