Snack Snacks
Simple prompts for eating with "awareness and gratitude." Plus The Heard
Of the five familiar senses, I have written least about taste. Which is weird; it’s pretty important! So today I’ll share two short & sweet practices — snack-size, if you like — from Jan Chozen Bays, that resonated with me.
Bays is a zen teacher and the author of Mindful Eating and other books. I encountered a version of this simple practice a while back, and have continued to think about it. It’s about slowing down your eating:
First you sit down to eat. Put one bite of food in your mouth. Now put down the fork or spoon — down, completely down . … Now savor that one bite as you chew and fully swallow it. It may help to close your eyes, so that you don’t even see the rest of the food. … Keep the mind’s awareness in the mouth … When that one bite is completely gone, then and only then may you pick up the fork or spoon, and put one more bite in your mouth.
Repeat: Mindfully eat one bite after another, until you are full. It might feel strange at first, Bays concedes, but now she says she does it all the time — and it “almost always makes me laugh,” as it counters her impatient nature. You can hear her describe the practice in this short audio clip:
Here’s another one, also from Bays:
