Consuming Consciously

Your diet extends far beyond what you eat at meal time. The nutrition (or lack thereof) you obtain from the food you eat is a combination of quantity, quality, and value. If you don’t eat enough, or if you have too much, you won’t feel great. If you have the “right” portions, but they’re made of junk, that won’t be great either. A third consideration, which I think is as important as quantity and quality, is value. How are you consuming? Are you taking notice of what you’re eating? Are you eating alone or with friends and family? Are you watching TV, trolling the internet, stressing about work? Are you paying attention to not only the food itself, but the experience you create when you eat it?

Consuming food is the most accessible example for the talking about consuming consciously. Your brain and your body consume everything that you expose them to. Activities that you do on the regular become a “diet” for your senses. If you sit a desk all day, make an effort to move. You wouldn’t eat white rice for 75% of your meals, so don’t subject your body and your posture to the cast of a chair for 75% of your time awake. The information you expose your mind to becomes the nutrition (or lack thereof) for what you think, how you think, and how you feel. Listening to Mozart on the ride to work will have a different impact on your mind than listening to talk radio. Reading Rumi or Rilke will provide different nutriment than the news. Having an exciting conversation with someone (in real life) about bike mechanics, coffee, or whatever you find interesting will be more novel, more energy rich, and provide more value than casual observations about the weather.

What we eat, what we listen to, what we read, who we engage with, and what activities we perform - consistently - will serve to mold who we are and what kind of experiences we have. We live in a time when we are overtly and covertly pushed to consume. If we can bring this process to a more conscious level, we give ourselves the opportunity to make a choice to ask: how much, what kind, and is this important to me?