Jan Chozen Bays

Jan Chozen Bays

JAN CHOZEN BAYS, MD, is an ordained Zen teacher and a pediatrician who specializes in the evaluation of children for abuse and neglect. She has trained in Zen for forty-five years with Roshis Taizan Maezumi and Shodo Harada. With her husband she serves as co-abbot of Great Vow Zen Monastery, a residential center for intensive Zen training in Oregon.

Jan Chozen Bays

JAN CHOZEN BAYS, MD, is an ordained Zen teacher and a pediatrician who specializes in the evaluation of children for abuse and neglect. She has trained in Zen for forty-five years with Roshis Taizan Maezumi and Shodo Harada. With her husband she serves as co-abbot of Great Vow Zen Monastery, a residential center for intensive Zen training in Oregon.

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GUIDES

Yvonne Rand: A Profile of a Life of Zen

A Remembrance of Yvonne Rand

Yvonne Rand, a leading teacher and figure in Zen Buddhism in the US, passed away on August 19, 2020.

While not the author of any books, her writing appears in several books including:
A White Tea Bowl: 100 Haiku from 100 Years of Life which includes a piece by Yvonne about Shunryu Suzuki-roshi's wife, Mitsu Suzuki which appears in the later's book of Haiku, 
Buddhism Through American Womens' Eyes includes an essay by  her on abortion.
 
Yvonne also appears in several other books including:
 
We at Shambhala Publications are full of appreciation to Yvonne for her immense contribution, unwavering dedication, and a life well-lived.

The following profile of  is an excerpt from Meetings with Remarkable Buddhist Women by Lenore Friedman


Yvonne Rand from cuke.com

Yvonne Rand (image credit: Cuke.com)

For twenty years, ever since she met Shunryo Suzuki-roshi in 1966 and became Zen Center secretary four months later, Yvonne Rand has been intimately involved with the San Francisco Zen Center. She has held virtually every administrative office one can hold there, as well as working closely with Suzuki-roshi in a hundred ways for the rest of his life. Most recently she has lived and worked at Zen Center's facility in Marin County, Green Gulch Farm. Yvonne is an articulate, forthright, down-to-earth woman with whom it is invigorating to talk.

Shunryu SuzukiAmong her most important teachers, she told me, have been a series of older, ill, and dying people-both ordinary and extraordinary- with whom she's worked closely over the past fifteen years. The first was Suzuki-roshi, who died in 1971. Two years ago it was Lama Govinda, the renowned author and scholar of Tibetan Buddhism. Before he died, he said to her: "Be willing to give up all the forms we've been accustomed to following, and go back to the original teachings of the Buddha." Yvonne was struck by this advice and it has guided her ever since. As a result, she has been incorporating into her own practice and teaching a variety of methods originating not only from Zen, but from the vipassana and Tibetan traditions as well.

For her personally, two of the most important have been the practices of breath-walking and of the "half-smile," each of which she learned from the gentle Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. "Learn to walk as a Buddha walks, to smile as a Buddha smiles," he says. "You can do it. Why wait until you become a Buddha? Be a Buddha right now, at this very moment!" Yvonne now practices the half-smile at stoplights and in grocery lines. Having breath-oriented practices that can be done for one to three breaths in the midst of activity has helped her experience a connectedness between the states of mind that arise in formal meditation and those arising in everyday life.

Other practices, especially with the precepts ( or rules for conduct), have been useful in examining deeper levels of herself, levels beyond action and language and thought. Layers of resistance and denial had to be plumbed, but now she experiences a much wider range of connection with other people. A vipassana forgiveness meditation, for example, has been useful in working with her "fierce, judging voice"-that voice so peculiar to American and Western minds, which Yvonne perceives as a wall or hindrance to being awake.

