Admit it. Isn’t the challenge of paying attention to your tongue as you eat a totally weird and wild activity? After all, how many members of your family and how many of your friends have been focusing their attention on their tongue this week? Unless you’ve involved others in this activity, my guess is you’re probably the only one who happens to be paying attention to your tongue anywhere near or dear to you.
When we eat, it is common to dip into a repetitive space of thoughts, behaviors and actions that do not serve our best and highest good. The purpose of the mindfulness exercises is to make every effort to twist our way out of that endless trap of repetition that does not serve our best and highest good and to whisk away the negative thought forms that contribute to ill-health so that we shift seamlessly into a much more positive space. After all, how benign can it be to simply pay attention to your tongue? Many of you may have discovered that it’s actually a bit of a challenge.
Think about another challenge that I certainly will never suggest, but you can fantasize what it might require anyway. The task would be to construct a book of instructions to your tongue so your tongue would know precisely what it needed to do at any particular given moment. Now that book, even if it could be written, would be hundreds of thousands of pages long because the tongue is quite a clever part of what our body does for us day in and day out.
Have you noticed that when pay attention to your tongue, sometimes you begin to think,
“Well, I notice my tongue is slipped over to the right side, I wonder what’s going to happen if I slip it over to the left side?
I wonder how my tongue is related to my swallowing?”
You see, without a tongue swallowing becomes incredibly difficult indeed.
The point of this task and all of the mindfulness exercises is to become totally present in the moment, to become aware of your body, to know precisely what your body is doing moment to moment and to become sensitive to what you are feeling. This, as it turns out. is the key to reducing stress. If we in a more typical mode of pondering over past mistakes or anticipating that tomorrow may be worse than today, stress will accelerate. An acceleration of symptoms is inevitable.
There is a lesson to paying attention to the tongue that is actually quite profound. The hundreds of thousands of pages of a book that would be required to give instruction to the tongue of course would never be adequate. There would always be criticisms from one critic or another that the instructions were not quite sufficient. Your Tongue Instruction manual could never cover all the bases. The final and most magnificent lesson we can learn from paying close attention to our tongues is to:
“Celebrate the wonders and the miracle of the human body.”
Yes, the body really does know how to function. No, we really don’t know how to give it instructions so that it functions any better than it knows how to do its job naturally and effortlessly. Our body is a miracle. Our body does know how to heal itself.
As you continue to pay attention to what your tongue is doing when you eat, listen, sit and talk, I invite you to also celebrate and honor the miracle of your body. It is indeed a divine creation composed of billions of cells that are healthy, vibrant, and doing precisely what they need to be doing for you moment to moment, day in and day out. As you focus your attention on your tongue you will become more mindful of the present moment.
- Notice how your stress dissolves.
- Celebrate the symptoms that dissolve.
- Honor the miracle of your body.
Robert