Mindfulness and the secret pudding

During a recent holiday to Greece, I sat back in a wicker chair and stared out over the light blue Aegean sea. I had just finished a hearty Greek salad and could still taste the salty feta cheese lingering on my tastebuds. At that moment, life couldn’t get much better. The waiter came and took our plates away and we paid the bill, and sat just a moment longer, listening to the lapping of the waves.

“For dessert you have homemade Baklava” came the waiter's voice.

What is this? Free pudding? It turns out that things can get that little bit better after all.

The Mindfulness Pudding

There is a secret pudding that comes with Mindfulness meditation too, and it is an often overlooked treat.

We tend to think of Meditation as the thing that begins when we close our eyes and ends once we open them again.

The secret joy comes from lingering in the moment once we open our eyes, but before we move our body. If we are lucky we get to see our world as if with new eyes. Shapes, colours, patterns, movements can all seem different. We can also experience our-self with new eyes; a sense of reorientation back into the body. Life can seem so simple, and so beautiful in this moment.

It is curious to wonder at what point we shift back into our autopilot and fit back into the treadmill of everyday life: deadlines, dramas and agendas, or as Jon Kabat-Zinn likes to say “The full catastrophe”. It happens to everyone sooner or later.

And so the next time you finish a meditation, why not let the eyes drift open, sit in the stillness you have cultivated, and savour the moment in the same way that you would savour a secret dessert, that arrives for free, and unannounced.