The precepts are "absolutely necessary ground" for her. "I can't be calm if my behavior is 'off.' " Sometimes she will use one precept as a mantra. Or she will hold, in the background of her mind, the image of a sieve, each of whose wires are the precept, through which she passes everything she does or thinks or says during the day. This ''creates a grid-large holes or smalldepending on the gross or subtle material which I intend to pass through it." This image came out of her working in her garden and noticing how different gradations of sieves determine the soil one can make. Images have more liveliness, she believes, if they come out of concrete experience.

Yvonne respects the way "practice grabs us. One of the precepts often jumps off the page at me, from an intuitive, barely conscious awareness of exactly where an 'edge' is at any moment." For instance, the precept about not stealing, or not taking what is not given (a translation Yvonne prefers), has expanded for her into an acceptance of things-as-they-are, which has been "very, very powerful." She says the precept acts like a rope along a pathway, and has allowed her to move through and be done with old patterns more effectively than any other single practice she has done up to now.

With its constant reminders of impermanence, she says, Buddhism helps us cultivate nonpossessiveness toward everything, including our personalities, or ''who it is we think we are."

Mindfulness practice, with its emphasis on being awake to whatever arises, teaches us to relate to our "stickiness and corruptibility" as grist for the mill. Aversion is an obstacle to seeing things as they are. Seeing leads to the possibility of transformation. "We're all corruptible," she says. But the degree to which we know our capacity for corruptibility ( that is, the roles and masks we wear that cause disharmony or harm to ourselves and others) is the degree to which we don't act on it.

The Teacup and the Skullcup

There is a Tibetan practice called the "inner offering" that Yvonne finds very useful here. Imagine, she said, a bowl carved out of a human skull. ( She recently brought one back from India.) Fill it with whatever stands for the "dark side" in you: blood, bones, shit, instruments of mayhem and torture, whiskey, demons. With a chopper, chop it all into tiny bits until it is transformed into nectar-which then can be an offering. In the same way we can chop up our corruptibility and transform it into an offering, says Yvonne.

Working with these different approaches from other schools of Buddhism has brought her back, refreshed, to traditional Zen practice. She is now interested in reexamining some of its formal aspects, such as dokusan and certain rituals in the zendo. She asks penetrating questions about power, authority, dependency, and relationships within the community of practitioners. How can we cultivate interdependence while, for example, we are doing retreats and giving lectures?

"Over and over, in meditation centers all over the U.S., issues of authority and projection are coming up. In our understanding of the Zen tradition as coming from Japan, we include robes from Tang-dynasty China, shaved heads, formality in meeting, hierarchy in the authority structure, and a tradition which, in its ideal form, includes long periods of living a daily monastic life with one's teacher. If I give a lecture in my traditional robes, I can feel an increase in the degree of authority which the people listening to my lecture attribute to me. They edge toward accepting what I say as true, without really examining and questioning it. Subtle changes, but they go deep, begetting a kind of handing-oneself-over. This is sometimes useful in one's learning process, but it is also dangerous to student and to teacher alike if not really conscious and within clear boundaries.

"Each of us needs to be in a feedback system. Without that we can fool ourselves about what we are actually doing to ourselves and to others. I find a deep resonance with the Buddhist tradition of being a spiritual friend. I can be on the path with another and offer what I have found in my practice. If my experience can be helpful to another, that is great. And if it is not useful or helpful, that is all right too. We can, in any event, walk this path together." Some very specific, bold, and concrete questions have been surfacing. For example, Yvonne wants to know, "How do those of us in teaching positions get others to shed light on our shadow side so that we ourselves can see it?" She's been encouraging students to do this recently, but that's not enough, she feels. It needs to be done with peers as well. "We need to hear what our peers have to say, no matter how discomfiting." One suggestion she makes is for weekly peer consultation groups for people at Zen Center who conduct practice interviews with students. What, she wonders, would constitute an environment safe enough for looking at our shadow side? The group would have to be small, but not too small ( five people would be the perfect size, she believes). There would have to be agreements about process-for example, a commitment to self-revealing and real contact with each other, a shared interest in each other's development, a willingness to attend each other's lectures and interviews and to share critiques: in other words, a totally open process that would be revolutionary in most traditional Zen settings, and certainly at Zen Center.

