On Mindful Eating

©Carolyn Mason, “Pink Frosting,” 2004.

In one segment of her book Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert recounts an experience she had in a busy office building in New York. Upon rushing into an elevator, she caught a glimpse of herself in the security mirror. Processing the familiar face, her brain registered her own reflection as a friend of hers; Gilbert reacted, for a fleeting moment, with surprise and joy. As quickly as this happened, she realized her mistake and laughed it off in embarrassment.

Gilbert reflects back on this moment in the midst of a night in Rome—where she has been living most vivaciously—when she finds herself suddenly overcome with depression and loneliness. Turning to her own self for support, Gilbert remembers this incident in the elevator. She scrawls in her journal: "Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend."

What a revolutionary concept: that we can be our own friend. That we can offer our own selves compassion and solace, even in the depths of despair. I would argue that this—this befriending of ourselves, this treating ourselves as we would our nearest and dearest—is one of the most vital practices in which we can actively engage. (And I say “practices” because it truly is evolving; truly takes repeated effort; truly takes disciplined attention.) A practice that makes life easier. Healthier. More fulfilling. And it is not just vital in moments of depression, strife or despair. It is work we can weave into each moment of our lives. What we allow ourselves to do with our time. How we approach our aspirations; our creativity; our play. How and when we work. How we judge and speak to our own selves.

So where does this process of self-befriending begin? There are many points of entry. Combating negative self-talk. Expressing gratitude. Giving ourselves credit for our achievements. Operating from a place of trust rather than fear. But those are not what we're going to talk about today. Today, we're going to talk about the point of entry that sparked the journey of self-befriending, in truth, for me. We're going to talk about food. 

Or, rather, the way we eat our food.

Mindful Eating or The Gateway Art of Attentiveness

I first encountered the concept of mindful eating in Michael Pollan's book In Defense of Food, which I highly recommend. He espouses this simple yet somehow radical belief that when you eat you should just eat. Don't eat and scroll through any media or communications on your phone. Don't eat and read the newspaper or even Bon Appetit magazine. Don't eat while driving. Don't eat straight out of the fridge while making your ritual boredom lap through the kitchen. Don't eat standing up, rushing out the door. Don't eat at your desk, working through your lunch break. Don't eat while watching TV or Netflix in bed.

So what, just…eat? Yes, just eat. Eat and give your full attention to your meal (and your present company, if you are sharing the meal with others). Eat and relish the colors, textures, scents and tastes of your food. Take your time. Put your utensil down between bites. Chew thoroughly. Savor the flavors. Take deep breaths and feel the reactions of your body to your meal. Appreciate the care that you put into preparing your meal, or that someone else put into preparing it. Acknowledge and appreciate the hands that nurtured and harvested the raw ingredients and the wonders of our earth that enabled them to grow. And, while we're at it, also be sure to eat off of proper dish ware, treating yourself like the deserving human that you are. You wouldn't serve your guest a meal straight out of a jar, wrapper or tupperware, would you?

These propositions in and of themselves have the capacity to trigger all kinds of resistance—let alone what might come up in the actual act of trying them. Our internal monologue, that voice of defense, has its lines firing. I don’t have time for that! I won’t get to read the paper if I don’t do it over breakfast. I can’t get my work done if I don’t eat at my desk. What, I’m supposed to sit at home alone, at the actual dining table, and have a meal with myself as company? I could never have a meal out in public and not be on my phone—that is way too awkward! Why dirty a dish when I can eat right out of the jar?

These are all valid concerns, but hear me out. Mindful eating has incredible physiological, psychological and emotional effects. For starters, when we take the time to slow our eating and chew more fully, our bodies actually have greater access to the nutritional benefits of our food. Believe it or not, chewing is the first step in the digestive process. When we chew completely, our teeth essentially liquidize our food, which enables our bodies to digest it more easily and frees up internal resources to focus on nutrient absorption. Our saliva also contains digestive enzymes that are necessary to break down the food for optimum conversion into energy. Slowing down and chewing fully means we physically gain more benefit from the food we eat and help our digestive systems do their job with more ease and effectiveness.

