The Secret of Life

The Taste Of Tomatoes

I recently attended a workshop run by Sally Chaffer, in which she introduced us to the spiritual experience of eating strawberries. Now, this may seem more like recreation than spiritual development, but it was all about mindfully eating strawberries: being aware of their appearance and texture as we held them in our hands, smelling their fragrance, and then eating them slowly a bite at a time, giving ourselves a chance to enjoy their luxurious taste.

I have to confess that this is very different from the way I normally eat: gulping things down mindlessly as I focus my attention on something else entirely.

I'm not sure how I came to eat like this. Was it because I would get into trouble with the adults if I didn't eat up my dinner, so I learned to eat as quickly as possible lest my appetite dwindled away and left me stranded half way through the green beans? Or is it because some primitive survival instinct kicks in and prompts me to eat up my food before some competitor grabs it away and I starve to death?

Whatever the truth of it, Sally's approach to eating is much more fun. And as you might have guessed, she was using the strawberries as a practical exercise in being in the moment, illustrating the advantage of focusing your attention on what you're actually doing, instead of being somewhere away in the past or the future, missing the experience of actually living your life.

If you happen to live within traveling distance of Leeds, UK, you may be interested in attending one of these workshops of Sally's. The next one is scheduled for 19th July. She titles the workshops Inner Peace Now! and you can find some details about them here. (You may recognize Sally from the comments she leaves here at The Secret Of Life - I've written more about my experience of her workshop at Sue Ann Edwards' blog.)

That experience with the strawberries reminded me of something which happened to me several years ago. A friend offered me an organic tomato she had grown, inviting me to taste it and see what I thought. Biting into that tomato was a real revelation. There was a sweetness to it, a subtlety of flavor, which brought me very vividly back to my childhood. It was a long time since I had tasted a tomato like that.

"Wow!" I said. "That's what tomatoes used to taste like!"

My friend smiled, clearly pleased at my reaction.

But afterwards, something unexpected happened. The next time I ate a tomato, just an ordinary non-organic tomato I bought at the supermarket, I tried tasting that one as well. And you know what? That tasted pretty good too. Not as good as my friend's tomato perhaps, but I could still detect that same sweetness and subtlety of flavor. And gradually, as I tasted more and more tomatoes, I realized that tomatoes generally tasted pretty good now, a lot better than all the tomatoes I'd tasted for many years. And I soon realized that this had nothing to do with the tomatoes themselves. It was all to do with me. It was simply because I had started paying attention as I ate. Tomatoes had really always been this good. It was just that I hadn't been focusing on what I was eating. I had been biting into something which my mind had labeled 'tomato' and then dismissed from my attention. Why go to the bother of tasting those things, my mind had been saying, I know all about them already!

But now I knew better. Now I had experienced the benefit of actually tasting the tomatoes, of being present while I was eating them.

Of course, I had failed to extrapolate this fully and bring the same degree of attention to all my eating, but it's never too late to start. And there may be more benefit involved than simply enjoying the taste. Some people believe that eating mindfully improves our digestion and allows us to extract more nutrition from our food. This seems to make sense. Why shouldn't our digestive system operate more efficiently if we're paying attention while we're using it? So many other things do - why not our stomachs?

Mindfulness can also be helpful in losing weight. Compulsive eating doesn't tend to be mindful eating. It tends to be something we do while we're thinking of something else, perhaps focusing on whatever problems have led us to eat compulsively in the first place. Or perhaps what's happening is that we're focusing on what we're going to eat next: eating a biscuit while our mind is on the biscuits that are still in the packet. Or worse still, on the packets that are still in the shop, just waiting there to be bought...

If compulsive eating is a problem for you, you could try eating mindfully for a change. Focus on that biscuit. Enjoy its taste, its texture. You may then derive more pleasure from eating that single biscuit than you did from all those packets you slung mindlessly down your neck.

And then: who knows? That one biscuit may be all you really desire.

Postscript: My blogging platform, Typepad, has now introduced more flexibility in typefaces, so I've taken the opportunity to increase the font size. I find this a lot easier to read. Do you agree, or do you find it too large? Any feedback is welcome!

Foreign Bodies

After all those serious posts about The Secret, it's high time for an anecdote. So here's one about guess what?: the law of attraction. But I warn you, it's not for the squeamish. I mean, it's really not for the squeamish. This is an official warning.

But it's quite funny, I think...

Chris recently drew my attention to the fact that I'd put on a bit of weight. So I checked on the scales and found that, yes, I'd put on half a stone (about eight pounds). This was a bit of a problem. How was I going to lose it? You see, I don't really do diets. I try but they don't seem to take. The truth is: I like the eating too much.

