KitchenCosmologyNourishing Engagement with the Living Universe
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KitchenCosmologyNourishing Engagement with the Living Universe
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“We have forgotten what really nourishes us, and when we fail to connect with things, life becomes empty and deadening. To see food merely as fuel or stuff is impoverishing. Enlightenment or realization in Zen is sometimes referred to as “attaining intimacy”: It is to actually touch and know through and through, to digest and grow. We cannot be more intimate than we are with food; it becomes us.” ~Ed Brown, Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings
"Because so much about our culture denies our senses, we increasingly consume food that we take no time to enjoy and that is literally killing us. . . We tolerate fast food not because we lack ‘good taste,’ but because we’ve lost touch with our natural sense of taste, with all its subtleties, and with the role food has always played in bonding us to the earth and to one another. . . Awakening to our senses might well be a key to gaining the confidence we need to change the larger patterns that generate hunger and ill health out of plenty." ~Hope's Edge
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Experience the World “Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils – all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness.” ~ David Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous My drive to work takes me along the north side of a valley that opens to the coast some five or six miles to the west. Early one morning, I turned onto the gravel road just as the sun began to break through the low-lying fog. I caught the rosy gold of the eastern sky out of my peripheral vision and turned to look. In that moment, sunlight poured through the fog sending luminous rays streaming towards me. Off to the right, the very tops of a long line of pine trees were visible above the fog. The beauty literally took my breath away. I stopped driving. The world around me was still, as if nothing else could happen while this magnificent display unfolded. A minute later, it was over. My eyes had taken it in, but it was in my body that the profoundness of the experience lived. Being human, being alive, means to be incarnate – to be embodied. Your body makes possible – actually allows for – every experience you have in life. Everything that “touches” you, that moves you, touches you through your body, through your senses and your sensing. Everything you see, every sound you hear, every fragrance you smell, every food you taste, every person you touch is available to you because you have a body. All of your emotional experience, as well, comes to you through what you feel in your body. I am learning that my body isn’t something to get rid of, transcend or even transform. Instead, it is something to embrace, care for, listen to and learn from. I spent much of my early life living in my head. It wasn’t until my late 30’s that pregnancy and giving birth, cooking for a living, and having horses in my life began to teach me about being in my body, being present, and experiencing my life and the world. Living in my body, really inhabiting my body, is something I am still learning about every day. Learning to live in my body seems like such a funny thing to say. Where else could I possibly be living? But the truth is that I used to almost always be somewhere else, anywhere else, than really in and present to my body. Watch as you go through your days and tell me if it isn’t true for you as well. How many of the infinite number of moments are you actually in your body, conscious and aware of your physical self, attuned to what it has to tell you – and, through your body, conscious of and attuned to the world around you? When we are not present in this way, our lives fly by. We are caught in our thoughts – our worries, our past, our plans, our to do lists – and we feel disconnected from our selves and from the world. When we are not present in our bodies and in our senses, we miss the deep experience of every moment that is the source of richness, learning, gratitude and happiness in our lives. I’m not sure what first made me notice this disconnection between my body’s experience and where “I” and my attention actually was, or how I first became aware of those moments when I was truly present in my body. I suspect that it was a gift that grew out of many changes that took place in my life about fifteen years ago. My partner Jeff and I moved to a small house on seven beautiful acres in a rural area. I quit my job as a marketing and communications manager and during the year I was pregnant worked only part-time. I started a garden and learned to quilt. I got pregnant, gave birth, and nursed my young son. After Hadley was born, I started a home delivered meal service, spending most of my time cooking real food in a kitchen out in the country. And I came back to one of my childhood loves – horses. Each of these shifts in my life brought me into a deeper and more immediate experience of my body. As David Abrams says in his fabulous book, The Spell of the Sensuous, “If this body is my very presence in the world, if it is the body that alone enables me to enter into relations with other presences, if without these eyes, this voice, or these hands I would be unable to see, to taste, and to touch things, or to be touched by them – if without this body, in other words, there would be no possibility of experience – then the body itself is the true subject of experience.” Food is a deeply sensual experience. As I have become more present to the food I cook and eat, my senses have become more alive, I feel more connected to my body, and my experience of life has become richer. As I have learned to listen more closely to my body, I have become more attuned to how specific foods affect me and to what foods my body wants. Food is beautiful. People laugh sometimes when I say this. But if