These aren’t the only ways that mindful eating benefits our physical health. When we actually pay attention to (or dare even savor!) the process of eating, we are better able to tune in to our levels of hunger and satiety. This helps us avoid overeating and feelings of post-meal discomfort, which in turn helps prevent unwanted weight gain and chronic stress on our digestive systems. Additionally, as our minds and bodies are constantly in relationship, eating with attentiveness helps us remember the experience of having eaten, which actually keeps us feeling fuller longer. 

And then there's the joy bit. The benefit of pure pleasure that comes from truly noticing and appreciating how delicious your food is, how curious of a sound it makes, how many hands it took to get from the field onto your plate, or how wonderful that even amongst your hectic/frustrating/disappointing/exhausting day, you took time to create something for yourself. By making an effort to eat away from your desk, away from your phone or television, off of real dish ware at the dining room table—even if you're by yourself—you are actively showing yourself that you're worth caring for. That, in itself, is something to be practiced and celebrated.

Words really cannot express how radically the practice of mindful eating has changed my life. It has so many benefits and an incredible ripple effect. Start paying more attention to your food and your eating and suddenly everything in your life will seem deserving of increased attention, care and even reverence. The mundane made magnificent. Trust me. You'll see.

On Coming Home to Yourself

© Collage by Nathalia Greghi

I went back home to Los Angeles last week. The home of my past selves. The home of my elementary and middle school self, who was joyous and carefree and destined for greatness. The home of my high school self, whose mind was ever expanding and whose heart felt perpetually bruised. The home of my post-college self, who had a burgeoning career she loved and a boyfriend she loved and friends she loved in a city she loved. So many selves contained in photos and diaries, coursework and notes passed in class. Selves written into the bed sheets, into the rough and fading dusty rose carpet that has forever cradled that floor, into the piles upon piles of mementos that I can't seem to throw away. So many selves that are intimately familiar, yet so far gone.

It's hard to go back to that house in Los Angeles. To enjoy the things I still love deeply about the city without free falling down the rabbit hole of my past. At 24, I left all that history behind and made a new home for myself in London. The city magnetized me, drew me to it and activated me in ways I could never have dreamed. At times, those two years in London were devastating and inconceivably challenging, yet I somehow managed to show up for myself like I never had before. I built the most incredible home, fell in love with a city, fell in love with food, fell in love with amazing friends and communities and conversations. And then, because of a situation well beyond my control, I had to leave. 

In the two years following my move back to the States, I would often tell people that I left my heart in London. But if home is where the heart is and my heart was 5,500 miles away, where did that leave me? 

There are so many things that can make a place feel like home. Comfort, familiarity, community, ease. Home can smell like pine trees or eucalyptus or mothballs or ocean air. Home can feel like a lover's embrace or the squeeze of a mother's hand. It can be the taste of empanadas or matzo ball soup. It can be the sinking into a well worn armchair or sitting atop a vista overlooking the city where you grew into you. It's strange now to say I'm going home when I take a trip down to LA and then to again say I'm going home when I get into the car to drive back up to the Bay. But that's another thing about home: it is multiplicity, evolving, physical and emotional, transient and eternal all at the same time.

The making and leaving and re-making of homes is one aspect of adulthood that I was definitively unprepared for. No one tells you how challenging and joyous and heartbreaking and perpetual it is. 

Through all of this, I'm coming to learn one essential and not often discussed thing: at the end of the day, the most important home I can make and return to is within myself. Which often feels impossible. To feel at home in my own self. Comforted, happy, at peace in my own company, irrespective of anything else.

But that’s part of the work. This life work. Can we learn to sit with ourselves, be with our breath, hold ourselves tenderly and still feel at home—even when everything else is in chaos or falls away?

On Repairing the World

About a year ago, while searching for things to listen to on my impending drive from the Bay down to LA, I happened upon a podcast called On Being. Oh my...this podcast. It is the stuff of life. The bafflingly well read and ever thoughtful host, Krista Tippett, speaks with a variety of thinkers—including philosophers, artists, activists, religious figures, poets, scientists and social researchers—about the things that make us human, that shape our world. I've been slowly working my way through her new book, Becoming Wise, and was struck by a parable she shared that was originally from her recorded conversation with physician Rachel Naomi Remen.

