Feeling overwhelmed by politics? Try mindful eating. Seriously.
Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s simple but powerful book Present Moment Wonderful Moment includes a short verse to be recited just before eating:
This plate of food,
so fragrant and appetizing,
also contains much suffering.
This probably set off an alarm inside of you. This is like a prayer! How am I to enjoy my food if I’m thinking about the 8,000 children that die due to malnutrition every day, as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests we do? I work hard, I deserve to enjoy this cheeseburger and fries!
But, ironically, Thich Nhat Hanh’s verse is intended to help you enjoy your meal even more. It cultivates mindfulness, our natural ability to truly taste and feel. It brings you into your body and out of your mind where thinking about other people’s suffering triggers that particular American schizophrenia of feeling either guilty for being privileged or pride for winning such luxury.
Mindfulness yields much more than pleasure, though. It slows you down and simplifies your relationship with the present moment, which can extend far beyond one meal. Practicing it while doing something as banal as eating cracks open a door to a new way of relating with suffering and injustice, with the police entering our neighborhoods like a foreign army, with corporations working people harder for less pay, with carbon filling the atmosphere. It can help you remember the workers that gathered the vegetables and checked you out at the grocery store, and whoever cooked the meal, whose work goes unpaid in capitalist society.
Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “Mindful eating can cultivate seeds of compassion and understanding that will strengthen us to do something to help hungry and lonely people be nourished.”
If you can’t be mindful when you do something as simple and everyday as eating, how can you expect to be mindful the next time you protest, canvass, go on strike, or even just talk to your neighbor?
Feeling angry or hurt by the state of the world? Don’t forget the small stuff.
