Busy Your enlightened eats start with tuning into meals with your full attention. This means quieting thoughts and engaging wholly with the food that you are about to cook and/or consume. But this focused awareness is not the norm.
Researchers say we think 60,000-80,000 thoughts per day. And over 50% of them are repeated! We are unaware of the majority of our thoughts, yet they are impacting our emotions, decisions and experiences. Included in this are around 225 daily food related decisions. (And yes, research has shown we are unaware of most of these, too. 200 are unconscious decisions.)
Becoming attentive on purpose to what is happening within and around us during meals will give more information to inform helpful decisions. As well as help tune into the real-time tastes and pleasures of life.
One way to ground yourself in mindful presence, in the here and now, is to do an ABC check-in (from Kinsho’s founder’s book Mind to Mouth: A Busy Chick’s Guide to Mindful Meals). It is a simple, effective method for more fully inhabiting the present moment. This is how you do it:
- Attention: Focus your awareness on the present moment. One trick is to purposefully close your eyes for 2 seconds and when you open them focus on what you see and sense. This can disrupt you’re your busy thoughts.
- Breathe: Take a few deep, conscious breaths to center the mind and move from your mental narrative to calmly and directly experience life as it is. Focus on how your complete exhale feels in your body. Notice how gentle deep breaths can immediately make you calmer.
- Curiosity: Become actively curious about what is happening in your body, heart and surroundings. Being a calm, engaged, nonjudgmental observer of what you are experiencing through your senses, like a scientist gathering data, will increase your perceptiveness.
Read our next post to learn some examples of the kinsho that ABC check-ins and mindful curiosity can reveal!