Yvonne's teaching activities at present include Sunday lectures at Green Gulch once every four or five weeks; leading a day of mindfulness once a month (including zazen, breath-walking, half-smile, and simple physical work); periodic workshops and weekend retreats on Zen and mindfulness practice at Green Gulch and elsewhere; retreats on death and dying, and workshops using pain as a teacher; and profession-specific retreats for people in the helping professions, lawyers, nurses, and doctors. She is primarily interested in working with "householders"-lay people practicing in ordinary life.

Since she was a child Yvonne has felt a special affinity for adolescents and old people, when "developmentally things are up for grabs, challenging and yeasty," and she wants to continue working with these age groups. In the future she also wants to work with people in mainstream work situations, giving longer, more intensive retreats in business and industrial settings. She says she wants to explore "visible versus invisible practice," and her trajectory seems to be to extend herself farther and farther into the ordinary world from the intentional community that has been her base for twenty years.

Yvonne is also profiled in Jan Chozen Bays' Jizo Bodhisattva

Jizo Bodhisattva

$29.95 - Paperback

By: Jan Chozen Bays

In response to my "updating" questions, Yvonne Rand wrote me the following letter, which I have lightly edited:

Tara Tulku

Dear Lenore,
You ask me where is my life right now? Where is my practice? "My home path continues to be Soto Zen, with significant amplifications from the stream of the Elders and the heartcentered practices of Himalayan Buddhism. Beginning in the winter of 1985-86, I was fortunate to meet and begin studying with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Venerable Tara Tulku, then the abbot of the Tibetan monastery in Bodh Gaya, India. Over the years, until Tara Tulku died, I was able to study closely with him and, most important, to study him and his life. I learned more than I probably yet know from his great and deep mind and heart and especially from his continuous expression of boundless compassion. He supported me in staying with my home path in a way that now seems remarkable. He took interest in teaching me about how and what to teach. And with him, I had a taste of what a truly androgynous person looks and feels like.

I have been teaching at Redwood Creek Dharma Center in Marin County since the late eighties. Our center is small and eccentric, set in the midst of a beautiful garden with places to meditate both outdoors and in. Developing this center has given me a chance to express my artistic inclinations to create a place filled with beauty and fun. The situation has grown slowly and organically and is small enough so that I can know the people I practice with quite well.

I also have the great good fortune to be studying with a Zen teacher who is a real yogi, Shodo Harada, Roshi, from Sogenji Temple in Japan.

Since the early nineties, I have met regularly with a number of teachers from various Buddhist schools and traditions. The contact and friendship that have grown out of these meetings help me keep an eye on my own capacity for self-deception and other pitfalls that lie in wait for anyone occupying a teaching seat. I value the company and feedback from colleagues and friends willing to speak up when they notice something I might need and want to notice myself. We discuss our teaching lives and give each other suggestions and inspiration.

In the fall of 1997, I was diagnosed with a cancer and subsequently had surgery. The entire journey from diagnosis through recovery was a great teaching and a chance to go deeply into breath practice of the most ancient and reliable sort. I found affirmation that dharma practice is exactly the resource I have always known it to be. The challenge of this time was learning to receive help, to be helpless with grace, and to taste the extraordinary experience of being prayed for.

I am now old enough for the teachings on impermanence to have become more than theoretical ( as though they were ever other than what is so). My mother died last year, in her nineties, after a long and unhappy life. Despite all the experiences I have had being with people as they die, I found her passing remarkable and difficult.

Today, I lead retreats, both long and short, give dharma talks fairly often, enjoy working both individually and in groups with all sorts of people, cultivating an authentic spiritual life. I continue to lead a ceremony for children who have died through abortion, miscarriage, and sudden infant death. I do this ceremony once a season and find that more and more people, as they hear about it, respond to the container it can provide for the grief and suffering that otherwise may linger unresolved for years.

