Rediscovering The Sacredness of Eating

There is a listen online button at the bottom right of this email, and you can click that to listen to this article if you wish to. It is not recorded in my voice, and I am using a tool in Beehiiv to do so.

In many Indian cultures, there is a sacred ceremony called annaprāśana. This Hindu rite of passage marks an infant’s first intake of food, particularly rice (grains), which is not milk. Traditionally, a child cannot be fed rice until this ceremony is completed.

This ceremony is typically held when a child is a few months old and is conducted by the priest. The child is bathed, dressed in ceremonial clothes and placed on the parents lap. The priest offers prayers to deities to bless the child with good digestive powers, health, and physical and mental development.

After the prayers are offered, the parents feed the child payasam (sweet rice milk pudding). This ceremony is an occasion of celebration, to which extended family, neighbours, and friends are invited to partake in the joy of the child’s first intake of rice.

Eating is seen as a sacred activity in many cultures. In Indian cultures, when prayers and pujas are performed daily, the worshipper offers the Gods and Goddesses a Naivedya. The Naivedya is an offering that takes the form of food and is offered with appropriate rituals to satiate the hunger of the deities being worshipped.

Eating is no longer seen as a sacred activity, and our relationship with food has become complex.

In the book, “Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food”, Jan Chozen Bays says

She goes on to say that sometimes, we seek out intense experiences through food to feel alive.

Food provides stimulation and pleasure that is not satisfying beyond the immediate moment. It leaves us wanting more and doesn’t do much to satiate and satisfy the other hungers that needs us to be fully involved in our life.

Eating is a sacred activity, and in many traditions, it is approached as such. It is not seen as a proxy or a substitute for anything else but as a wholesome act of living that must be fully engaged with our presence.

Jan says,  “In Zen, we call something that has the potential to awaken us to a deeper truth about our life a “dharma gate”. Every evening at the monastery, we chant, “Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them.”

Why are dharma gates boundless? Because they are everywhere.

Anything can be a gate to a deeper truth if we are able to sit perfectly still and truly open to it.

When a dharma gate opens, we are able to have many experiences that we long for but that ordinarily elude us; experiences of the sacred, intimacy, oneness, abundance, gratitude, well-being and simple happiness. Eating can be called sacred because it can become, through mindful practice, a dependable dharma gate.”

The words “dependable dharma gate” struck a deep chord with me. So many of us strive for the experience of intimacy and oneness using many different strategies, many of which are not that dependable.

But if eating is a dependable gateway to simple happiness, I am encouraged to try and practice mindful eating.

With this, I will round up this edition of our newsletter and conclude the deep dive into the book, “Mindful Eating” by Jan Chozen Bays. Thank you for letting me share these reflections as we journeyed through this beautiful and transformational book together.

This book came to me again at precisely the time I needed it. I’ve enjoyed reading, reflecting on, and writing about it. I would love to hear about your experiences with it as well.

The next edition of the newsletter will feature an RWM Classics Edition. RWM Classics are some of my older editions, which fit in well with the theme we have been exploring in our recent editions.

We conclude this edition with a tiny story this week.

💌 Siri