I’m willing to be that we all over did it on Thanksgiving. The line between gratitude and gluttony can be as thin as a razor’s edge, and just as dangerous.
Mindfulness offers us a set of skills and practices to combat gluttony and to move through the rest of the holiday season with enjoyment and restraint — without a sense of deprivation.
To be mindful we bring our full attention to whatever we are doing in the moment — the activity, and the sights, sounds, sensations, smells, and tastes of now. Eating provides a rich array of sensory perceptions for us to pay attention to. But we are often, almost always I would venture, multitasking when we eat. We eat and talk; we eat and watch TV, we eat and sit at the computer; we eat and drive. We rarely just eat — just give our full attention to eating.
Inviting Silence to Quiet Stress:
We live in a noisy world both inside our own minds and the world in which we move. Much of this noise is uninvited. We may seem to be immune to it, but the relentless pressure of sound generates stress. We live in a heightened state of arousal, as if on terrorism alert.
Even when the world is quiet, our internal landscape may be anything but quiet. Relentless thoughts about the future, often in the form or worry; sticky thoughts about the past, often in the form of regret; and unabashed opinions about the present (often with a plaintiff feeling tone) preoccupy our minds.
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