In this meditation, I offer the experience of tasting and savouring a small bite of chocolate to open the sensory pathways – a fantastic way to expand inner and outer awareness and to fill all the levels of your being with an experience. I use the example of chocolate as so many people find it pleasurable, but you can use any food or drink that you especially look forward to savouring.
In life we often race through pleasure and yet dwell and ruminate on pain. As one meditator recently said to me, “We press the fast forward button instead of Play.” We often make pleasure something we have to “earn” or “deserve” and in doing so, undermine our enjoyment with feelings of anxiety over worthiness.
Life is full of special treats. On some level, all of life is a treat, a gift, an invitation for us to fill our beings with experiences of wonder, awe, gratitude, thrill and adventure from a place of feeling natural with ourselves. We are invited all the time to suffuse ourselves with these experiences and let them play on inside of us long after the experience is over.
This meditation is really about savouring all the flavours of life, not just a few. When we meditate this way, we really get to feel so many inner awakenings and to sense an expansion, an illumination, on the inside. With this style of meditation, every touch of life becomes almost psychedelic. Colours, flavours, sights, sounds, touches infuse us and we feel touched by all the fingers of life.
This practice is also great if you are someone who loves being in the “highs” of life but feels a crash afterwards which leaves you feeling a little flat, empty or lost. In this meditation, we learn how to sustain all the sensations of the experience, long after it has gone, using the great meditation secret of “infusion”.
There is so much to this meditation – which I offer as a practice frequently in my classes and workshop – that the feedback from meditators afterwards is incredible in its range of experiences, surprises and spontaneous arisings. I have quoted some of the feedback I have heard after the chocolate meditation, at the end of this piece.
To take this meditation a step further, you can actually meditate on savouring all the flavours of something you love to eat or drink but without actually having that thing available. This is using imagination to awaken sensory pathways and inner life and is incredibly powerful. The last time I offered this meditation to a class, there were two people who cannot eat chocolate. They each instead, imagined they were sipping a glass of their favourite wine. You will see their feedback along with the others at the end of this piece!
Practice
Take your chocolate, still wrapped, and place it in front of your gaze. Look at it for a few moments, savouring the feelings that come with the anticipation of unwrapping it and then biting into it. Let your attention bask in whatever feelings, thoughts and sensations come up as you pause on this threshold. These may be eagerness, curiosity, excitement, anticipatory pleasure or a feeling of gratitude for the self-awarded permission to enjoy yourself and feel pleasure. That itself can feel relaxing and a relief to your nervous system.
Then slowly unwrap the chocolate, listening attentively to the sounds the paper makes as it crackles open, feeling its texture in your fingers, watching it unfold and beginning to sense any scents that come up from the chocolate as it is unwrapped.
Be luxuriously unhurried with this opening and revealing. Be aware of any emotion, visualisations, sensations in your physical body and memories that arise as you unwrap it.
Then lift it to your nose and reach inwards and outwards with your sense of smell to experience the full scent of chocolate. Be aware of your sense of vision, smell and hearing awakening, opening and expanding when you give them all your attention.
Now take a small bite from the chocolate and hold it on your tongue. Don’t chew it yet. Let it melt in your mouth for a few moments, feel it and taste it as it spreads around your mouth. Savour the melting and the spreading for as long as you feel you want to before you chew and then swallow. Allow yourself to feel fully everything awakening in your body and your mind – your pleasure centres, taste receptors, the readiness of your intelligent digestive system as you salivate, the feeling of your throat receiving the chocolate as it moves down inside you. Savour the swallowing.
Eat the whole chocolate this way and notice the rhythms of the experience within you moment by moment.
When the chocolate is finished, rest there in the afterglow. You will find the taste, the texture, the feelings of eating the chocolate remain with you long after the actual chocolate has gone and you rest in pleasure, enjoying all the awakened energies inside you, body sensations, feelings in your heart, thoughts, dreaming, memories. Pause in pleasure here, with curiosity and wonder, for as long as you like.
This meditation is of course about much more than chocolate. It is about savouring and cherishing all of our instincts and about savouring and cherishing all the flavours of life. Savouring the feelings of anticipation before you even unwrap the chocolate is “pausing on the threshold”, a practice in life which is very rewarding and very conducive to nervous system repair and balance. Paying attention to all thoughts and feelings as they arise is king in the practice of meditation – that way we learn to know, understand and tend to ourselves and all of our needs and most cherished desires. “Savouring the afterglow” is about “infusing” and processing an experience. We know that nothing is truly over – that the cells in our bodies hold every memory, experience, thought and feeling. This is true of every exciting, pleasurable, life-affirming, surprising, hilarious, joyful, poignant, tender, loving moment or experience you have ever had. When you have an experience that lights you up, take time with it and in its afterglow (reflecting on it, journaling about it, meditating with it) as if bathing in essential oils. By calling into the sacred, infinitely tender glow of your awareness, the full range of your senses, emotions and bodily sensations, you can be filled with and nourished by life itself.
Some Experiences reported by “chocolate meditators”
“I often eat several chocolates in a row without really noticing them. This way, one chocolate is enough, more than enough. I was totally fulfilled and satisfied by it.”
“I could still taste the chocolate, even hours later.”
“I had a memory from childhood, when crinkle cut potato chips first came out, of eating them that way – taking tiny nibbles with my front teeth – being so excited about this new taste and texture and wanting to make every part of it last.”
“It made me think of that scene from Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory where Charlie unwraps his first bar of Wonka chocolate…that scene always gives me goosebumps.”
“I went to other places for a while. I actually went to Mars for part of that.”
“I was amazed at how long something that wonderful could last and how deeply I could take it in.”
“I can’t believe how much I experienced inside myself just by eating chocolate.”
“I feel refreshed and invigorated.”
“Tt really made me think about how I rush through everything in life and in doing that, don’t really enjoy it as much as I could.”
“If I sipped wine like that, I am sure I would drink less and this would be good for me.”
“I imagined I was drinking a top shelf shiraz. I poured the glass and when I offered it to my nose to smell, my nose actually tingled! I really do feel like I have had a delicious glass of wine.”
