Eating Mindfully with the Raisin Eating Exercise

Mindful eating involves paying attention to the sensory experience while you're eating and mentally describing it to yourself as you eat. Mindful eating is different from savoring -- which is something people are commonly confused by. Mindful eating is more descriptive and non-judgmental. For example, you would describe the sensation of biting through the skin of a grape rather than evaluating it as good or bad.

Probably the best way to understand mindful eating is to follow along with my video demonstrating the all-time classic mindful eating experiment:: the Raisin Eating Exercise.

When you try mindful eating, your thoughts will probably drift to the future or the past, or to other topics. Your task is to notice that your thoughts have drifted when it happens and gently bring your thoughts back to mindful eating.

It might take a couple of goes, but the purpose of this exercise is to help us to fully experience and enjoy the taste and texture of what we eat.

John Kabat Zinn discusses the experience thus: "The raisin exercise dispels all previous concepts we may be harboring about meditation. It immediately places it in the realm of the ordinary, the everyday, the world you already know but are now going to know differently. Eating one raisin very, very slowly allows you to drop right into the knowing in ways that are effortless, totally natural, and entirely beyond words and thinking. Such an exercise delivers wakefulness immediately. There is in this moment only tasting."

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Howto & Style

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• raisin experience
• raisin eating exercise
• eating mindfully