Mindful Eating and Fast-Food Buddhism

This is an article from The Atlantic by Robert Wright, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Evolution of God.

“Mindful eating” has officially entered the memosphere. An article about it reached the very top of The New York Timesmost-emailed list this week, and two days later it’s still hanging in there at number three.

What is mindful eating? The Times piece gives step-by-step instructions. “Chew slowly. Stop talking. Tune in to the texture of the pasta, the flavor of the cheese, the bright color of the sauce in the bowl, the aroma of the rising steam.”

And what is the point of the exercise? For one thing, it’s a kind of fast-food form of Buddhism. If you don’t have time to go off to a monastery and sit in silence for a week, you can still get little tastes, here and there, of what such a retreat might be like.

And when I say little tastes, I mean little tastes. The Times story says of Jan Chozen Bays, a pediatrician and meditation teacher:

Sometimes, even she is too busy to contemplate a chickpea. So there are days when Dr. Bays will take three mindful sips of tea, “and then, O.K., I’ve got to go do my work,” she said. “Anybody can do that. Anywhere.”

Even scarfing down a burrito in the car offers an opportunity for insight. “Mindful eating includes mindless eating,” she said. ” ‘I am aware that I am eating and driving.’ “

It may sound like I’m about to make fun of the mindful eating movement–and that last quote is certainly a tempting springboard–but instead I’m going to spring to its defense. First, though, I have to disclose something about myself.

Three times over the last nine years I’ve gone on one-week silent meditation retreats at a Buddhist retreat center. Seven days of no talking, no reading, no phone calls, no email, no news whatsoever from the outside world. Five and a half hours of sitting meditation each day, five and a half hours of walking walking meditation each day. And, more to the point, three meals a day.

But the term “meals” doesn’t do justice to these experiences. When I got to my first meditation retreat, I didn’t understand why so many people in the dining hall were eating with their eyes closed. Three days later I was just like them–eyes closed, eating in slow motion, totally absorbed in the taste and texture of foods that, a few days earlier, I would have dismissed as offputtingly wholesome and lacking in sex appeal. (None of the food was even made of dead animals!)

Now that I’ve established my credentials, I just want to make two points:

(1) If you dabble in mindful eating as prescribed in the Times piece, do not be under the mistaken impression that this is anything like the real thing. The level of sensual emergence in food that I reached would not have been possible without getting totally off the grid and using intense meditation to fundamentally alter my frame of mind.

(2) Do not be under the impression that this sensual indulgence is the ultimate point of the exercise. Because meditation can involve a lot of inward focus, it is sometimes belittled as egotistical or solipsistic. But the overall effect is supposed to be roughly the opposite, and that held true for me. The retreats made me way more open to other people and less judgmental of them. I felt a true kinship even with non-human animals (even non-canine non-human animals!). That this was intertwined with a much deeper sense of aesthetic appreciation–of both food and non-food items–certainly made the whole experience gratifying, but it was a paradoxically selfless kind of gratification.

The transforming effect that a silent meditation retreat can have doesn’t magically last forever, though you can hang on to an appreciable part of it if you practice daily meditation and mindfulness in a disciplined fashion after the retreat is over (which is way easier said than done). So I’m not the wonderful human being I so briefly was at the end of my first meditation retreat. But I think I’m better than I was before I went on it (leaving aside the question of how high that’s setting the bar).

The Green Papaya Sangha happily welcomes back an old and dear friend, Phra Pandit Bhikku.  He will be joining us his Thursday, February 16 at 7:30 pm at the yoga Tree.  He will be speaking on;

The Lion’s Roar:  The incontrovertible teaching: developing meditation that goes beyond everything.  

Phra Pandit is a British monk resident in Bangkok and has been ordained as a Bhikkhu (monk) in Thailand since 1996. Apart from Dhamma and meditation,his  interests include psychology (BA) and faerie tales. Blogmaster at littlebang.org, Phra Pandit organizes most LittleBang events, and is the speaker at the annual Dhamma Talk Series. Phra Pandit is a lecturer at Mahachulalongkorn Rajavidiylaya University at the main campus in Bangkok, a Buddhist university for monks and novices.

Mindful Eating as Food for Thought

Jennifer May for The New York Times

Diners wait until everyone is seated at the Blue Cliff Monastery. More Photos »

By JEFF GORDINIER

Published: February 7, 2012

Now comes the hard part. Put the fork down. This could be a lot more challenging than you imagine, because that first bite was very good and another immediately beckons. You’re hungry.

