Welcome to this practice.
You need a piece of fruit or a small food item to do this meditation or a glass of water will do.
Grapes or raisins are ideal but anything you can eat or drink will do.
So please make yourself comfortable in your seat and have your piece of fruit or food item in front of you and we'll settle ourselves down first.
So let's plant our feet on the floor put our legs somewhere comfortable and we'll take a few deeper breaths.
Next time we inhale we can allow our spine to grow a tiny bit and next time we exhale we can allow our shoulders to soften our face to soften and we'll balance our head on the top of our body so we're all in neutral we've parked our body.
Let's take a few deeper breaths as we settle in.
You can try sighing out the breath if that's something you'd like to do it's quite relaxing and allowing the breath to come into neutral breath breathing itself.
See if we can have no control over it.
Now we're feeling a little bit more still and centered we're going to take a look at our piece of fruit slowly opening our eyes without disturbing ourselves too much and looking at our piece of fruit and we're going to examine it like we've never seen it before.
Noticing how the light shines on it and the shadow behind it.
Noticing the texture of the surface,
Colour,
The shape,
And then we're going to start to move one of our hands towards the piece of fruit and let's see if we can do it mindfully so noticing as we move our arm noticing as we move our hand and paying as much attention as we can while we pick up piece of fruit and put it into the palm of the hand.
How does it feel?
We can use our other hand to turn it over and look all around and let's pay as much attention as we can as we do this.
Noticing how our fingertips touch the fruit.
Is it soft or hard?
Light,
Heavy.
If we press it a little bit what happens?
Noticing and as much detail as we can and using the fruit as our anchor in the present moment.
It's our focus of our attention of our meditation.
So we're going to go on a little thought journey now and you can rest your hands if that's comfortable and we're going to imagine how this piece of fruit came to be in our hand.
So I invite you to visualise where this piece of fruit was grown.
Imagine it on the tree,
On the vine,
On the bush,
In the light,
In the rain.
Absorbing the energy of the sun and with its roots in the earth.
And it's growing and developing.
When it's ripe it's picked,
Packed,
Transported and it's ended up in your hand.
So opening our eyes again and looking at our item of food.
I'm inviting you to notice when you visualise you're not looking out of your eyes you're looking into your mind's eye and even if our eyes are open when we do that we're not using them we're looking into our internal space.
So let's try that again.
We're looking at our piece of fruit and just briefly I want you to imagine it being cut in half and notice how your vision stops working and your internal vision takes over.
As you mentally imagine that fruit,
What it looks like on the inside.
Opening your eyes coming back to our piece of fruit again and once more we can then imagine the internal structure of the fruit.
So we're going from our visual perception to our inner perception and it is our inner perception that runs the autopilot can take us to the past and future and time travel which is wonderful but it can also take us to fears of the future and pain in the past.
Let's take our attention once more to our fruit.
We've used our visual perception on the fruit.
Let's take the fruit to our nose and inhale using our sense of smell now.
What happens as you smell the fruit?
Maybe it triggers memories,
Maybe it triggers your body that you're about to eat,
Maybe you start to salivate.
Can we notice all of these things?
And then very,
Very slowly,
Mindfully,
Observantly we're going to place the piece of fruit into our mouth.
Feel what it feels like in our mouth.
Feel our body's reaction.
Noticing what normally happens completely,
Automatically and slowly we can start to chew the food,
Paying as much attention as we can to how it feels and what thoughts pop up for us.
Feeling each sensation and observing all the thoughts.
Swallowing when we're ready.
Can we feel that food item going into our body?
Can we still taste it a little bit?
We can go on a little thought journey to imagine that food item going into our body,
Part of it maybe becoming our body or being burnt in the metabolic fires to fuel our body and part of it passing through and into the waste and that continues its journey.
Back out into the environment.
So returning to our physical body and noticing how we feel now.
And still being the observer we can start to take a few deeper breaths,
Energising breaths,
Returning movement to the body,
Gently reanimating the body and returning to our regular waking state.
Thank you for practicing with me.
