One night, alone in my apartment in Prague, I sat on the floor with a stack of tortillas, hummus, and vegan cream cheese with a bar of chocolate all splayed out on the floor in front of me. I had a little picnic with myself right there on the floor.
That is something Brie would never do. Brie always cooks and prepares her food so mindfully, so spiritually. For her, eating and sharing a meal is a spiritual experience and a spiritual practice. She would never, or at least I have never seen her, just grab a tortilla and dip it into hummus. She would take the time to get out a plate, napkin and maybe even a place mat. She would get a knife out and spread the hummus evenly over the tortilla and maybe add some cheese and fried mushrooms.
But not me. I just grab whatever I can. For me, eating fast accesses an animalistic or primal self inside me. Tapping into my lizard brain is SO satisfying. I love not thinking about it, but just digging into my food without much thought. For me, it’s like I just want to be in my body and let my lizard brain take over. I want to forget my civilized self and embrace my primitive self. There is also something so satisfying about the fact that it’s not something I normally do in front of Brie—to stuff my face or eat on the floor.
When I’m around Brie I try to eat mindfully. I know that chewing with my mouth open bothers her, and I try not to talk with my mouth full either. We did a month of mindful eating while she was in Prague, which included some silent time at the beginning of each meal as well, not talking unless to comment on the food. It was wonderful. And yet, there I was that night, sitting on the floor and filled with the pleasure of eating fast.
Eating mindlessly is something I let myself do only one of the days of Brie's trip to Europe. It was the day on the train heading from Berlin and Prague when my tattoo infection was at its worst. I didn’t care. I ate all the chocolate, all the nuts, all the chips, and all the grapes in our little snack bag. I just needed to feel soothed and calm for a while. Brie could tell, saying to me as I devoured the snacks: “Sometimes we need chocolate to soothe ourselves, don’t we?”
That was the day I allowed us to watch Netflix together, something I normally don’t like to do, because it feels like we’re connecting with the screen but not with each other. But I needed it that day on the train; my arm on fire, itching and burning, orange pus leaking out. Throughout the train ride, we kept spare shirts cool with our drinking water and kept putting the soaked shirts on my arm like a bandage to calm the nerves and swelling and heat that was emanating off my skin.
When Brie isn’t around, I like to eat the way I “normally” do: fast and with abandon and with my mouth open. I actually get a ton of pleasure out of eating with my mouth open, partially because I think that it genuinely does make my food taste better (this is what Chinese people believe—that the air oxygenates the food to make it more flavorful and I think they’re right! Beer tasters would agree), and also because it just makes me feel more relaxed and in my own body and enjoying my own personal experience in and with my body.
This way of eating is totally normal for me. For me to re-train my eating habits that have been ingrained since childhood, this is definitely one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. There are lots of things in our brains that are plastic and can be re-trained. But I’ll tell you from personal experience that eating is something so primal, so closely connected to our mothers and our families that re-training myself how to eat is so hard-wired it really does feel like learning how to walk and talk all over again.
So there I was that night in Prague, heart aching and needing to be soothed, and all I needed in that moment was some chocolate, tortillas and hummus. And all I wanted in that moment was to eat it mindlessly. I wanted to just get lost in my phone and stuff my face. And so I did just that. And it felt amazing.
Being mindful and spiritual is great. But sometimes we just need to be animals and lose ourself in bodily pleasure. It's a combination of factors from purity culture to dieting culture, weight-loss mania and disordered body image. It's the way we were raised, and the way we live. It's not bad or good. It just is. What I want for my life is to be mindful of what I'm doing. If it means being mindful while I'm eating fast, then I'm okay with it. But it also means trying new things and new ways of being, and I'd like my entire life to be an experiment of doing and trying different things. And that is what the 30-Day Challenges are all about.
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