Today’s experiment in eating, however, involves becoming aware of that reflexive urge to plow through your meal like Cookie Monster on a shortbread bender. Resist it. Leave the fork on the table. Chew slowly. Stop talking. Tune in to the texture of the pasta, the flavor of the cheese, the bright color of the sauce in the bowl, the aroma of the rising steam.

Continue this way throughout the course of a meal, and you’ll experience the third-eye-opening pleasures and frustrations of a practice known as mindful eating.

The concept has roots in Buddhist teachings. Just as there are forms of meditation that involve sitting, breathing, standing and walking, many Buddhist teachers encourage their students to meditate with food, expanding consciousness by paying close attention to the sensation and purpose of each morsel. In one common exercise, a student is given three raisins, or a tangerine, to spend 10 or 20 minutes gazing at, musing on, holding and patiently masticating.

Lately, though, such experiments of the mouth and mind have begun to seep into a secular arena, from the Harvard School of Public Health to the California campus of Google. In the eyes of some experts, what seems like the simplest of acts — eating slowly and genuinely relishing each bite — could be the remedy for a fast-paced Paula Deen Nation in which an endless parade of new diets never seems to slow a stampede toward obesity.

Mindful eating is not a diet, or about giving up anything at all. It’s about experiencing food more intensely — especially the pleasure of it. You can eat a cheeseburger mindfully, if you wish. You might enjoy it a lot more. Or you might decide, halfway through, that your body has had enough. Or that it really needs some salad.

“This is anti-diet,” said Dr. Jan Chozen Bays, a pediatrician and meditation teacher in Oregon and the author of “Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food.” “I think the fundamental problem is that we go unconscious when we eat.”

The last few years have brought a spate of books, blogs and videos about hyper-conscious eating. A Harvard nutritionist, Dr. Lilian Cheung, has devoted herself to studying its benefits, and is passionately encouraging corporations and health care providers to try it.

At the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, Prof. Brian Wansink, the author of “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think,” has conducted scores of experiments on the psychological factors that lead to our bottomless bingeing. A mindful lunch hour recently became part of the schedule at Google, and self-help gurus like Oprah Winfrey and Kathy Freston have become cheerleaders for the practice.

With the annual chow-downs of Thanksgiving, Christmas and Super Bowl Sunday behind us, and Lent coming, it’s worth pondering whether mindful eating is something that the mainstream ought to be, well, more mindful of. Could a discipline pioneered by Buddhist monks and nuns help teach us how to get healthy, relieve stress and shed many of the neuroses that we’ve come to associate with food?

Dr. Cheung is convinced that it can. Last week, she met with team members at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and asked them to spend quality time with a chocolate-covered almond.

“The rhythm of life is becoming faster and faster, so we really don’t have the same awareness and the same ability to check into ourselves,” said Dr. Cheung, who, with the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, co-wrote “Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life.” “That’s why mindful eating is becoming more important. We need to be coming back to ourselves and saying: ‘Does my body need this? Why am I eating this? Is it just because I’m so sad and stressed out?’ ”

The topic has even found its way into culinary circles that tend to be more focused on Rabelaisian excess than monastic restraint. In January, Dr. Michael Finkelstein, a holistic physician who oversees SunRaven, a holistic-living center in Bedford, N.Y., gave a talk about mindful gardening and eating at the smorgasbord-friendly headquarters of the James Beard Foundation in New York City.

“The question isn’t what are the foods to eat, in my mind,” he said in an interview. “Most people have a general sense of what the healthy foods are, but they’re not eating them. What’s on your mind when you’re eating: that’s mindful eating to me.”

A good place to try it is the Blue Cliff Monastery, in Pine Bush, N.Y., a Hudson Valley hamlet. At the serene refuge about 75 miles northwest of Manhattan, curious lay people can join Buddhist brothers and sisters for a free “day of mindfulness” twice a week.

At a gathering in January, visitors watched a videotaped lecture by Thich Nhat Hanh (pronounced tik-nyot-HAHN), who founded this and other monasteries around the world; they strolled methodically around the grounds as part of a walking meditation, then filed into a dining room for lunch.

No one spoke, in keeping with a key principle of mindful eating. The point is simply to eat, as opposed to eating and talking, eating and watching TV, or eating and watching TV and gossiping on the phone while Tweeting and updating one’s Facebook status.

A long buffet table of food awaited, all of it vegan and mindfully prepared by two monks in the kitchen. There was plenty of rice, herbed chickpeas, a soup made with cubes of taro, a stew of fried tofu in tomato sauce.

In silence, people piled their plates with food, added a squirt or two of condiments (eating mindfully doesn’t mean forsaking the hot sauce) and sat down together with eyes closed during a Buddhist prayer for gratitude and moderation.

