Chapter 7.
Food.
For this meditation you will need a delicious snack or treat and a comfortable place to sit down.
Your treat can be a piece of fruit,
A rose petal,
An empanada,
Or a piece of cake.
When you are ready take a seat and set the treat in front of you.
Take a few minutes to consider all the hands that went into this food to prepare it for you.
Where did the key ingredients originate?
Is it slow food?
Food prepared in accordance to cultural tradition or created with high quality ingredients?
Or a fast food commercially available?
Does this food come with a story?
Does it connect you more deeply to the earth from which it grew?
Do you know whose hands picked this food and prepared it in their kitchens?
Visualize the hands and faces of the farmers and the ingredients growing in their habitat.
Appreciate the diversity of the climate and growing zones on our planet and the systems that bring you these calories,
This sustenance.
Close your eyes and take a moment to feel into your body.
Let your sits bones be heavy and support your pelvic bowl down and wide as your back body lengthens long.
Match your shoulder blades with your hip creases and draw the back of your ribcage and lungs into the back body so there is symmetry to the spine from back to front and side to side.
Take a few minutes to connect with your inner landscape,
The sensations within your body underneath the surface of awareness.
Does your body or a specific body part have something to say to you?
What is your state of hunger?
How do you want to be nourished by this food,
This life?
Notice any sensations in your digestive tract and mouth as you sit and observe.
Open your eyes.
Look at the food in front of you.
This morsel is symbolic of the life force that brings your substance and energy.
It is a plant,
A seed,
An animal,
A fungi,
Once a living creature.
Offer three gratitudes and acknowledge this food which traveled to arrive at your gaze.
Let this be a moment of harvest and celebration to honor the intersectionality of ecology,
Interdependence of lives,
And healthy food for the health of our lives.
After you've shared your three appreciations,
Close your eyes again.
Stretch your spine from front to back,
Curling in your head downward into your heart and curl to the tip of your pelvis like a cat.
Then move into the reverse position,
Your head and pelvic bowl moving towards your back body in full extension.
Open your throat.
Look up.
Greet the front top of your lungs.
Return to neutral spine and exhale.
Give yourself a few pumps in this way,
A seated cat-to-cow,
To wake up your spine.
Like you are licking the cookie batter bowl,
Let your belly swivel and circle in both directions to aid digestion.
Bring your shoulders up to your ears and in a circular motion drop them down and in to lay on your back.
With all the appreciation and gratitude,
Welcome yourself back by opening your eyes and taking in your surroundings.
Carefully pick up your treat.
Let yourself notice the texture,
Smell,
Form,
And reconnect your senses with open eyes.
What memories come to you?
Savor this moment.
Let it be a bite like no other.
Fully awake and attuned to the process of pleasure feeding your body.
Dig in with all of your senses.
