What You Eat

This week in Spritual Practices class, we covered Eating Meditation and Walking Meditation.

I was having an awkwardly laid out schedule, so I was starving just before class started and was eating pizza during the chat at the beginning. I’d forgotten it was Eating Meditation day and people were looking at me strangely as I gulped down my food.

For eating meditation, you practice eating slowly and mindfully, savoring each step of eating. First you “eat” with your eyes, taking in the color and shape of the food. Then you “eat” with your sense of smell, savoring the smell of the food you are about to eat (we were eating grapes and guess what? grapes don’t really smell like anything.). If it’s something more solid, you could “eat” with your sense of touch, feeling how the item feels under your fingertips. You could “eat” with your sense of hearing if it was something like fruit that you could thump or tap. Finally, you put it into your mouth and feel it with your tongue and the roof of your mouth. You chew slowly, taking in the texture as it is chewed. Eventually you swallow it and feel it going down.

The whole process makes me giggle a lot. I’m not sure why. 🙂

We were also supposed to do walking mediation, but since this is a pandemic and we were on Zoom, that part was hard to do online. So we just talked about it and our leader shared a visual about how to hold you hands while you walk (think of what the kids did with their hands in the Sound of Music while they were singing, it’s sort of like that.) We talked about where there were local prayer/meditation labyrinths for walking. There’s one quite near my house (that I know about thanks to the Pokemon Go group that I joined one day last year).