Mindfulness is being in the moment. As such, mindfulness is intimacy with what is. Intimacy - by definition -- connects. After all, whatever our differences may be, we all share the same "now" -- that is, if we are fully in it. If you and I sit down at a table, across from each other, with the same food in front of us, and you think about what happened yesterday while I plan my tomorrow, we are -- for all intents and purposes -- in different psychological places. But, if you and I put our respective preoccupations aside and focus on what's going on right in front of us -- at the surface of the table, on the surface of our tongues -- we are, in a manner of speaking, coordinating and aligning our minds to one and the same plane of existence. We are connecting.
Whatever the status of your relationship, mindful eating can help you reconnect with each other or to deepen your connection. Mindful eating is an opportunity for the two of you to get out of your heads (where your differences ferment and smolder) and back into your bodies. Wherever you are in the history of your relationship, chances are this history began with shared sensory pastimes. There is a good chance that going out to eat, liking the same foods, and experimenting with exotic foods was part of your original romantic chemistry. So, before your break-up reaches a point of no return, why not sit down and reminisce on how you first broke bread? Sure, you've got issues. But you also have solutions. And some might be as simple as going back to some basic sensory pastimes the two of you had shared in common. Eating together takes you back to your original chemistry, to one of the pillars of your romance, to a time when you were in love... with everything!
No need to light that candle or pour a glass of wine yet (unless, of course, you are at a place where your relational problems don't yet stand in the way of physical intimacy). Just sit down together, in a kind of gustatory zazen, share the basic intimacy of eating together. Eat mindfully. Fill your mind, not stomach. And, perhaps, re-fill your heart.
Pavel Somov, Ph.D. is the author of Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time (New Harbinger, 2008) and of "Present Perfect: From Mindless Pursuit of What Should Be to Mindful Acceptance of What Is" (in press, New Harbinger Publications, in stores in July 2010). He is in private practice in Pittsburgh, PA. For more information visit www.eatingthemoment.com and sign up for Pavel Somov's monthly "Mindful-not-Mouthful" Newsletter