Interrupting the flow.

Eating is your chance to multi-task - right?

At the very least we talk while doing it; or watch television together; or if we are eating alone we listen to music, or continue our journey on foot or on the tube. While we are chewing our hands are busy preparing the next mouthful on the plate; it’s on its way to the mouth before what’s in there already has been swallowed; or maybe it hovers on the fork, halfway to the mouth, while we make an important point in the conversation. Thank goodness that somewhere beneath all this activity we do manage to notice something of the quality of the food (the avoidance of harmful substances must be programmed pretty deeply in our brains) but the important thing is that we mustn’t let eating absorb our attention - right? Well that, surely, is what an observer from another planet would think about us humans and the way we eat. “Ah!” the visitor might think, “the future is more important than the present for these humans.”

Have you ever tried eating mindfully (to use a Buddhist word) – noticing what’s on the plate: its smell, its colours and textures; noticing this piece of food on the fork as it approaches the mouth; the feel and taste of it as it passes the lips; what happens to it as you chew and finally swallow; allowing a moment between that and returning to the plate for the next portion? It’s extraordinarily difficult in our doing, achieving, multi-tasking world. You might begin with just a single break in the cycle: a tiny pause between each action as you consume food; interrupting the flow. Apparently it’s a really helpful way to eat if you want to lose weight.

Interrupting the flow, however fleetingly, enables our magnetic centre to grow stronger so its pull is more insistent and more recognizable. Magnetic centre? That place of silence, stillness and space which we all carry deep within us: the place of Being, not doing.