What can I teach you Little One? What will I impart to you that you can carry with you when you feel the need to touch the Source you crave so much?

You have chosen to come closer to your spirit. It resides within, but your thoughts of this world prevent you from seeing the larger world inside. Now I must take your hand and walk you to the table, sit your down and “show” you how to show yourself the easiest way to Nirvana.

Eat!

Sit quietly, close your eyes and chew each bite over and over again. Eat while guiding your thoughts to the food you’re processing inside the instrument God created for us to truly nourish ourselves. Bite the food ever so gently and chew it.

Chew for the farmer that planted the seeds in the ground that helped the rain water seep into it and the sun to open it to the atmosphere above where day after day it grew more and more until removed from its home by loving hands that gathered it for market.

Chew for the driver that delivered the food to a processor who cleaned, shaped and bundled the food to prepare it for display on supermarket shelves for customers like your mother to pick and choose while planning to feed you at our dinner table.

Chew and then chew again for the nutrients each bite will offer.

Now for the fun part: chew for the taste of it. Yes, chew with all of your teeth, including those near the back of the mouth that see less work when one hastily runs through the daily task of eating. When you chew this way, taste buds that have not awoken in many years suddenly awake, surprising you how rich and downright delicious the food substance can be. It’s like discovering a treasure hidden right beneath your nose!

Eating meditation is this game. Gaining wisdom and inside knowledge is the aim. But you can’t do this alone. Be constantly aware of the other tool given us to practice our journey with: the breathe.

I’m asking you to walk and chew gum at the same time, got it? Actually, you should breath and chew each morsel simultaneously “sensing” or “feeling” the food and the air. Be cognizant of each. Focus on nothing but them until you can widen your scope of awareness to include other parts of your body, the parts that tense up without us even thinking about it..

I bet you dollars to donuts that if you take a survey of yourself now you’d feel some tenseness in the body. Particularly, in the shoulders. Go there. Focus your mind there, not once, but often during the eating process. I don’t know why, but we tense up a lot. Even when there appears to be no earthly reason to “be on guard” we stay as coiled as a metal spring waiting to force a jack-in-the-box to pop out to warn us of danger, a threat or possibly some other left-over primordial reflex action.

Calm down. Calm down the body just as you’re calming down the mind by focusing on the where, the how and the why of the food in your mouth. You fooled yourself into not thinking wayward thoughts while chewing again and again.

Time to swallow and feel the passageway the food now travels. (Check on those shoulders, and loosen them again!)

Practice this technique when you are alone, Little One. Practice it with like-minded persons who understand the way to one’s heart can be through his or her stomach. Love and compassion arise when you choose to make food for thought.