The Zen of Eating

What is meditation? It is the condition of being aware.  State of awareness.  Consciousness.  Focused attention - then, detachment.

When we are upset or angry, tired or frustrated, we are experiencing emotions.  Our emotions reside in a part of the brain that is "unconscious," in the sense that our emotions are instinctive.  They originate in the amygdala, a very primitive part of the brain that houses our survival mechanisms.  Our emotions help us survive as a species, even though one might argue that they can create havoc in our daily lives.  When a therapist asks a patient "how do you feel," frequently the most immediate answer is, "I don't know."  That's understandable, because "knowing" how one feels means giving a name of the emotion, and doing so implies thinking: left brain.  Emotions are located in the right brain.  Therefore, when we feel, when we experience emotion, the part of the brain that is active is the right brain -- not the "thinking" brain; not the part of the brain that is logical and analytical.  Our emotional brain is not.  Our emotional, right brain is charged with keeping us alive, with creativity, feelings, reactions - not thinking.  Our reasoning abilities are products of our left brain.  It might be said that we have distinguished ourselves from the so-called "lower animals" by virtue of the evolution of our left brain into a thinking, analyzing, reasoning mechanism.

Meditation is the act of becoming aware.  Once you understand that your emotions originate in the amygdala, the survival center of your brain that is very primitive in terms of our evolution as a species, it might become clear that you are not thinking when you are experiencing an emotion.  The two are almost incompatible.  Thinking is a function of the left brain, while emotions and feelings are functions of the right brain.  Meditation is the act of becoming aware (left brain, logical, thinking, reasoning) of your emotions (right brain, feelings, reactions).  It takes practice to be able to put a name on a feeling.  When you are feeling, you do not have conscious awareness of the feeling: you are simply reacting.  The idea, then, is to practice identifying that feeling (logic), labeling it, and then letting it be.  Let's say you feel angry, upset, frustrated.  If you were to meditate on that, you would try to first identify how you feel.  Simply identifying it is very difficult because emotions don't have names.  Emotions reside very deeply, and are amorphous.  Sometimes the process is easy and obvious: your dog passed away last night, and you miss him terribly.  You are crying, you are sad.  But frequently, emotions are not as straight-forward.  The first step, then, is to identify your feelings.  There simple act of putting a name on the feeling forces your brain to cross over into left-brain territory, thus interrupting the flow of feeling hormones.  Once you have given a name to your emotion, say, anger, you proceed to the next step, which is to put the anger in some sort of perspective: Why am I angry? What happened? Why am I reacting so violently? Why am I upset? What is the reality here? Meditation asks you to become aware.  It does not ask you to change things; it does not ask you to stop feeling as you do.  It simply asks you to become aware.  You may choose to do something about it, but that's not the function of meditation.

What does meditation have to do with the Zen of Eating? Again, meditation asks you to become aware: of your style of eating, the time of day, your emotions, the type of food you are eating, the speed at which you are eating it.  If you are an emotional eater, you are likely to "inhale" your food, in big gulps or giant bites, practically not chewing it, swallowing it ravenously and indiscriminately, stuffing yourself, frequently to the point of sleep.  This is emotional eating.  You are actually reacting to your emotions by giving yourself some form of comfort.  You have learned to associate large quantities of a particular food (fresh bread, say) with feeling calmer, and so you repeat that behavior again and again in an effort to quell your emotions.  The Zen of Eating asks you to interrupt that habitual behavior, that reflex behavior, that behavior that originates in the primitive parts of your brain, and become aware.  As you are about to open that box of Pepperidge Farm cookies, you pay attention to the act; you focus on the cellophane; you focus on your surroundings; on the way you are dressed; where you are located; and what is your state of mind/emotions.  With time and practice, you may come to a point where you consciously choose to not react in a manner that sabotages your health.