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Guided Meditation: Nourishing Awareness

Good morning, good day, warm greetings. Welcome to our third day in the series of mindfulness and daily life, mindful days. Delighted to be joining you again. Welcome you to this loving, kind space in your day or your evening, knowing that whether you're here now or later, you're joining a very large community of good-hearted practitioners. So, happy to see you all and to share warm greetings and blessings.

Connecting with your heart, connecting with the warmth of presence, mindful awareness of this moment, connecting to yourself, to your practice. And when you're ready, taking a couple of slow, intentional, calming breaths and beginning to shift the attention inside, connecting with the weight of this body, connecting with the sounds in the room. The silence between the sounds.

Allowing your attention to fill your body and shifting the attention inside. Internal mindfulness, kindness, an open heart to the moment. Letting the attention settle into the simplicity of breath rising and falling in your body. Perhaps at the nose or the chest, the abdomen, or radiating through the whole body. Tending to sensations of breath or the entire body, or to sound if that feels more spacious. Letting yourself be nourished by this connection to the moment.

The invitation when you're ready is to close your eyes and to tune to the texture of the moment, the flavor of the moment. A felt sense of now. If it feels more hospitable to have the eyes very slightly open and downcast to notice the quality of light. Welcoming yourself, your whole being here. All of who you are inhabiting.

Yes. The mind's momentum and movement pulls the attention from the moment. Graciously, kindly observing that momentum as an internal movement of mind and heart, habit energy process. It's okay. And shifting, shifting back to savoring this, the simplicity of this. If it's difficult turning towards what is and trusting the simplicity of mindful awareness, releasing a need to control and being simply in the flow and texture and flavor of the moment.

Creating the arrival, the return of mindful awareness with warmth, appreciation, kindness.

The last few minutes of our practice here together. Opening to a broader sense of the moment, the overall tone, flavor, mood, quality of your mind and heart. Acknowledging any challenges with graciousness, patience, kindness, and savoring the goodness. Steeping in it, soaking in it, letting it nourish your being and your practice.

And as we close this period of formal meditation together, offering the benefits, the goodness of this practice outwards into the world. To all those who are suffering or challenged and to all beings sharing in their joy, their happiness, the very fact of their expression of being alive. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free. And may our practice here together be a cause and condition for greater love, liberation, wisdom, and peace in the world. Thank you for your practice.

Dharmette; Mindful Days 3/5; Eating for Lightness and Ease

Welcome to our third session on daily life mindfulness. As I mentioned at the beginning of this series, I'm trying something a little different, which is responding to common questions I've seen or heard from practitioners in their practice. So the talks have a little bit of a different orientation. As we've been doing in the past days, I would love to hear, see, and know how you are relating to your practice. How you are relating to establishing little anchors in your day and finding little phrases, intentions to help connect your mind and heart more to the moment, and integrate this practice more into the day.

Today our topic is eating as an oasis. An invitation to you to open to food nourishing your body and mind, to become a source of greater mindfulness, greater connection, and greater presence rather than what it often has become for people these days. The default can be quite different, right? Mealtime has become a modern time for digital multitasking, emotional soothing, and autopilot consumption. Not so great.

The shift, the invitation here, is to move from eating as background noise or something you're doing while doing something else, to eating as an ally for mindful awareness and for nourishment. It can be a way of connecting with your lived experience, with yourself, with others, and with your Buddhist or mindfulness practice.

In terms of an anchor phrase, these little gathas^[1] or two or three-word phrases can help anchor you. I'll just give one example: "This food is nourishment for vitality, health, and practice, not distraction." Food can often serve as a distraction for many of us.

This comes from the Buddha. A wise practitioner, a bhikkhu^[2], takes food just as someone might apply ointment for the sake of healing a wound, or grease an axle for the sake of the journey. That's a little bit of a paraphrase from the Connected Discourses^[3]. A wise practitioner heals themselves or fortifies themselves for their journey through the day and through life, rather than what's so common for us humans: to not be so wise, not be so functionally oriented about food. It's so common to reach for food when stressed, lonely, or bored. Mental restlessness can feel like hunger.

So, noticing the difference between craving sensory contact and actual physical hunger. So often our hearts and minds seek connection or stimulation even more than calories or satiating hunger, right?