In the past several years, I have been invited to teach in situations that are not identified as Buddhist and have found the forays into the larger American secular world quite stimulating. A long-standing interest for me has been to find ways of talking about the Buddha dharma in language and with images that arise out of our own cultural context and to find ways to make Buddhism accessible to people in the mainstream. I am currently writing a book on right speech. I find writing as another form of teaching quite enjoyable, and at the same time, the process of writing is teaching me.

Recently, I have been exploring how to live a life that is less busy and less scheduled and has, consequently, more opportunity for spontaneity. The long time I had for recovering from surgery taught me a lot about the high price we Americans pay for our dense and busy lives. I have worked all of my life since I was thirteen years old. This is the first time I have truly 'just stopped' for an extended period of time. I notice a vast difference in my life, inner and outer. For example:

I am meeting individually with a rather small number of students these days, and I notice that with few appointments, I have large blocks of time that I can now spend writing or studying or working in the garden. I have time to sit in the morning sun or to watch the birds. I experience creative energy arising often and in ways that leave me surprised and delighted. For years, I have aimed to do more of less. Now I am beginning actually to get the taste of what this way of living feels like. There is an enriching of the day's experiences that seems to come without any special bidding or expectation on my part.

And my teaching is different, goes deeper, as a result. There is a price to pay for this shift, but I think a simpler lifestyle is exactly what is needed to cultivate the heart/mind deeply. And I like it. In addition to writing, I am drawn back to my old friends, clay and stone. I do not know what will become of this shift toward quietness, but I do know I am very much enjoying my life now."

Meetings with Remarkable Women

$34.95 - Paperback

By: Lenore Friedman

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Three Practices for Eating | An Excerpt from Mindful Eating on the Go

Bettering Our Relationship with Food

Mindful Eating on the Go

Trying a New Fruit

The Exercise

Find a fruit you have never eaten. An Asian food market is a good place to look. Star fruit, lychee, kiwano, rambutan, papaya, custard apple, mangosteen, and dragon fruit are some possibilities. At a Mexican market look for mamey, guanabana, sapote, chico, or pitahaya. Ask to make sure they are ripe.

Sit down with the new fruit and investigate it with all your senses, using the Nine Hungers as a guide. (This is a great way to introduce mindful eating and the nine aspects of hunger to children.) Take it in with your eyes, like a piece of sculpture. For each hunger, ask, “What do I notice? How would I describe this to someone else?” Next, cut it open. What do you see? Smell it. Touch the outer skin and inner fruit. Take a piece in your mouth and roll it around a bit so you can distinguish the flavors. Put full attention in your mouth as you chew and swallow. Does your mouth want more? Now ask your stomach if it wants more. Ask your cells or organs if they like this fruit. Ask your mind if it wants you to try more. Why or why not? Ask your heart if it finds this fruit soothing or comforting.

Reminding Yourself

Put “new fruit” on your shopping list. Or post on your social media a photo of fruit and your experience with eating it mindfully.

Discoveries

If you lived one thousand years ago, you would have no scientific equipment to analyze the nutritional content of a potential food. You would have only the experience of your sense organs and the experience of others. (“Don’t eat that fruit. It made Joe sick and die.”) If you buy a strange fruit or vegetable in a modern market, you have the assurance that many people have tried it, liked it, and survived, and that there is even a demand for it.

I suggested an unknown fruit because humans are born with a liking for sweet foods. Also, you can eat a fruit raw. You could also try this exercise with unknown vegetables such as kohlrabi, chayote squash, oca tubers, tamarillo, or romanesco, but you will need to find out how to prepare and cook them (something easily done on the internet).

When I try this exercise with children, some are courageous and eager to investigate. “Oh, cool! This is going to be fun!” And some are timid or resistant. “It looks yucky. I’m not going to taste it.” When they see another child try a bite and enjoy it, however, they may join in. We have those same voices inside our adult heads too. We can all fall into the safe habit of eating the same thing over and over.

