Mindful Eating Exploration #1 (Three Food Items)
Practice Mindful Eating with three food items through a sequence of various sensory experiences including what you see, what you feel with your hand, what you smell, what you feel emotionally, and what you feel in your mouth.
Transcript
This is Mindful Eating Exploration number 1 with Marc-Antoine Landry.
For this mindfulness exercise,
Ideally you would need three food items.
Three small pieces of food that you will explore with your eyes,
With your hands,
With your nose,
With your emotional body,
And finally with your mouth.
I invite you to pause the recording and fetch the food items and resume when you're ready.
When you're ready,
Take the first food item in your hand and explore it with your eyes only.
Pay attention to the shapes and the colors of the food item that you chose.
After you've noticed a visual element of the food item,
Soak your awareness into that visual experience for a moment,
A few seconds.
Then release your attention and note a different visual aspect of the food item,
A different color,
A different shape,
Or it could be the same.
And repeat that for the next minute.
Now I invite you to bring your awareness in your fingers and your palms to discover the food item with a sense of touch.
You want to pay attention to how hard or soft,
How cold or warm,
How moist or dry,
How heavy or light the food item might be.
Every time you notice a specific sensation,
Soak your attention into it for a few seconds,
And then release your attention to notice a different experience with your fingers and your palms.
And repeat that for a minute.
Now I invite you to bring your awareness in your hands.
And repeat that for a few seconds.
Great!
Now I invite you to bring your nose to the food item or the food item to your nose and explore the sense of smell.
Try to detect with your nose what you can smell,
What is the aroma from that food item.
Not detecting any particular odors is an actual sensation,
So if you don't smell anything,
Don't worry about it.
Just pay attention to the absence of a smell.
We'll do that for 30 seconds.
While you keep smelling the food item,
I invite you to bring your awareness in your emotional body.
Typically,
People feel their emotions in the chest,
Upper belly,
Face,
Throat.
So just bring your awareness there and explore if you detect any emotional sensation related to the food item.
If you detect an emotional sensation,
I invite you to soak your awareness into it.
Try to be curious about it in terms of where is it in the body,
What is it,
Is it strong,
Is it soft,
Or is it moving in any ways.
You may want to close your eyes for that.
That might be easier to detect.
Let's do this exploration for about a minute.
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Lastly,
I invite you to bring the food item inside the mouth to discover the physical sensations inside the mouth.
By this I mean sensations such as hardness or softness,
Dryness,
Moistness,
Warmth,
Cold,
Pressure that you feel with your gum,
Your tongue,
In between your teeth,
Or as you swallow.
So we're not paying attention to the taste of food,
We're only paying attention to the texture of food.
Every time you notice a different sensation inside the mouth,
I invite you to bring your awareness into it and soak into it for a few seconds.
And then release the attention to notice something different or the same thing.
We'll do that for about a minute.
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Great.
Now I invite you to take your second food item and explore it with your eyes only.
Pay attention to the shapes and the colors of the food item that you chose.
After you've noticed a visual element of the food item,
Soak your awareness into that visual experience for a moment.
Few seconds.
Then release your attention and note a different visual aspect of the food item.
A different color,
A different shape.
Or it could be the same.
And repeat that for the next minute.
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Now I invite you to bring your awareness in your fingers and your palms to discover the food item with a sense of touch.
You want to pay attention to how hard or soft,
How cold or warm,
How moist or dry,
How heavy or light the food item might be.
Every time you notice a specific sensation,
Soak your attention into it for a few seconds.
And then release your attention to notice a different experience with your fingers and your palms.
And repeat that for a minute.
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Great!
Now I invite you to bring your nose to the food item or the food item to your nose.
And explore the sense of smell.
Try to detect with your nose what you can smell.
What is the aroma from that food item.
Not detecting any particular odors is an actual sensation.
So if you don't smell anything,
Don't worry about it.
Just pay attention to the absence of a smell.
We'll do that for 30 seconds.
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.
While you keep smelling the food item,
I invite you to bring your awareness in your emotional body.
Typically people feel their emotions in the chest,
Upper belly,
Face,
Throat.
So just bring your awareness there and explore.
If you detect any emotional sensation related to the food item.
If you detect an emotional sensation,
I invite you to soak your awareness into it.
Try to be curious about it in terms of where is it in the body?
What is it?
Is it strong?
Is it soft?
Or is it moving in any ways?
You may want to close your eyes for that.
That might be easier to detect.
Let's do this exploration for about a minute.
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.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Lastly,
I invite you to bring the food item inside the mouth to discover the physical sensations inside the mouth.
By this I mean sensations such as hardness or softness,
Dryness,
Moistness,
Warmth,
Cold,
Pressure that you feel with your gum,
Your tongue,
In between your teeth or as you swallow.
We're not paying attention to the taste of food.
We're only paying attention to the texture of food.
Every time you notice a different sensation inside the mouth,
I invite you to bring your awareness into it and soak into it for a few seconds.
And then release the attention to notice something different or the same thing.
We'll do that for about a minute.
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Awesome.
Now I invite you to take your last food item and explore it with your eyes only.
Pay attention to the shapes and the colors of the food item that you chose.
After you've noticed a visual element of the food item,
Soak your awareness into that visual experience for a moment.
A few seconds.
Then release your attention and note a different visual aspect of the food item.
A different color,
A different shape,
Or it could be the same.
And repeat that for the next minute.
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.
Now I invite you to bring your awareness in your fingers and your palms to discover the food item with a sense of touch.
You want to pay attention to how hard or soft,
How cold or warm,
How moist or dry,
How heavy or light the food item might be.
Every time you notice a specific sensation,
Soak your attention into it for a few seconds and then release your attention to notice a different experience with your fingers and your palms.
And repeat that for a minute.
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