Food is the designed
mechanism for transferring life force from one species to another, for
allowing an individual to consciously (or unconsciously) enter into a
relationship with life, and for participating in the cycles of life.
Conscious Eating is
a kind of spiritual practice that can bring the miracles of food
to your awareness. The technique is simple.
First, take a moment or two before each meal to consciously
remember all the people who have brought you the food on your plate.
Think about the
farmer who plowed the soil, planted the seeds, watered, weeded, and
hovered over the crops until harvest time.
Think about the harvesting, loading of baskets and boxes, loading
of trucks. Think about the
truck driver who transported the whole food to a grocery store or to a
factory for processing. Think
about the factory workers who may have ground the grain or processed the
sugar to put in the cereal that comes from the box.
The more processed the food, even though it may be less healthy
for us to eat, the more people that have been involved in bringing it to
us. And of course, think of
the person who made the money to purchase this food for you, and the
person who went shopping and brought the food home, and the person who
did the menu planning and cooking and cleaning up before the food made
it to the table. And don’t
forget to put yourself on the list, for taking the time and energy to
give your body the gift of a good meal.
There was a time in our history when most of these jobs were completed
by people we knew or even by ourselves.
This is not commonly the case today.
Today, the list of workers bringing us our sustenance is long.
And it’s hard to go through such a long list of people without
being filled up with awe and gratitude.
Meal time is a good time to send some of that gratitude radiating
back out toward that multitude.
Now for the second part of Conscious Eating, take another moment to feel
the life in the food. Remember
how it grew from the warm soil, used the sun and the rain to grow and
grow. Or perhaps more
profoundly, remember how it was born and grew to walk on the land and
felt the breezes and ate and slept and ultimately gave its body for your
meal. Take this life force
into your own body so that it might grow strong and live and help you to
fulfill your destiny.
In this way, two or three minutes before eating can turn into a moment
of awakening our awareness to the incredible acts of nurturing and
caring that take place with each meal.
Whether you’re sitting down to a home cooked meal or grabbing
an Oreo in the car on the way to your next meeting, the process of
feeding yourself is no small event when you look at it in this spiritual
context.
Conscious Eating can be a way of expanding and deepening your
relationship with Source energy. It
is a way to remember your place in the cycle of life.
And maybe most importantly, it is a way to remember that you are
giving yourself life in a very literal way when you eat.
And you don’t do that alone.
So, so many others feed you every day.