What followed was captivating and mysterious. Surrounded by a murmur of clinking forks, spoons and chopsticks, the Blue Cliff congregation, or sangha, spent the lunch hour contemplating the enjoyment of spice, crunch, saltiness, warmth, tenderness and like-minded company.

Some were thinking, too, about the origins of the food: the thousands of farmers, truck drivers and laborers whose work had brought it here.

As their jaws moved slowly, their faces took on expressions of deep focus. Every now and then came a pause within the pause: A chime would sound, and, according to the monastery’s custom, all would stop moving and chewing in order to breathe and explore an even deeper level of sensory awareness.

It looked peaceful, but inside some of those heads, a struggle was afoot.

“It’s much more challenging than we would imagine,” said Carolyn Cronin, 64, who lives near the monastery and regularly attends the mindfulness days. “People are used to eating so fast. This is a practice of stopping, and we don’t realize how much we’re not stopping.”

For many people, eating fast means eating more. Mindful eating is meant to nudge us beyond what we’re craving so that we wake up to why we’re craving it and what factors might be stoking the habit of belly-stuffing.

“As we practice this regularly, we become aware that we don’t need to eat as much,” said Phap Khoi, 43, a robed monk who has been stationed at Blue Cliff since it opened in 2007. “Whereas when people just gulp down food, they can eat a lot and not feel full.”

It’s this byproduct of mindful eating — its potential as a psychological barrier to overeating — that has generated excitement among nutritionists like Dr. Cheung.

“Thich Nhat Hanh often talks about our craving being like a crying baby who is trying to draw our attention,” she said. “When the baby cries, the mother cradles the baby to try to calm the baby right away. By acknowledging and embracing our cravings through a few breaths, we can stop our autopilot of reaching out to the pint of ice cream or the bag of chips.”

The average American doesn’t have the luxury of ruminating on the intense tang of sriracha sauce at a monastery. “Most of us are not going to be Buddhist monks,” said Dr. Finkelstein, the holistic physician. “What I’ve learned is that it has to work at home.”

To that end, he and others suggest that people start with a few baby steps. “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Dr. Cheung said. “You’re not supposed to be able to switch on your mindfulness button and be able to do it 100 percent. It’s a practice you keep working toward.”

Dr. Bays, the pediatrician, has recommendations that can sound like a return to the simple rhythms of Mayberry, if not “Little House on the Prairie.” If it’s impossible to eat mindfully every day, consider planning one special repast a week. Click off the TV. Sit at the table with loved ones.

“How about the first five minutes we eat, we just eat in silence and really enjoy our food?” she said. “It happens step by step.”

Sometimes, even she is too busy to contemplate a chickpea. So there are days when Dr. Bays will take three mindful sips of tea, “and then, O.K., I’ve got to go do my work,” she said. “Anybody can do that. Anywhere.”

Even scarfing down a burrito in the car offers an opportunity for insight. “Mindful eating includes mindless eating,” she said. “ ‘I am aware that I am eating and driving.’ ”

Few places in America are as frantically abuzz with activity as the Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., but when Thich Nhat Hanh dropped by for a day of mindfulness in September, hundreds of employees showed up.

Part of the event was devoted to eating thoughtfully in silence, and the practice was so well received that an hourlong wordless vegan lunch is now a monthly observance on the Google campus.

“Interestingly enough, a lot of the participants are the engineers, which pleases us very much,” said Olivia Wu, an executive chef at the company. “I think it quiets the mind. I think there is a real sense of feeling restored so that they can go back to the crazy pace that they came from.”

It’s not often, after all, that those workhorse technicians get to stop and smell the pesto. “Somebody will say, ‘I ate so much less,’ ” Ms. Wu said. “And someone else will say, ‘You know, I never noticed how spicy arugula tastes.’ ”

And that could be the ingredient that helps mindful eating gain traction in mainstream American culture: flavor.

“So many people now have found themselves in an adversarial relationship with food, which is very tragic,” Dr. Bays said. “Eating should be a pleasurable activity.”

Ease into Mindfulness:  A Retreat of Meditation and Gentle Yoga in the Jungles of Thailand with Steven Smith, Julie Selbt and Dharammaruwan. The retreat will be held in the south of Thailand, March 26 – April 2, 2012.

World reknowned meditation teacher Steven Smith weaves intellectual understanding with pure Dhamma transmission. Julie Seibt gently guides movement classes twice each day to support sitting, walking and reclining meditations. Dhammaruwan is reknowned for spontaneously chanting suttas in his early childhood and for his teachings to lay people in Sri Lanka and abroad.