you begin to really look at the food you buy and cook and eat, I think you will agree. Food is vibrant and alive, infinitely varied, and full of color and texture. Just-blanched sugar snap peas are a bright almost luminous green. Cut open a red cabbage and look at the pattern created by the tightly woven leaves. Pick up a bunch of curly red Russian kale and notice the deep purple stems against the sage green of the leaves. Yesterday, I sautéed cubes of red bell peppers, golden sunburst squash and green zucchini together and served them in a shallow bowl with chopped cilantro on top. It was alive with color. Our most closely held food memories are often related to our sense of smell. I can still remember the combined aromas of fresh coffee, toast and bacon frying that would greet me as I biked along the seawall in Pacific Beach early in the morning. Think about summer barbecues and the smell of hamburgers grilling, or cookies baking in the oven, or fresh bread. When I am working at the retreat center, I can tell how wonderful it is for our guests to smell the food cooking in the kitchen. They come in from outside and the house is filled with the aroma of chocolate cake baking in the oven, onions sautéing on the stove, or of the fresh mint I am chopping. The smell of the food tells them they are being cared for and they feel happy and loved. And, of course, food offers us a rich complexity of flavors and textures – from the crunchiness of a raw carrot to the smooth texture of mashed potatoes, from the tartness of lemon custard to the mellow flavor of buttered bread. Sweet, salty, sour, hot, bland and bitter combine to enliven our experience of the food we eat. Think about a ripe peach, a dill pickle, brownies, spicy salsa, a grilled cheese sandwich – each is unique and each is a delight for our senses. Food is a gift. When we open deeply to food, we experience profound gratitude for our lives. When we open deeply to food, we also experience our senses, ourselves as sensual beings, and the gift that it is to “be a body.” All of us, I believe, long to be really alive, to feel connected to ourselves, to one another and to the world around us. Food can teach us about all of these things. What does it mean to “experience” my life? When I ask the question, the first thing I realize is that I have to be present. Our experience is always in the now, always in the present moment. I have to be able to bring my attention to the present moment, and in order to do this, I have be in my body. It is through my body that I take in the physical sensations of the world around me – the beautiful view, the aroma of the flowers on my desk, the cat walking on the roof, my fingers on the keys of my computer, the bracing flavor of fresh coffee. Experiencing my life requires that I be present and attuned to my body. Working with horses has taught me a great deal about being present and in my body. In dressage – the type of riding I do – the goal is complete harmony of purpose between horse and human. Achieving this requires an exquisite level of communication. In our best moments, my horse and I literally dance together. When I am riding, everything happens much too quickly for what we would typically call thinking. Instead, very good riders have the ability to be deeply present in every moment to what is occurring, and to respond almost instantly in their bodies. Even fifteen years ago, when I had just returned to riding, I described my time at the barn as my “practice”. Riding took all my attention and so, during those hours, the rest of my life would fall away. Even if I had a terrible ride, I would leave the barn renewed. I realize now that riding in this way is a form of meditation, a way of deeply experiencing life. My body is also the vehicle for my emotional experience. Sadness is a quiet kind of heaviness. Tears fill my eyes without warning. Longing is felt in the heart. Joy has an expansive, exuberant energy that makes me feel like moving. Excitement brings an almost edgy feeling of aliveness. Our emotions are all experienced as felt sensations in our bodies. It is through listening to our bodies that we actually know what we are feeling. Without knowing what is really happening for us in this way, there is no true engagement with ourselves or with anything or anyone else. Our most important work, then, is to learn to rest in our bodies – to rest there so that we have time to notice what they are telling us. If we are critical and judgemental about our bodies, we have no ability to rest in them. Listening to our bodies requires that we learn to embrace them and ourselves with love and compassion. Begin to notice all that your body does for you, all that it gives you, all that it allows for in your experiencing of life. Your body allows you to see the magnificence of apple blossoms in the Spring, the fiery colors of Fall leaves. It is your body which hears the early morning bird songs, that both hears and feels the wind moving through trees as you hike along a mountain ridge. It is your body that holds those you love, and that receives the love of those who treasure you. Your body smells lavender and wild fennel, fresh baked bread and meat grilling on a summer evening. It is your body that tastes ripe mango, artichoke leaves dipped in melted butter, warm chocolate torte and brandy. These are your body’s gifts to you. Celebrate them and revel in your body that makes them possible. Until we can fully be in whatever body is ours right now, we will not be fully alive or fully present to our lives. We can’t be because we are shunning the very part of ourselves that is the gateway to our entire lived experience. Food can teach us many things about being in our bodies and experiencing the world. Try the following exercise. Let go of everything you think you know about your body’s relationship to food. Let go of every idea you have about good foods or bad foods. Pretend for a meal or a day that you don’t know anything about what you like or don’t like, want or don’t want. Rest