The Mindful Mouthful

There are some people who remember me as Tom ‘the Locust’ Powell. I was (and sometimes still am) well adept at devouring all the contents at a dinner table in a matter of moments. In fact I have still been known-on-occasion to absent-mindedly guzzle down somebody else’s cup of tea in 3 mouthfuls despite having just finished my very own cup.

It was a surprise therefore, when I began my mindfulness journey with a single raisin.

The raisin meditation begins by placing a raisin on the table and then taking 30 seconds or so to really look at it, and then the meditation moves onto touching the raisin and rolling it gently between the fingers, and then smelling, then slowly, slowly bringing it to the mouth. Then finally tasting, but without swallowing for at least a minute. I did all this with a gentle curiosity as if I had never seen or eaten a raisin before in my life, and it is quite a startling experience.

The raisin meditation is normally the first practice that people are introduced to on a mindfulness stress based reduction (MBSR) course, and as a Mindfulness teacher who has guided many people through the meditation and then listened to the reflections, I have found that it commonly leads to a few key realisations: 

We rush: Sometimes we learn that we rush because it turns out that we don’t find the thing we are eating to be pleasant, this could be to do with the texture or the taste, and so we develop unconscious coping strategies of getting it away from our tongue and into our tummy as quickly as possible. Or we like the thing, and know there is more, and so we want to swallow what we have quickly in anticipation to repeat the process again, but perhaps on a bigger scale.

We lose attention: For most of us, eating quickly turns into an autopilot experience, falling into the same category as commuting to work, showering or breathing. We don’t recognise how we move our body and what we do with our posture, or where we place our attention. Most astonishingly, we even forget to taste. Many people discover that just one raisin, when eaten mindfully, is an intense flavour explosion around the whole mouth that lingers even after we’ve swallowed it. When we are mindless, we can consume a packet of raisins and barely even register any sense of taste whatsoever. 

Beginnings middles and ends: Later on in the mindfulness journey, many people recognise that when they sit down to a meal, they enjoy their first bite with anticipation and appreciation, and they savour their last bite with a tinge of sadness that it is over. Everything in the middle was by-and-large forgotten because the mind was elsewhere. This is part of the human condition, we enjoy novelty, habituate to what is normal, and fear loss and so grasp on to what is left. Rarely do we sit down to a meal and treat each and every mouthful with the same level of curiosity and appreciation. 

We notice our habits: For me, I discovered that my hand wants to throw the raisin into my wide-open mouth quickly, and it takes a lot of concentration to slowly bring it to my mouth and closed lips but not eat it straight away. In my day-to-day life, I also begin to notice that I reach for food when I am tired, angry or anxious, and that it is as if my body is on ‘search’ mode for a tasty snack. Eating for me therefore, isn’t only about putting fuel into my body, but can at times act as an attempt to soothe or move my emotions.   

Just a single mindful mouthful can help us to slow down and fully enjoy the experience. Not only can we cultivate gratitude in something so simple as a morsel of food, but by enjoying what we have in-the-moment we can feel internal satisfaction and reduce our desire to mindlessly stuff ourselves in an attempt to fill an emotional void. It is also an opportunity to see our habits, our cravings our desires and aversions a little more clearly. Once we can see them, then we can greet them with mindful curiosity and respond to them more wisely.

I would like to say that I am now a mindful eater, who consumes his food slowly and with a grateful reverence and patience and that I treat each mouthful with equal attention. This is definitely not the case, and I will still often mindlessly devour a snack or a meal in front of the TV with my mind elsewhere and with little appreciation for the textures and tastes. However, done is better than perfect and so I look for opportunities to put away distractions, slow down and appreciate my food, and all it takes is just one mindful mouthful, and perhaps that one moment of mindfulness will become two moments. Each moment brings an opportunity to fully savour the present moment to come to know our-self a little better.

There is the often quoted saying “Even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” perhaps there is another journey that begins with a single raisin.