Eating Process
In Eating peacefully, recommends starting with one mealtime: breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Choose a specific location to eat, such as your table or the lunchroom at work. Sit quietly. Don't get up, and don't answer the phone. Have all the food you intend to eat on the table in front of you before starting. To be mindful you must give your full attention to your eating. You must focus on the process of eating and enjoying your meal.
For example, try eating using a pair of chopsticks instead of your customary utensils. This will force you to take smaller portions, eat more slowly, and look at your food more closely. Other strategies include eating with your non-dominant hand, chewing your food 30 to 50 times per bite, or trying to make the portion of food you've taken for the meal last 20 minutes.
In Coming to Our Senses, mindfulness guru Jon Kabat Zinn says, "When we taste with attention, even the simplest foods provide a universe of sensory experience, awakening us to them. "The Raisin Consciousness is an exercise Jon Kabat Zinn uses with his clients as a first meditation. The exercise is based on Buddhist teachings.
The raisin exercise dispels all previous concepts we may be harboring about meditation. It immediately places it in the realm of the ordinary, the everyday, the world you already know but are now going to know differently. Eating one raisin very, very slowly allows you to drop right into the knowing in ways that are effortless, totally natural, and entirely beyond words and thinking. Such an exercise delivers wakefulness immediately. There is in this moment only tasting.