Keeping Track of the Food

I've been working on noticing the food as I eat it.

I'm pretty good, though not perfect, at noticing taste and texture, temperature, saltiness, sweetness, wateryness, that kind of thing. What I mean when I say I'm not perfect is that it is sometimes easy not to notice even the food (or drink) in my mouth.

It's also really easy not to notice the food as it leaves my mouth and moves down my throat. I'm better at remembering to notice it in my esophagus, just before it enters my stomach. I'm also pretty good (much better than I used to be, anyhow) about noticing it in my stomach. Occasionally, I am aware of the food in my intestines, especially if there's something wrong.

Paying attention all the way down into your stomach is what I think of as an eating meditation. It's not really normal eating -- maybe it's too difficult to ever really be normal -- but the better I am at doing an eating meditation, the more conscious my "normal" eating is.

That's all for now. I thought I would just try blogging about conscious eating to see what happens when I begin to speak about it publicly. When I was trying to find a unique name for this blog, I realized there are other people out there blogging about conscious eating. I looked around a little bit, and I'm looking forward to reading more.