Remen, who recognized and integrated the power of personal story into her approach of cancer treatment with patients, recounted for Tippett a tale of one of the fundamental ethics of Judaism: to "repair the world". Her Orthodox rabbi grandfather told her this story as her fourth birthday present. She shared:

In the beginning there was only the holy darkness, the Ein Sof, the source of life. In the course of history, at a moment in time, this world, the world of a thousand thousand things, emerged from the heart of the holy darkness as a great ray of light. And then, perhaps because this is a Jewish story, there was an accident, and the vessels containing the light of the world, the wholeness of the world, broke. The wholeness of the world, the light of the world, was scattered into a thousand thousand fragments of light. And they fell into all events and all people, where they remain deeply hidden until this very day.

Now, according to my grandfather, the whole human race is a response to this accident. We are here because we are born with the capacity to find the hidden light in all events and all people; to lift it up and make it visible once again and, thereby, to restore the innate wholeness of the world. This is a very important story for our times — that we heal the world one heart at a time. This task is called “tikkun olam” in Hebrew, “restoring the world.”

Tikkun olam is the restoration of the world. And this is, of course, a collective task. It involves all people who have ever been born, all people presently alive, all people yet to be born. We are all healers of the world.

And that story opens a sense of possibility. It’s not about healing the world by making a huge difference. It’s about healing the world that touches you, that’s around you. That’s where our power is. 

In my years and years of Jewish education, I had never heard this story before. It baffled me and it touched me deeply. The idea that we all of us are healers. And when everyone does small things to make the world as they experience it better, more just, more connected, more curious, more generous, more equitable, more thoughtful and more human, the entire world is transformed.

//

As I let the message of this parable sink in, I couldn’t help but frame it within the context of my own personal healing, the avenues through which I aim to help heal the world, and the truths that I have come to take as fundamental. One such truth is this: While we certainly have a responsibility to be good to one another and to care for the earth as well, our foremost responsibility is to our own selves. To acknowledge and tend to the light within each of us. We must treat ourselves—mind, body and spirit—with curiosity, tenderness, non-judgment, generosity, and care. This was not something I remember being taught as a child, but is something I now believe to be of utmost importance.

In her talk, “The Power of Vulnerability,” Brène Brown makes a bold assertion that we can only love others as much as we love ourselves. I believe this to be true. And so: in order to see and bolster the light in others, we must tend to the light within ourselves. We must meet our struggles with compassion. See the opportunity in our failures. The gifts in our imperfections. The cumulative transformation in our slow growth. The strength in our vulnerability. The perspective derived from our wounds. The absolute necessity of our unique offerings to the world.

We can only begin to attend to our responsibility and power to heal the world by first attending to our responsibility and power to heal our own selves.

By living in ways that bolster our own light, we are poised to genuinely champion the light within others. And. By living each day in our light, we create an energy and model of behavior that imprints itself onto the world. That allows others to step into their own light. And in our wake, the world changes—becomes, increment by increment, more repaired.

On Courage, Perseverance & Meeting Yourself Where You Are

©Francesca Woodman, Untitled (New York), 1979

"To create one's own world takes courage"
                                         -Georgia O'Keeffe

I've been thinking a lot about balance lately. Not so much the typical idea of work/life balance, but balance of a more internal and personal kind. That sweet spot between constantly striving for better and knowing that what you do, make or share—even in its imperfections—is worthy. That space between brash confidence and utter lack of faith in your capabilities or qualifications. That tenderness, compassion and flexibility that yearns to be breathed into your choices when you tell yourself you're "slacking off" on whatever aspirations or regulations you have set for yourself, be it exercise goals or eating goals or personal project goals. That delicate and somehow elusive courage to keep doing, making and sharing even though you know there is still so much space for you to perfect and to learn.

It is both incredible and entirely unsurprising how many beautiful food blogs exist today. And now, with the ubiquity of Instagram as a tool for people to compulsively and publicly share their lives, we can stare at gorgeously prepared and styled photographs of food literally ALL DAY LONG. In ways, this is massively exciting. It is also terribly overwhelming and can spark a dark vortex of self-doubt. The "I'm not ______ enough"s are endless, if you let them be. I speak from experience. Even if you aren't a food blogger or aspiring Instagram superstar, the avenues through which people are now able to carefully curate and share a particular image of their lives are many; with innumerable opportunities for comparison today, it is often hard to trust that what we have to offer is enough. Maybe you can relate.

