How to Train a Wild Elephant_ And Other Adventures in Mindfulness - Jan Chozen Bays [59]
If you want to experience more peace and contentment, you must examine all aspects of your life, become aware of what kinds of habit patterns you have accumulated in those areas, and be willing to discard any that are unskillful. Many people hope that one day someone will come along, or something will suddenly happen, like a flash of lightning, and transform their life completely. You can waste your whole life looking for happiness to arrive from the outside. A quiet, basic contentment is our birthright; it is already inside of us. Mindfulness gives us a vehicle that can drive us straight to the place where it lives.
Final Words: True transformation is difficult. It begins with small changes, changes in how we breathe, eat, walk, and drive.
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Look Deeply into Food
The Exercise: When you eat, take a moment to look into the food or drink as if you could see backward, into its history. Use the power of imagination to see where it comes from and how many people might have been involved in bringing it to your plate. Think of the people who planted, weeded, and harvested the food, the truckers who transported it, the food packagers and plant workers, the grocers and checkout people, and the family members or other cooks who prepared the food. Thank those people before you take a sip or a bite.
REMINDING YOURSELF
Post signs reading “Look into Your Food” in locations where you usually eat, such as in the kitchen or on the dining room table.
DISCOVERIES
At the monastery we say a chant before meals that contains this line: “We reflect on the effort that brought us this food and consider how it comes to us.” As with anything that you repeat several times a day, chanting these words does not mean that at each meal we actually think about all the people involved in bringing our food to our bowls. We might be vaguely aware of the cook in the kitchen and grateful to him or her if the meal is tasty. Hence this practice.
We have the advantage of growing much of our food at our monastery. Working in the garden and greenhouses opens our mind to how much work goes into bringing the lettuce and carrots to our salad. We are grateful to our neighbor as we shovel manure from his barn into our truck, shovel it back out of the truck, and layer it onto our compost pile along with scraps from the kitchen and clippings from the mower. Anyone who has helped with our annual canning gains a new respect for applesauce after picking many barrels full of apples from neighbors’ trees, then washing, cutting, cooking, pureeing, and canning hundreds of quarts of fruit. Even though we are closer than most modern people to the labor involved in being able to sit down at a table of food and eat, when we do this deep-looking practice, we find that we still take many foods for granted, particularly those in packages, such as flour, sugar, salt, cheese, oats, or milk.
We do this exercise frequently, as part of our mindful-eating practice. It helps us to look with the inner eye in order to see the scores of people whose life energy contributed to the food on our plates: the cook, the checkout clerk, the shelf stockers, the delivery drivers, the people in the packaging plants, the farmers, and the migrant workers.
When my husband and I had young children, we spent a few minutes in silence before meals contemplating who brought us our food. We were living in a big city, where most children thought that all food, including the fresh produce, came from the supermarket, mysteriously manufactured there behind the scenes, possibly from plastic. Even many intelligent adults do not know where food comes from. When a guest cooking soup at the monastery asked for onions, I went outside and returned with two I had pulled from the garden. He