We think we have certain innate food preferences, but the only inborn preferences are a liking for sweet and an aversion toward bitter flavors. We are conditioned to like certain foods. This begins with what our mothers ate before we were born. Amniotic fluid takes on the flavor of foods the mother eats, so what mother eats, baby tastes. If mothers eat particular foods or spices, such as garlic, their babies will prefer those foods and flavors after they are born. As the food writer and author Bee Wilson said in a 2016 episode of Fresh Air, “Imagine swimming around in that [garlicy amniotic fluid] for nine months. That baby will grow up to love garlic . . . It feels like home, it tastes like home.”

The same is true of breast milk. In one study, when mothers drank carrot juice in the last weeks before giving birth or when breastfeeding, their infants later more readily accepted and showed more enjoyment of carrot-flavored cereal than infants who were not exposed to carrot flavor in their amniotic fluid or breast milk. Perhaps forever after, carrots will taste like love.

Deeper Lessons

Our attitude toward eating a new fruit can reveal something about our attitude toward life. Buddhists divide people into three categories, based upon the “three poisons”: greed, anger, and ignorance. These three, if allowed to run unchecked, can poison our experience of life and bring much suffering to us and those around us.

A person who is a “greed” or desire type loves novelty, variety, and new experiences. They might be excited about the opportunity to try an unknown fruit. However, the downside is that they are easily bored and can feel restless and unhappy if the menu of life is not always bringing new “tastes.” The positive side of greed is a strong desire to learn.

A person who is an “anger” type is averse to change and novelty. They might be cautious about trying an unknown fruit. They often react to new ideas or suggestions with, “Yes, but . . . ” or with a reason why it won’t work. The downside is that they make decisions according to what is the least aversive alternative rather than for positive reasons, and can become depressed, with a constricted life. The positive side of aversion is appropriate caution in the face of something new.

A person who is an “ignorance” type reacts to new situations with indifference, apathy, or dissociation, saying, “Whatever . . .” or “I can’t be bothered to try.” They might choose to remain uninvolved in the exercise of trying a new food. The downside is that they miss out on new experiences and, most important, they can miss out on the experience of being present for their life—the difficulties, lessons, and joys of a unique human life. The positive side of ignorance is “beginner’s mind” and the willingness to not know.

Once at the monastery I presented this typology of personality types. One person said, “That is so interesting, I’d like to read more about it.” The next person said, “I don't agree with that at all.” I asked someone who was silent what she thought, and she said, “Huh? Oh, I didn’t really pay attention to what you were saying.” Everyone else laughed.

Each type has its own basic strategy for being safe, successful, and loved in life. All of us have aspects of all three, but can you tell—even from your eating habits—which type sounds like you? Do you crave new tastes and eating experiences? Are you averse to many or new foods? Do you check out while eating and retreat into thoughts about past and future or fantasies? Would you like to change or expand your strategy?

Final Words

Our attitude toward new foods can reveal our underlying strategies for life. Awareness of our own strategies brings choice, and choice brings freedom, including the choice to be compassionate toward other people who are also boxed in by old strategies.

Our attitude toward eating a new fruit can reveal something about our attitude toward life.

Eating with the Non-Dominant Hand

The Exercise

For one week try eating at least part of each meal with your non-dominant hand. You can expand this to include all drinks and more meals each day. If you’re up for a big challenge, try using the non-dominant hand to eat with chopsticks.

Reminding Yourself

Put a picture of a hand with an X through it in your lunch box or near where you usually eat. Or put a Band-Aid on your dominant hand or a rubber band around your wrist to remind you to switch to using your non-dominant hand. You could also place a sign where you eat that says “left hand” (if you are right-handed). Or use an unusual color of nail polish on your non-dominant hand, to signal, “use me!”

Discoveries

This experiment always evokes laughter. We discover that the non-dominant hand is quite clumsy.

