Conscious Eating as a Profound Spiritual Practice, by Robin Wing
By Robin Wing with www.SecretWealthMastery.com and www.MagnetizeYourWealth.com
From heaven and earth we receive our food. Conscious, prayerful eating is a very beautiful way to practice yoga. When we eat with love, with bountiful appreciation, the process of eating itself becomes a spiritual practice.
Before we approach our food, we prepare ourselves. We are about to enter into a most spiritual experience. When time permits, we bathe, purifying ourselves physically, washing away mental and psychic tensions. We take a few minutes to breathe slow, soft, complete breaths. Gentle and light, we attune to our intrinsic calm and quietude. We become aware of our natural hunger, which stimulates and enlivens our digestion.
We approach our kitchen as we would a temple - a place of transformation. We walk slowly, contemplatively, our heart satiated with pure vibrations, thankful for this plentiful grace, for this special occasion to feed and nurture ourselves, our family, our friends. We communicate with our food, relishing its beauty, its color, its form. We chant, we sing, feeling joyous as we cook, opening to our full-flavored expression.
If our meal is being prepared for us, we acknowledge the love and energy that pours into this creation. We convey our appreciation with our whole being, through kind words, a smile, or the light in our eyes.
We sit in a space that is sacred to us, returning here each meal, sowing the seeds for an atmosphere that naturally and magnetically invites us into meditation. We recognize this as a place of sadhana, or spiritual practice.
We light a candle, place a flower on the table, or perform any rite or ritual that holds special meaning for us. We offer our food to the Divine, for his and her pleasure.
We may wish to eat alone, or in the company of loved ones - in complete silence, or with soft, uplifting music in the background.
Sitting with our food before us, we close our eyes. We meditate, and breathe a prayer of thanksgiving. This food beomes our beloved. We listen to her voice, sensing all the love that has gone into its fruition - the commitment and dedication of the farmers in the field, the gift of the five elements, the power and wisdom of the entire cosmos. As we inhale the aroma, our taste buds awaken, our salivary glands come alive, and fresh prana imbues all our senses.
This is a most sacred moment we are entering into. We relax into a worshipful mood. Our meditation and reverent attitude transforms and spiritualizes the food before we eat.
Finally the moment of our first mouthful arrives. As our taste buds make contact, we delight in the explosion of sensations, the exquisite taste. The first mouthful is so ecstatic. We savor it, allowing relaxation to spread throughout our body, releasing all subtle tensions. We receive the essence of our food, which is prana, which is love. We feel our energy rising upward. We enter into the experience of conscious eating.
Conscious, prayerful eating adds immensely to the pleasure and nourishment we receive from our food. Although natural, wholesome food is very important, more essential and life enhancing is the way we eat, which takes us beyond the physical realm altogether. Through this meditative mode of eating, we are enhancing the food value many times, and recharging our whole being, sanctifying it with spiritual energy.
As we eat, we remain in silence, letting go of all that lies outside us. With our eyes lightly closed, our body soft and open, we eat slowly, chewing our food thoroughly. When we chew well, consciously, we add an element to food that nature isn’t able to produce.
Breathing is also an essential ingredient. Chewing and breathing go hand in hand. They are united, inseparable. When we consciously breathe as we eat, we fan the fire of our digestion. We keep our energies flowing. The intention is to convert each morsel into its purest possible state by chewing thoroughly until it is liquid, breathing prana into it, and infusing it with our loving vibrations.
As we become more accustomed to this practice, we become more and more relaxed as we eat. Chewing slowly and sensuously, deep breaths begin to emerge spontaneously, without thought or effort.
Another way to further invoke and awaken the spirit of communion is to silently repeat mantra as we eat. The holy vibrations of the mantra are assimilated into our food and thus into every cell of our body, and every thought and image in our mind.
Periodically during our meal, we pause for a moment, tuning in to our body. Have we satisfied our hunger? Do we need more food? It’s not the quantity of food that nourishes us. It’s the quality, and the attitude with which we eat. We know that we are being nurtured in the very best way by eating consciously.
Upon completion, we become still. We end our dining experience with a final prayer of gratitude for this refreshing godsend of sustenance and new life. Sitting in meditation a few more moments, we receive the ultimate nourishment from our food, on every level. Balanced, light, and energized, we feel prana flowing through our body, coming to rest at our third eye, the seat of our conscious awareness.
As we slowly transition, rising up from our meal, we carry this sense of attunement, clarity, and self-mastery into our day, wherever we go, whatever we do.
Conscious eating is a natural delight; a celebration; a wonderful, simple, and luxurious pathway into nutritious and fertile lands, and into the sublime sweetness and richness of the yoga of love.
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Robin Wing, Founder & Director of the Mystical Yoga Institute, published author and musician, and former Director of Kripalu Yoga Teacher Trainings, has had the great fortune to live in spiritually charged yoga ashrams in the U.S. & India for over two decades & has studied very closely with great yoga masters from many traditions.
The primary focus of Robin’s study & practice continues to be immersed in the spiritual dimension of yoga & devotion, born from a tradition & lineage of masters that dates back thousands of years. Robin created Mystical Yoga from a strong intuitive calling to bring these ancient teachings of yoga into this modern age in a new and profound way.
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This is your Positive Motivator from Yadel Foundation a non-profit organization. At http://www.starredreview.com/synop179.htm you will find a review of the book “What Is Man”. It is very enlightening in regards to life and living. Secure a copy and read it. You will be glad of doing that.
There is but one Spirit that controls the entire universe. That is the Eternal Spirit, the creator of the universe whose omnipresence fills it altogether in order to keep things in check. He is the Spirit that we call God, and is not one of many competing or rival spirits. Rather, He is the integrated compact of all positive and fundamental principles, spirits which are infinitely existent.
These among others are the Spirit of all Life and Living, all knowledge and wisdom, all power and might, all benevolence, good, mercy and grace, all uprightness and rectitude, all holiness and justice, all space and existence, and the embodiment of all positive principles that there is, and will ever be. In effect, these principles are basic and fundamental to everything that exists, except evil, and are the fundamental laws upon which existence itself depends and operates. They are immutably changeless, and, violating any, results in dire calamitous and severe consequences.
These principles, having been around before us, and will be around after we are no longer here, we will never be able to understand them fully; therefore our attitude towards them should be one of reverence and fear. We should respect them and endeavor to support them and their cause. They precede the application of the name God, (God being applied by man only since his emergence two thousand years ago) and as such, are fundamentally existent principles, eternal in scope.
It remains then that God is without beginning and so he can never come to an end or go out of existence. He is that being who is just infinitely eternal, making him The Great Eternal Spirit an originator of all that exists. Every element within creation, in its own interest, should be obligated to honor, respect and reverence God. I conclude this transcript by inviting the reader to look through the last chapter of of a document by the wisest man that lived. Ecclesiastes chapter 12.