This week is a refinement of the last. As you might have guessed from the practice last week, the trick to receiving pleasure from food is to savor it.
Webster defines Savor this way
• to appreciate fully
• to enjoy and relish
It Will Be Repeated. A Lot.
The key to this is pace. We talked about pace in the Winter and Spring Food Practice Through The Seasons – The pace at which you eat or go through life deeply impacts the quality and pleasure you will derive from the food you eat (as well as life itself).
Slow down. Slow down. Slow down.
The key to presence is slowing down. And by the same token, the key to slowing down is to eliminate as many distractions as you can.
We live in such a fast world. There is so much happening at once and we have sexy tools like our phones and computers that make it easy to make even more come at us and happen as well. The thing is, there is no way to fully engage and experience something you are doing if you don’t shut the world out, and give your full attention.
Your pace, how you approach your food and how you eat it is essential to your pleasure and how much you actually experience.
The slower you go, the more you savor, the more you will receive and the more you will learn. This sounds like a lot of repetition, but it bares repeating because it is that important. Every single thing in your life will be improved by you slowing down and intimately taking in your food.
A Word On Multi-Tasking
Don’t. Seriously.
We have long lived with the gender stereotype that women are great at multitasking. Much of that is sourced from the very real fact that women HAVE to multitask as they manage their own lives, the lives of their loved ones, careers and countless other things.
Personally, I find multitasking to be an affliction of a broken system that humans both create..
Multitasking gives you the illusion that you do a bunch of things efficiently, and where perhaps you’re getting somethings done, you’re certainly never going to be able to do each of those things to the best of your ability. You are definitely never going to fully absorb all that each individual task has to offer you by way of experience, wisdom, learning, sensation, pleasure, nourishment, expression, etc.
Food Practice
This is very similar to last week and important to keep doing. The only difference with this week is that you refine your practice, take it deeper, continue to strip away distractions.
Savor – appreciate fully, enjoy and relish your food. Linger in the flavors that you are enjoying. Let the food sit in your mouth longer. Chew more, which by the way is a healthy thing to do because it boosts the effectiveness of your digestion process.
Start paying attention to the textures and flavors you derive most pleasure from.
Linger. Linger. Linger.
This is the key to savoring your food. Relish those fresh tastes. Relish the variety. See if you can savor deep enough to ‘taste’ the Life in the food you are eating.
Felicity says
Now that you mention it, I do seem to savor going out to eat with my loved ones. I am always the one to eat the slowest, talk the most, and think on things. But when I eat at home its another story. Its always quick and never savored. Most of the times it has morphed into a quick pause between other ‘to do’s’…..Thank you for reminding me to “Linger. Linger. Linger….” and to give my “sexy tools” a rest – especially at meal times.
Elena Rego says
The sexy tools are hard to put down, girl. I KNOW. In other ways, unrelated to food, but very much still affecting how I eat, I’m culling the noise from my sexy tools so that what I get out of them is a bit more honed, refined and intentioned. I need to write about this soon.