And yet, thinking back, I realized that I do sometimes lose weight. It usually happens by accident, due to some fortuitous circumstance or other. Like, er, gastroenteritis - that's been a popular one over the years. But I thought it best not dwell on that one too much: what we focus on grows. I'd learned that much from all those posts I did about the law of attraction.

So guiding my thoughts swiftly on, I tried to think what else had turned up to make me lose weight over the years. Well, there was falling in love with Chris. That seemed to do the trick at the time - the pounds fairly rolled off me. But I'd already been and done that one. There was always the chance of an affair on the side, I supposed, but Chris might not like it and I didn't want to upset her.

So what could I do? How was I going to lose those extra pounds?

I decided that something would probably turn up...

Carbohydrates are my downfall. I can eat muesli till it's coming out of my ears. Gluten free muesli, that is, because I find I'm best without too much gluten in my diet. Another favorite is gluten free porridge, made out of rice and millet flakes. Yum.

I was helping myself to some of this the other morning, pouring it into the bowl to warm it up in the microwave, when I suddenly noticed something strange in it, which I took to be some sort of husk. A millet husk, I supposed, not knowing very much about millet or how it grew or anything. The truth is: I tend not to know a great deal about anything much. I'm remarkably incurious really (except when it comes to the meaning of life and stuff like that).

But I'm quite good at eating things...

Anyway, I thought I'd better take a look at this thing in the porridge, so I went and got my glasses and found to my surprise that it wasn't a husk at all. It was an insect. Quite a big insect as it happened. It had its wings outstretched as though it was about to fly away - but it wasn't going to go anywhere. It was far too dead for that. And far too toasted.

My first thought was to pick the insect out and carry on making the porridge. After all, that's what you'd do if you were washing vegetables, wasn't it? And I was really looking forward to that porridge...

But I decided that I really ought to take a closer look at the packet. And that's when I noticed that there were other things in there as well. Things that also looked like cereal husks - but on closer inspection, weren't.

On closer inspection, the packet contained rather a lot of dead insects.

Suddenly, I didn't feel very much like the porridge any more.

And that wasn't the end of it. There were other things in the packet as well: things that were harder to identify. I delved inside and picked one of them up to take a closer look and found that it was attached to a string of grains of millet as though they were all on a necklace. My mouth was gaping wide open in awestruck wonder by this time. I seemed to have found a kind of Aladdin's Cave of Yuck. I saw that what I was holding, with the grains of millet attached, was a string of white cotton.

Well, that settled it then! I was going to have to complain about this...

My mind started making connections now. I had previously only identified the insects as 'insects'. That had seemed to be all I needed to know. Delving any further into the zoological details would have seemed over-fastidious. But now I realized that these creatures were actually moths. And moths eat cotton, don't they?

Which kind of made sense - and yet didn't. I mean, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Was the cotton in the porridge to start with and then the moths found their way in, attracted by the cotton? Or was it that the moths were in there first and then some concerned operative at the porridge works came along and fed them some cotton in case the poor things should starve? Or else - my mind was going into overdrive now - had one of the operatives fallen into the vat of flakes and these threads of cotton were all that remained of his T Shirt? In which case, where was the rest of the operative? Was he all mashed up in another part of the porridge?

I threw a sidelong glance at the packet. It was sitting there looking all innocent, apparently filled to the brim with its humdrum load of rice flakes, millet flakes and dead moths - yet did it also hold a sinister secret?

I thought it best not to delve any deeper...

So I took the porridge back to the store and complained. The young lady at the desk looked suitably horrified. She took a look at the packet.

"I didn't realize that's what 'organic' meant," she said.

"Neither did I," I told her.

So they gave me my money back there and then - how's that for customer service? - and told me that the packet would be sent to their laboratory for inspection. I would hear from them in due course...

I d*mn well better do...

But I kept quiet about the terrible truth - I was too scared that I would throw up all over the customer services counter if I told them about it.

The truth was that I'd actually bought two packets of porridge. And I'd already eaten the other one.

I'm definitely going to put on my glasses when I fix my breakfast in future...

"What do you fancy for tea?" asked Chris, when I got back from the store.

I told her that I didn't feel very hungry.

And indeed, I haven't felt very hungry ever since.

So what did I tell you? I knew that something would come along. There's the law of attraction for you...

Because it seems to me that I'm not going to be putting on very much weight over Christmas, not this year.

I'll be sliding into those skinny jeans in no time...