manabunnow4zph – Mindfulness Challenges

One Bite at a Time

How much pleasure do you derive from eating delicious foods, or at least foods that are yummy to you? Speaking for myself, I derive endless pleasure from eating. My next question is how much time do you spend eating the delicious foods that you love to eat? How much time are you able to derive pleasure from eating?

Thanksgiving is a good example of what happens when we eat. Much time is spent in the kitchen by many people preparing the Thanksgiving meal. Hours are spent puttering and cooking and heating and shopping and preparing various dishes. Everyone sits down, typically a nice prayer or salutation is given for the entire family and then everybody gets down to the serious business of eating. Food is gobbled, one bit after another. Sometimes talking completely stops for ten minutes. There is no necessity for one bite to be chewed and swallowed before the next is inserted into the mouth. And presto – after ten minutes each person around the table has successfully gobbled up as much as they can eat.

Watch people carefully who eat and oftentimes you’ll notice that a person will put one bite, chew once or twice, put a second bite, chew once or twice; they’ll put a third, chew once or twice and finally after three or four shovelfuls of food, they swallow. This is certainly not a mindful practice. What is also interesting is that we tend to eat the foods that we truly love, the taste that we treasure, much more quickly than those food that do not offer us as much instant pleasure.

The mindful practice and challenge this week is to slow the process of eating down. The challenge has a formula to it. I must warn you, it will take longer for you to eat each meal, but the benefits will be immeasurable. Here’s the formula. If you’re eating with a utensil; a fork or a spoon, take the fork or the spoon and insert the food into your mouth and then place the fork or the spoon down on the table and proceed to chew slowly, deliberately and then swallow.

After swallowing, pick the utensil and do it one more time. No new food can be inserted until the existing food has been swallowed and its treasures enjoyed. We will fully and completely enjoy the tastes of each and every bite by proceeding with this small, short, simple formula––

Insert the food into your mouth
Put the utensil down
Chew slowly and deliberately
Focus your attention on your mouth, not the plate or the spoon
Enjoy all the tastes and sensations
Swallow
Pick up the fork or the utensil from the table
Proceed to Step One

If you’re not eating with a fork or a spoon and if you’re using your hands – for example if you’re eating a sandwich or chips – the same applies. You’ll want to take your item, whatever it might be, place it up to your mouth, take a bite and then put that sandwich or whatever you’re holding in your hand down on your plate. Chew, swallow and then do it again one-bite-at-a-time.

This week, change your customary and habitual approach to eating. Focus your attention on your mouth. Enjoy the deliciousness of food that you love to eat.

Robert

Deeper Meaning Behind Paying Attention to Your Tongue

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

Pay Attention to Your Tongue

Each week’s challenge is crafted to direct your attention to places that are unfamiliar. This helps enforce mindfulness such that we are more mindful moment to moment of our body and what messages our body sends to us.

This week’s challenge is to pay attention to your tongue. Really! That is your invitation this week. I bet you have never had an invitation like this one!

What is your tongue doing when you are eating?
Does your tongue tend to hang out on the left side of your mouth or the right side of your mouth?
Where does your tongue hang out when you swallow water?
Does your tongue feel thick, mucousy, thin, slippery, tough, raggedy or edgy?
How does your tongue feel from moment to moment during each and every day?
Where does your tongue hang out in the moment when you are simply sitting listening to someone else talk?

Pay attention to your tongue this week, especially when you eat. What is your tongue doing? How does your tongue feel? What is your tongue saying to you. You tongue may be an ignored body part of your body but it is also terribly essential to your health and well being.

I’m quite sure this is not something you’ve done recently, so this exercise is guaranteed to place your attention on the present moment rather than being focused on the past or anticipating the future.

May you lead a stress-free life this week as you pay attention to what your tongue is doing in the moment.

Robert