in that not knowing. Feel the freedom of not knowing. From this place of being totally present to your body and your self – open and willing to listen and to hear as if for the first time – ask your body what food it wants. Give it that. Eat mindfully. Notice how the food smells, looks, tastes and feels in your mouth. Notice your attraction to it, how it draws you and seduces you. Notice how it feels as it enters your body. Notice how your body feels receiving it. Notice when your body is done. Very few of us eat with real awareness, whether we are rail thin or morbidly obese. In our culture, in particular, most of us put enormous amounts of things into our bodies unconsciously – out of habit or convenience, or because we have bought into a conversation generated by advertisers or our cultural conditioning. Rarely do we eat from a place of true relationship to our bodies, to the very part of ourselves that we are feeding. And this eating without awareness is merely a reflection of the multitude of ways that we live our lives without awareness The exercise above isn’t about eating, it’s about being fully present to the food you eat, to your self, and to the vast richness that is waiting for you in every moment. Food is just a simple way to experience this. When you open your senses and really take in the food you are eating, you teach yourself to be more present everywhere. When you really pay attention to what your body wants to eat, you teach yourself to pay more attention to everything your body wants to tell you. As you connect more deeply to food, you connect more deeply to yourself and to the world. In Ed Brown’s fabulous book, Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings, he tells the story of an eating meditation he led with a Buddhist group. Eat one potato chip very mindfully, then eat one orange, and then eat one cookie. Everyone complained like mad about getting only one potato chip. And yet, after eating it, they noticed that there was nothing really there. It wasn’t giving them anything. After the sensuous delight and juiciness of orange, most people didn’t even bother with the cookie. Bringing awareness to the food we eat, really experiencing it, is one of the most important things we can do on this planet right now. Learning to rest in our own bodies, to embrace them fully, to listen to what they have to tell us, and to be mindful and present to what we truly need – these are powerful steps towards healing ourselves, our families and our communities. Being present to ourselves in this way, and opening our senses to the world around us, will enable us to fully inhabit our days, to know what we really want and what serves our deepest selves. We are living in a world that is both out of balance and unsustainable. Healing our world begins with healing ourselves, and healing ourselves begins by learning to be present in our own bodies. When I am not present to myself, I can’t take care of myself because I am unable to hear what my body and my emotions are telling me. I take on too much, I don’t get enough rest, and I do things that I don’t want to do and for the wrong reasons. When I’m not present and listening to my body, I also don’t eat well. I skip meals and then eat too much. I eat what’s easily available rather than what my body really needs. We create a great deal of unhappiness, stress and ill health for ourselves simply because we are not present, because we don’t know how to stop and listen to what our bodies are telling us. It is the same for the larger world. When we are not present to the world, when we don’t or can’t open to what is actually happening in the world around us, we become cut off from the messages the world is giving us. From this disconnected place, it is impossible for us to act in ways that are consistent with our deepest values. To love and care for ourselves we must learn to stop and really listen, to pay attention to what our bodies and our hearts are telling us. It is the same for the larger world. To love and care for the world around us, we must be able to let the world in, to experience it deeply through all of our senses, and to pay attention to what it is telling us. Being fully in our bodies and attuned to our senses, paying attention to ourselves and through ourselves to the world around us is a fundamental step if we are going to contribute to the healing of ourselves and our world. Experiencing our lives from this place informs our sense of gratitude, adds depth and richness to our living, builds relationship and connection, and enables us to act in ways that will create the world we say that we want. We are each an interdependent part of the whole that makes up our planet. The healing we do in our own lives is part of the healing for the world as a whole. Exercises Choose a food that you really love. Set the table and light a candle. Place the food you love on a beautiful plate or bowl. Sit at the table and eat the food very slowly with all of your senses present. Once a day or once a week eat a meal in silence, bringing all of your attention to the food you are eating. Dedicate a day to each of your senses. On that day, practice being very present to that particular sense. Notice what that sense brings you, what it makes possible. Notice as well how often you are not present to that sense or how you take it for granted. Take a “sense walk” in a local vegetable garden or organic farm. For an hour or two, let your sense lead you. You might start by letting your eyes draw you to a beautiful plant, then you might want to taste or touch something. Just keep opening and allowing your senses to call to you. Develop the practice of “tuning in” frequently during your day. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, stop for a minute or two or five. Turn off the conversation in your head and open your senses. Take in the world around you, really let yourself experience it. What do you notice in your body when you do this? Questions
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