This exercise takes us back to what Zen teachers call “beginner’s mind.” Our dominant hand might be forty years old, but the non-dominant hand feels much younger, perhaps about two or three years old. We have to learn all over again how to hold a fork and how to get it into our mouths without stabbing ourselves. We might begin to eat with the non-dominant hand, and then, when our attention wanders, our dominant hand will reach out and take the fork away. It’s just like a bossy older sister who says, “Hey, you little klutz, let me do it for you!”

You can have more fun if you use your non-dominant hand for other everyday tasks such as brushing your teeth or hair, opening doors, writing, or cutting with scissors. You can also try switching the usual roles that each hand plays when they work together. Have the non-dominant hand wield the hammer and do the pounding while the dominant hand holds a nail, or reverse the hands while stirring a pot of food or washing dishes. I’ve discovered that my right hand is skilled in fine motor movements, but my left hand is the less intelligent “strong woman” who can better hold a baby on my hip or steady the cheese grater while the right hand grates the cheese.

Struggling to use the non-dominant hand can awaken our compassion for anyone who is clumsy or unskilled, such as a person who has had disabilities, injuries, or a stroke. We see briefly how we take for granted scores of simple movements that many people cannot make.

Researchers speculate that one reason that obesity is less common in countries like Japan is that when you eat with chopsticks, you must take small bites. Using chopsticks with the non-dominant hand is a humbling experience. If you want to eat a meal in under an hour and not end up spilling food all over, you have to be very attentive.

Deeper Lessons

Using the non-dominant hand reveals our impatience. Isn’t it interesting that we become impatient with eating, one of the most pleasurable activities we humans engage in? Why are we anxious to get it over with quickly? It’s self-defeating!

If each person has one major lesson for each lifetime, mine would be impatience. I’ve investigated impatience by asking, impatient to get to what? I’m impatient to finish breakfast so I can do what? E-mails. I’m impatient to finish e-mails so I can get to . . . working on this book . . . finishing a ceramic statue . . . eating lunch . . . lying down for a nap. . . . If I continue to carry this forward I discover that I’m impatient to eventually get to what . . . my death?! That realization jolts me back into a more vivid experience and enjoyment of this moment of life, a life I am not at all impatient to leave.

If you step back and simply observe how your two hands work together as a team in routine tasks such as eating or washing dishes, you will see that they work together beautifully, quietly and continually caring for you. If everyone in the world worked together in this way, aiding and supporting one another as they cared for the life of this earth, the world would be an entirely different place.

Using the non-dominant hand can help us become more flexible and discover that we are never too old to learn new tricks. If we practice frequently, over time we can watch our skill develop. I have been practicing using my left hand for several years, and I now forget which hand is the “right” hand to use. This could have practical benefits. If I lose the use of my dominant hand, as a number of my relatives did after strokes, I won’t be “left” helpless. When we develop a new skill, we realize that there are many other abilities lying dormant within us.

Final Words

Simply using your non-dominant hand can invoke beginner’s mind and open a world of interesting discoveries.

Isn’t it interesting that we become impatient with eating, one of the most pleasurable activities we humans engage in?

One Bite at a Time, or Put Down That Utensil!

The Exercise

This is a mindfulness practice to do whenever you are eating. After you take a bite, put the fork or spoon back down in the bowl or on the plate. Place your awareness in your mouth until that one bite has been enjoyed and swallowed. Only then do you pick up the utensil and take another bite. If you are eating with your hands, put the sandwich or apple or cookie down between bites.

Reminding Yourself

Post notes saying “one bite at a time” wherever you eat, or an icon of a spoon or fork with words Put it down!

Discoveries

This is one of the most challenging of all the mindful eating practices we do at our monastery. In attempting this exercise, most people discover that they have the habit of “layering” bites of food. That is, they put one bite in the mouth, divert their attention away from the mouth as they shovel food onto the fork or spoon for the next bite, then put a second bite in the mouth before the first one is swallowed. Often the hand is hovering in the air, with another bite halfway to the mouth, as the preceding bite is chewed. They discover that as soon as the mind wanders, the hand assumes control again, putting new bites of food in along with partially processed bites. It is amazing how hard this simple task can be. It takes time, patience, persistence, and a sense of humor to change long-term habits.