For further information: www.jungleyoga.com or lovingkindnessretreat@gmail.com

Dear Friends,

Just this once we will not be having our cozy little Thursday meeting on February 2nd.  But we shall all be back for our usual Thursday meeting on  February 9.          Meantime . . .

Drink your tea slowly and reverently,
as if it is the axis
on which the world earth revolves
- slowly, evenly, without
rushing toward the future;
Live the actual moment.
Only this moment is life.

                      –The Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh

The New Life Foundation in Chiang Rai proudly announces The Hungry Ghost Retreat: Healing the Mind in Recovery to be held March 22 -25, 2012

This Mindful Recovery Retreat is offered as an opportunity to experience a wholly Buddhist approach to recovery from all forms of addiction. This retreat is open to those new to recovery as well as those who have been in recovery for a longer time.  All are welcome to sit together to discover an alternative and complementary approach to recovery and to support on-going abstinence.

Throughout the retreat, the meditation practices of Loving-kindness and Forgiveness – both essential for healing our hearts and minds – will be central to, and woven into, our daily schedule.
For the period of the retreat, retreatants are required to commit to Sila (Precepts):

• To refrain from harming any living being
• To refrain from taking what is not offered
• To refrain from sexual and sensual misconduct
• To refrain from false speech (including idle gossip, harsh and divisive speech)
• To refrain from taking substances which disturb the balance of the mind (and may lead me into committing any of the above).

It is important to note that you do not have to be a Buddhist to adopt or to adapt any of the principles discussed, and meditation practices explored. Recovering people of all faiths and none are welcome on this retreat.

The retreat’s primary facilitator will be Vince Cullen. Vince is an ex-alcoholic who has been associated with the Wat Thamkrabok monastery in Thailand and Buddhist-oriented drug and alcohol recovery since 1998. In 2009 Vince became a charter member of the Buddhist Recovery Network and established the Fifth Precept meditation for recovery group in Berkshire, UK.  Vince offers recovery retreats in the UK and Ireland.

Donation (Pali : Dana) : The retreat teachings are offered in accordance with the Buddhist tradition of Dana (the practice and virtue of generosity).  Vince follows the ancient Buddhist tradition of not charging for the teachings he shares. The organisations that host his retreats and workshops generally only cover his travel expenses.  However, in return for his teaching and instruction, Vince gratefully accepts donations, which enable him to continue his work. If you would like to support Vince, you can do so at the end of the retreat.

Retreatants have a single room each, with shower, bed, sheets, towel and fan. Please notify us in advance if you would like a double room. Vegetarian meals are served 3 times a day. Fruit, tea and coffee will be available all day long. The retreat will include teachings, guided meditation practice and yoga with an experienced teacher. There will be plenty of time to enjoy the swimming pool and our herbal steam bath. The price for the retreat is 2,000 THB. Please help us spread the word and bring some friends.

If you are interested please contact us at info@newlifethaifoundation.com
More info on our website : www.newlifethaifoundation.com or blog: http://newlifethai.wordpress.com/

Friends, please enjoy this wonderful lecture on YouTube by the Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh.

Did you enjoy the video?  Now go pick up some tangerines at the local market and eat them mindfully.

The traveling exhibition of the Tooth Relic of the Kassapa Buddha has arrived at Wat Phra Singh.  The exhibition is presented by the Government of Bhutan (the Land of “Gross National Happiness”) and the is accompanied by a host of Bhutanese lamas.  The Kassapa Buddha is a previous incarnation of the historical Buddha.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kassapa_Buddha

A selection of verses to honor the auspicious relic are being chanted throughout the day beginning at 6am culminating in a recitation of verses to honor the Boddhisattva Avalalokitsthesvara at around 5 pm ending at around 7pm. The Bhutanese lamas and Thai monks alternate chanting.

This is a truly auspicious event for the New Year.    The Tooth Relic will be at Wat Phra Singh through January 19th.

We are so proud of our new Green Papaya Sangha banner.  This banner is the calligraphy of the Venerable Zen Thich Nhat Hanh.  He made this especially for us while in residence at Plum Village.  Our very own Phap Thi, a member of the Green Papaya Sangha who is now ordained and living in Plum Village, asked Thay (“teacher”) to make it for us. Phra Prempiti, a monk studying at Mahachulalongkornrajavidiylaya University here in Chiang Mai, worked his cyber magic and crafted it into our banner.  Our many thanks to Thay, Phap Thi and Phra Prempiti.

Enjoy!

Happy Seasonal Greetings.  May your internal papaya continue to ripen.

Watch this heartfelt stirring inspiring wonderful video.  A holiday gift:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXDMoiEkyuQ&feature=player_embedded