It is more important

Eating It is more important to note, than it is to eat.Watch the eye scanning the food table, watch the opening and closing of the mouth as food enters it. While eating, watch flavour, pay attention to your self, don’t go outside yourself.When eating is not so pleasurable, meditation is going well! So you’ve had your meal, being mindful of all your sensations, eating it, and then when you ask your self, ‘well what did I eat?’ You can’t remember! Or it takes you a while to recall!at’s because you didn’t pay attention to concepts. You forgot what you ate because you didn’t pay attention to the concepts like: ‘I ate chicken or carry.’All you did was ‘sensations, sensations, sensations and sensations!’ No meaning comes into your mind about what you are eating, so when you get up you can’t remember, or it takes you a while to remember. You can remember the whole process that you ate but you can’t remember what you ate!With eating remember three things always: sensations, taste, mind states. You can include movements as well as intentions as you go on. When you get very relaxed even eating is very calming.When your mindfulness is lacking you tend to eat too fast! On the other hand when you are mindful it seems that it takes so much energy just to eat!Because you are so calm! It’s exhausting! And being aware of all your sensations, makes it feel so painful!Every moment something is coming through the five sense doors to the mind constantly. So you are aware of something.With all practices, try to have awareness of yourself every moment. If you really have awareness first, and awareness is first place and everything else comes second, then you will find really you start going up in the practice. e mind becomes obedient and tamed.e more you look at subtle sensations the stronger the mind becomes. Choose the subtle sensations, the neutral ones that make you work harder and make sati-samadhi strong.

From – THE WAY OF ATTAINMENT OF GENIUS