I am so appreciative of the bloggers who keep their entire history of posts up to view even after achieving massive success, book deals, etc. It's easy to forget (or not realize in the first place) that many of them have been producing work online for YEARS, as far back as 2008 or 2009. If you look at those first posts, they never look like they do now. The lighting, the props, the composition, the image quality—all of these things are skills and resources that take time to acquire. And these bloggers acquired them through their passion, their tenacity, their belief that what they had to share was exciting and worthy even when they had five readers and their posts included sentences like, "Hi, Mom!" They had the courage to create their own worlds, to pursue the activities that made them feel alive, and to share their offerings with the world not because they wanted fame or notoriety but because it was something they felt deeply compelled to do. Everyone, at any given time, is at a different point in the process, the journey, of their life. In this world of excessive sharing and digital connectivity, we should take inspiration from those further along in their journeys than we are and, even amidst comparison and kernels of frustration or doubt, find the courage to keep walking our own.

//

I've been sitting on this post for awhile. I was excited to have a free morning to shoot it and thought that the early afternoon light would be perfect. As it turned out, the light was harsh, blew out the colors in most of the images and cast drastic shadows from the windowpanes onto every shot I composed. I didn't have the "right" plate ware for the dish (wherever I get my ideas about plate ware from), and the salad took up way too little space on the plate. Some of the images were salvageable, but needless to say, I was bummed. Weeks passed and the images sat idly on my computer. And as I continued to flutter between engagement and disengagement with the other projects and things in my life, I began to think about balance. And worthiness. And the courage to do, make and share things with this world even when I don't think it's my best. To trust that in being gentile with myself, in being authentic, and in continuing to actively show up in this process that is life—in all of its messy imperfections—everything will, in time, fall into place.

On Connecting to the Seasons | Springtime Intentions

©Arielle Vey

A native of Los Angeles, I grew up with a rather skewed experience of the seasons. Winter to me was orange, yellow and red tinted leaves that clung to their branches well into December, suburban streets lined with hues that I thought were vibrant until the East Coast taught me otherwise. To my thin California skin, the marked chill of a day that peaked in the low 50s drew my puffy purple jacket out of the closet, which I then layered over a sweatshirt and long sleeved tee. Aside from the eventual trickle of the foliage and its indistinct renewal, seasons in Los Angeles were subtle. The sky grew grey and sometimes poured rain, but the landscape always looked pretty much the same.

My first year in New York was a shock to the system, to say the least. I will never forget how impossibly long that first winter felt—truly, like, It's April, how the hell is it STILL snowing?! It got to a point when I almost couldn't remember the particular sensation of sunshine on skin. But slowly the thaw did come. And slowly, then seemingly all at once, new life began to emerge. In the early stages of spring, the tulips struck me most. Vibrant and elegant, they covered my school's campus, a proclamation of what was just around the bend: a world overcome with rich renewal. For the first time in my life, springtime was more than just a concept, a nondescript string of months between the chill and the heat. Not only could I see spring, I could feel spring in my bones.  

While I no longer reside in a climate with such dramatic shifts, living back East taught me not only to notice the particular markers of springtime but to relish this wondrous time when the world jolts back to life. Even during distinct environmental transition, it is so easy for us not to notice. We live such busy, plugged-in lives that we become disconnected from our surroundings and focus our attention solely on our personal dramas, obligations and narratives. Yet these cycles are not separate from us. They dictate what we eat, what we wear, how we move, when we sleep, how we feel. They provide opportunities for us to turn inwards, to hibernate and reflect and then to turn outwards and grow anew with the world.

While it may be doing so more rapidly in California than in other places at present, the thaw is approaching and new life is beginning to emerge. As beings who not only inhabit this Earth but are connected to it, it serves us to tap into this natural regeneration and use it as momentum within ourselves. The days are getting noticeably longer and new, less hearty and heavy crops are popping up, both of which offer us opportunities for more buoyant and sustained energy. Spring is the perfect time to sow seeds, set intentions and bring new projects and goals into fruition. So, here is my invitation to you: set a springtime intention. Something that will bring you joy, that will help you grow. And then do it. Notice the beauty that is emerging in the natural world around you, harness the energy of that new life, and set something enlivening for yourself in motion.