This is a guided prayer practice using a happy food memory. Take ten minutes of quiet time and try it. I don’t appear in the video at all, but there’s a red-headed woodpecker that comes and goes.
[youtube id=”m2veO6dhJnM”]
What food memory did you use? How did that work for you?
OMG I thought of a ‘leg of lamb’ done on the grill. The smell, looks, taste, and family we ate with were all present. Thank you.
I just love your ‘spot on’ reflection each week.
Thanks, Katie.
When I did this exercise recently, I thought of an orange. Just an orange. I don’t usually like oranges that much. It’s something about the texture — I mostly think of them as containers for the delicious juice, containers meant to be squeezed and composted. But on this long-ago occasion I was backpacking in Maine with some friends. We hadn’t packed enough food — hiking teenagers burn a lot of calories — and we were on very short commons. We stopped to rest, and I was so very hungry. Then someone found an orange in her pack, and wordlessly began to share out the segments.
Immediately, oranges were my favorite food in the whole world. My memory is somewhat vague about what happened after the first bite; some kind of quiet feeding frenzy took over, I guess. What happens on Katahdin, stays on Katahdin. When it was over, I thought of burying the peel, but I couldn’t find any. I think we ate it.
Love the birds! I think this would be a great video to watch (muted) if someone ever needed to have a moment of peace during a hectic work day.
Concerning your food meditation …, I was surprised by what happened when I tried to think of an incredibly good food memory. Absolutely nothing came to mind, and that was when I realized that I’ve never really fully connected to food in a way that makes me feel super thankful for it (even when the food tastes good, and even when I’m enjoying the table fellowship of family and/or friends, my brain’s always a little ho-hum about the food, itself). But, thanks to your exercise today, I also now realize that I’ve never allowed myself to become overwhelmingly hungry (even though I routinely fast, at least four times a year, for up to three days at a time). Perhaps if I were to fast for a longer period of time, I would become so exceedingly hungry that one single grain of rice would taste like heaven (ha!ha!).
I like the breath-prayer at the end of the video. And, again, I love those birds. Thank you, Adam!
-Sr. S