Manufacturers of foodlike substances are well aware that we like the hit of intense flavor and texture sensations that occur as soon as we take the first bite of food. They are also aware that as soon as those sensations begin to fade, we will take another bite. And another. The more quickly the sensations disappear, the more of their product we will mindlessly consume. You can try this for yourself. Pick something like cheese puffs or a variety of potato chips that are coated with flavor dust. Put one in your mouth and let it sit there. You can roll it around with your tongue, but don’t chew it. What happens to the initial crispy texture and bright flavor? How long does it take for it to become uninteresting or even repulsive? What is your impulse when that happens?            

A nurse told me about a woman who was learning to chew her food well, one bite at a time, a necessity following her bariatric surgery. The woman was surprised at what a difference it made, how it enriched and expanded her experience of eating, and said, “If I’d learned this earlier, I wouldn’t have needed the surgery!”

Putting down your utensil between bites used to be part of good manners. It counteracts the tendency to wolf down our food. One person exclaimed after trying this task, “I just realized that I never chew my food! I swallow it almost whole, in my haste to get the next bite in.” She had to ask herself, “Why am I in such a rush to get through a meal, when I enjoy eating so much?”

Deeper Lessons

This is another exercise in which we become aware of impatience. Eating quickly, layering one bite on top of another, is a specific example of impatience. Doing this practice may lead you to watch impatience arise in other aspects and occasions in your life. Do you get impatient when you have to wait? We have to ask ourselves, “Why am I in such a rush to get through life, when I want to enjoy it so much?”

Experiencing one bite or one swallow at a time is a way of experiencing one moment at a time. Since we eat or drink at least three times a day, this mindfulness practice gives us several built-in opportunities to bring mindfulness into each day. Eating is naturally pleasurable, but when we eat quickly and without mindfulness, we don’t enjoy it. Research shows that people eat their favorite foods more quickly. Binge eaters also report that they keep on eating in a vain effort to re-create the pleasure of the first bite. Because the taste receptors tire quickly, this will never work. If we want the flavors in each bite to be clear, we need to pause a bit to refresh our taste buds.

When the mind is absent, thinking about the past or future, we are only half tasting our food. When our awareness rests in the mouth, when we are fully present as we eat, when we slow our eating, pausing between bites, then each bite can be like the first, rich and full of interesting sensations.

Final Words

Pursuing pleasure without mindfulness is like being caught on a treadmill. You eat more but enjoy it less. Mindfulness allows pleasure to bloom in thousands of small moments in your life.

Experiencing one bite or one swallow at a time is a way of experiencing one moment at a time.

Related Books

Mindful Eating on the Go

$12.95 - Paperback

By: Jan Chozen Bays

Mindful Eating

$16.95 - Paperback

By: Jan Chozen Bays

Mindfulness on the Go

$12.95 - Paperback

By: Jan Chozen Bays

Jan Chozen Bays, MD, is a Zen master in the White Plum lineage of the late master Taizan Maezumi Roshi. She serves as a priest and teacher at the Jizo Mountain–Great Vow Zen Monastery in Clatskanie, Oregon. She is also a pediatrician who specializes in the evaluation of children for abuse and neglect. Learn more about her books. 

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The Future of Religion: A Reader's Guide

In the world of religion, some things stay the same, while many are constantly adapting to meet our new world of the internet and cell phones, scientific discovery, increasing awareness of gender and race dynamics, multiculturalism, the numbers of people identifying their religion as “none” or “spiritual but not religious,” and so much more.

We have chosen a few books below that address these issues, each in its own way.