If emotional eating is something that you find emerging in your day or in your life, pause for a micropractice. Take a breath. Consider asking, "What's the actual state here? Is it hunger, boredom, fatigue? Is it loneliness?" Whatever it is, take a few grounding breaths, just two or three. Turn your attention to your stomach, fullness or emptiness. If there's actual hunger there, proceed eating. There is no crime to snack. And then repeat that process while eating, noticing what the actual state is. Is there hunger?

So often what people notice is there's not physical hunger. So then it becomes the art of feeding something else. Giving our hearts attention, our being attention, or giving the body other stimulation. In other words, take a different kind of sensory snack. Maybe a change of scenery. Step outside, take a short walk, splash water on your face, sip a cup of tea, call a friend or a colleague, or even send a pulse of metta^[4]—kindness, compassion, and care—to yourself.

Food can be nourishment and medicine as well. Moving from snacking, we'll talk here more about the felt sense of eating and nourishment. It's common to lose touch with that during our day. Instead, we are scrolling screens and rushing through meals. Try to shift the attitude towards food as medicine and maintenance for our bodies. It is a spiritual practice for relieving chronic conditions, relieving hunger, helping to relieve bodily discomfort, and not creating new mental heaviness.

An invitation here is to take a pre-meal pause. Set devices away, and again, take a few deep breaths, two or three, before the first mouthful. Many people find it helpful to do some intention setting. We focused on intentions in the morning in the first talk. Here, intentions are set before the meal. Monastics do this, and I'm paraphrasing here from a chant book: "Wisely reflecting, I use food not for fun, not for pleasure, not for fattening, not for beautification, but for the maintenance and nourishment of this body, for keeping it healthy, for helping live the holy life—that is, a spiritual or mindful life. Thinking thus, I will allay old hunger without overeating, so that I may live blamelessly and at ease."

That's a little long, and there is no crime for us laypeople taking in food as pleasure and savoring nourishment. However, I love this idea of maintaining and nourishing the body, using the fuel as a way of coalescing, gathering, and fortifying a beautiful, mindful life.

In addition to setting an intention with two or three words from your own experience, try to single-task, single plate at a time. Serve food on an actual plate or a bowl. Perhaps sit at a dedicated table. Commit to being present for this often-repeated process in our lives. It can serve as a mindfulness bow, a sense of connection.

The Buddha spoke of eating proper amounts at the proper time, and for him, this was one meal a day, which would not feel right to many of us. But he said, "Of eating proper amounts, I experience lack of illness and disease, lightness, strength, and living at ease." So, lightness, strength, and living at ease. Moderation and shared silent meals are also possible. It's possible in shared meals when we're in connection and in conversation with others. Sometimes people think that mindful eating has to happen in agonizingly slow motion or with nothing else going on. But rather, it's about bodily presence and moderation, whether in solitary practice or the relational warmth of a shared table. Both can nourish. In other words, mindful eating doesn't have to be solitary.

This too is from the Jataka tales^[5]: "The best food is that which is given in love." Suppose you're sharing a meal either with yourself or others. Try treating the first three bites as giving over to total sensory awareness. Take time to taste, to savor the smells, the textures, the flavors, and then you can just resume a normal, relaxed pace after that. This comes from Dr. Jan Chozen Bays^[6], a Zen teacher and medical doctor.

There's also an old-fashioned etiquette suggestion that works for modern mindfulness: putting your utensils down now and then during the meal and just checking in with your body. Check the sense of satiation; is there internal fullness developing?

And here is ancient advice from the Theragatha^[7], the poems of the ancient Buddhist monks. This is from Sariputta^[8]: "Four or five mouthfuls before you're full, drink some water. This is enough for a resolute practitioner to live in comfort." And you may not find that water is necessary or helpful at the end of the meal, but this idea of stopping before total fullness to pause, lets your body catch up. And then afterwards, observe the effect of what you eat and how. Observe the effect of the nourishment.

This is paraphrased from the teachings^[9]: "If beings knew as the Buddha knows the result of sharing gifts, they would not eat without having given. Even if it were their last morsel, their last mouthful, they would share it."

To summarize, friends, let mindful eating be a nourishing part of your day through these kinds of micro-anchors and microphrases that connect. Consider for yourself what is one mindful meal anchor you might try today. Are there a few words or a phrase to connect you with your practice that you'd like to share with your future self, or share with others?

Thank you for your kind attention.