Mindful Eating Moment #8
Emotions come with a whole host of physical sensations, so the relationship between feelings and sensory experiences is a natural connection to make. But for many of us, the identification or labelling of our emotions is challenging, let alone being able to recognise the accompanying physical sensations.
I can hear you asking “what does all this have to do with mindful eating?”… Remember back to our Mindful Eating Moment when we spoke about our hunger and fullness cues, and how these sensations could be either pleasant, unpleasant or neutral? Well, here again we are using mindfulness to help us sit with ALL of our feelings and sensations, even the unpleasant ones.
The first step in this process is being able to identify our emotions and feelings, and then we get to recognise whether these emotions are pleasant or not. Generally speaking, we are all pretty comfortable with pleasant emotions, and even neutral ones tend not to cause us too much angst! But throw in some unpleasant emotions, and we usually have a rough time allowing them “in”. Being able to sit with unpleasant emotions, and observe them with curiosity rather than judgement, is an important step towards being able to manage our emotions and respond to them appropriately.
When we mindfully “feel”, we can then react accordingly. When eating, we can recognise when something makes us feel a certain way – pleasant or not. We can make choices about when to eat something and when not to. Or we can make a decision about whether to continue with an unpleasant meal, or change what we are eating, or stop eating completely! Being present with our feelings while we eat, and not judging them or attaching meaning to them gives us the FREEDOM TO CHOOSE. And those choices are based SOLELY on what feels right for us at any given moment… not what we are being told we should/should not be eating by some external “source”.
A word of caution here: this doesn’t mean that every meal has to be PLEASANT (aka awesome). What is pleasant one day, week or year might be unpleasant to us the next. Plus, while food is certainly one of the most pleasurable things in life, it doesn’t always have to be this way – food is also “just food” at times, and that is perfectly OK!