By reflecting on the multitude of tiny miracles that made the food and brought it to your plate, you will be open to the wonders of life, writes JOHN McKENNA
IT IS surely a sign of the times we are living through that the visit to Dublin of Thich Nhat Hanh, the 86-year-old Buddhist monk and teacher who runs the Plum Village monastery in Bordeaux, should merit a front page photograph in The Irish Times, as well as coverage in this supplement by both Sylvia Thompson and Tony Bates.
Ireland is hurting, and needs a healer.
“New possibilities arrive when we breathe mindfully,” Tony Bates reported Thay (as Thich Nhat Hahn is known) telling an audience in London’s House of Lords.
“We discover what we have to be thankful for, the wonders of life that are available to us.”
Thay’s message of mindfulness is inspiring and empowering. We need new possibilities in Ireland, we need to see again the wonders of life.
And there is a very simple way to find those possibilities, and see those wonders, and to heal ourselves: we can do it by eating, by Mindful Eating.
Thay himself has co-written a book on the subject. Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life was co-written with Dr Lilian Cheung, of Harvard’s School of Public Health.
The Savor message ( savorthebook.com) is so simple that it is easy to overlook its profundity. I would summarise it like this.
Take an apple, give it your attention as you eat it, just concentrate on eating the apple and nothing else, be still, savour its qualities, enjoy it. Then, take a moment to think about the apple, and your state of mind as you ate it.
If you ate it mindfully, if you were lost in its qualities, then you were fully in the moment, fully aware, fully mindful. Mindful eating.
If, however, you were thinking: where are the car keys? I must call my mother; damn, Book Club tonight; I must lose some weight; or any one of the million things that flash through our minds every mili-second, then you weren’t mindful. You prevented yourself getting there. The pleasure, and the peace of mind, were lost. What you were doing, in fact, was Mindless Eating, the opposite of Mindful Eating.
If you reckon that you simply don’t have time for this sort of practice, then consider this: once a month, at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, they observe an hour-long, wordless, vegan lunch. It happens thanks to the influence – and also thanks to a visit to the Google campus – by Thay last September.
No talk, no tech, no meat, just silent eating in the company of others who want to savour their food and be mindful of it.
It is more than a little ironic that in Ireland we used to have two great mechanisms for mindful eating, mechanisms that we have almost completely neglected in the hurly-burly of modern Ireland.
We used to pause and say Grace before we ate dinner together.
And we relished having a nice cup of tea.
So maybe the path to mindful eating can start with two little steps. Make a cup of tea and sit down and enjoy it, enjoy its niceness, the pleasure of its epicurean complexity. Make it, and sit down in a comfortable chair, and enjoy it mindfully.
And consider saying some manner of Grace that suits your religious persuasion, or lack of it. Just a few seconds’ reflection on the multitude of tiny miracles that made the food and brought it to your plate will slow you down, will make you mindful, will open you to the wonders of life that are everyday made manifest at our tables.
John McKenna is author of the Bridgestone Guides.