The Religion of Tomorrow

$34.95 - Paperback

By: Ken Wilber

"The religion of tomorrow, according to Ken Wilber, will not be one religion, but all religions guiding their respective constituents toward oneness with Ultimate Reality. This book is Ken Wilber’s comprehensive synthesis of all the elements that make for human development from the Big Bang through the course of material and biological evolution. The recent discoveries of science, especially in the areas of developmental psychology and historical criticism, as well as mystical experience, have enabled him to bring together contemporary science, the wisdom of the world religions, and an integral presentation of the human condition with all its potential. The endless complexities of the evolutionary process gives way to a sublime simplicity, culminating in the spiritual and integral evolution of the human person toward unity with That Which Is." —Thomas Keating, author of Open Mind, Open Heart

Buddhism beyond Gender

$29.95 - Paperback

By: Rita M. Gross

“Rita Gross offers readers an amazing example of a lifelong, ongoing commitment to feminist thinking and practice. Her visionary insistence that the path to ending patriarchal domination must lead us beyond gender is a revolutionary paradigm shift, one that can lead to greater freedom for everyone.”
—bell hooks

Integral Buddhism

$19.95 - Paperback

By: Ken Wilber

What might religion look like in the future? Using Buddhism to explore this question, Ken Wilber offers insights that are relevant to all of the great traditions. He shows that traditional Buddhist teachings suggest an ongoing evolution leading toward a more unified, holistic, and interconnected spirituality. Touching on all of the key turning points in the history of Buddhism, Wilber describes the ways in which the tradition has been open to the continuing expansion of its teachings, and he suggests possible paths toward an ever more Integral approach. This work is a precursor to and condensed version of Wilber’s The Religion of Tomorrow.

Mindfulness on the Go

$12.95 - Paperback

By: Jan Chozen Bays

If you’ve heard about the many benefits of mindfulness practice but think you don’t have time for it in your busy life, prepare to be proven delightfully wrong. Mindfulness is available every moment, including right now, as Zen teacher Jan Chozen Bays shows with these twenty-five mindfulness exercises that can be done anywhere. Use them to cultivate the gratitude and insight that come from paying attention with body, heart, and mind to life’s many small moments.

Hard to Be a Saint in the City

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It’s been said that Jack Kerouac made it cool to be a thinking person seeking a spiritual experience. And there is no doubt that the writers he knew and inspired—Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, and others—were thinkers seeking exactly that. In this re-claiming of their vision, Robert Inchausti explores the Beat canon to reveal that the movement was at heart a spiritual one. It’s about their shared perception of an existence in which the Divine reveals itself in the ordinary.

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The Phone Fad

Cell Phone

My phone is so close to me at all times it is like having a permanent pet. It is like a yo-yo. In my pocket, on the counter, atop the bed covers.

When did we decide we would all marry our devices, make the commitment “to have and to hold?” I’d like to think I am not attached. But I’m totally attached.

I have gotten into the practice, kind of an anthropological experiment, of watching the way other people behave with their devices. I slip around behind people and peer over their shoulder.

It is not just the way they crane their neck so far forward it seems like their head might snap off. It is not only the way they are absorbed by snap-shot photos of people at parties, pets sleeping, and pretty teeth. What really strikes me is how oblivious they are to me. The irony I’m sure is obvious. That in the age of constant contact, 10,000 connections and more, there is so much disconnect.

I watched a woman, like mid-fifties, FaceTiming her hubby back home. At least it seemed like her sweety because she started to ask about the kid’s bedtime and fixing the dishwasher. But the light from the window behind her bleached her screen in such a way that she couldn’t really see him. She could see only her own reflection mirrored on her screen.

There are times when I am in an airport and some businessman is talking to his associate on speakerphone. Going on and on about a deadline later that day. He doesn’t care a hoot that the warbled voice on speaker is loud enough for all around him to hear. Is that legal?

Our phones are just part of a fad, right? When our grandparents were kids there were no TVs. When I was a kid the phone was attached to the wall. Someday, probably fairly soon, the smartphones will be extinct. They will be interred in a massive smartphone graveyard.

In the meantime, the handheld device has become so habit-forming that all too often I find myself flipping open my lid and starting to press buttons when I have no idea where I am going.

The handheld device is a perfect replica for the habit mind. It gives us all the chance to indulge our habit mind anytime, anywhere.

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