How Mindfulness can help transform your relationship with food...
HOW we eat is as important as WHAT we eat, and has a huge impact on what we do actually end up putting in our mouths, as well as how much we put in our mouths...
Mindfulness is the purposeful practice of being fully attentive to the present moment and what is arising in it, with complete acceptance.
All thoughts are let go of by being absolutely present, from moment to moment, to the immediate activity and our inner response to it, such as arising emotions and sensations.
Complete acceptance means we are not judging our experience. We’re neither identified with it nor pushing it away. It is as it is.
The many benefits of practising mindfulness whilst eating:
- It cultivates our connection with our body (disconnection is always present when we have struggles with food, no matter how minor)
- It enables us to hear our own body’s satiation signals
- It trains the thinking mind (so it serves the experience rather than dictates with distraction and zoning out)
- It reveals emotional patterns and states (so you can unravel your emotional eating triggers!)
These are just four main ones; there are other significant ones, such as finding it harder to overeat, calmer at mealtimes, improved digestion, and the arising of self-compassion...
In Nourishing Light, we call it Conscious Eating because not only do we eat with conscious awareness of what we're doing, it helps us cultivate our conscious awareness of our life. It's no small thing!
