Daily Meditation: Thursday, May 16, 2013

Eating - must be accompanied by mental work; examples

05/16/2013

Eating gives us elements that are indispensable to life. But in order to benefit from everything it provides us with, not only must we be aware of what the act of eating represents for our health, we must also work with our thinking. As we take a mouthful of food, we can concentrate on wisdom, and then continue with patience, justice, love, purity, humility, gratitude, and so on. So long as we are content to eat without doing this mental work, we will absorb only the material part of the food, depriving ourselves of all the subtle elements that sustain our psychic life. These subtle elements can only be captured through concentration, and those who have learned to focus on them are better able to bear the difficulties of everyday life. They become stronger, more patient, more aware and also more sensitive to the manifestations of divine life.