A Pizza Meditation

Mmm pizza. Ahhhh, meditation. Is it a coincidence that the meditative sound of AUM is so similar to the pizza eating “nom nom nom”, I ask you? Definitely not! Can adding these two things together make each of them easier to digest? Can it help you with stress and anxiety? Can it even help you to lose weight? The answers are, of course, yes. And they revolve around ‘non-attachment’ and mindful eating.

Attachment is the origin, the root of suffering; hence it is the cause of suffering.

- The Dalai Lama

 

Pizza anxiety

I try to follow the 80/20 principle of eating very well 80% of the time and allowing the reigns to loosen 20% of the time, with a pizza or burger each week. When eating something like pizza, I notice that after getting halfway through, I start to worry. I get anxious that soon the pizza will be gone. There will be no more pizza for another week or so. This is where my mindfulness practice kicks in. I note my attachment to pleasure and then I let go of it. I let go of the fear that in the very near future, my plate will be empty. I then bring myself back to the moment and continue to enjoy said pizza. My anxiety about a potential future is robbing me of my present moment pleasure.

Mindfulness meditation is simply about bringing yourself back to a point of focus. Usually, you would do this with your eyes closed, without distraction and you would be bringing your attention back to the breath each time your mind wanders. But the pizza meditation is mindfulness in real life. Instead of your point of attention being your breath, it is your pizza.

Let it go

I mentioned in my last post that I have come to agree with the idea that happiness is not the fulfilment of desire but the freedom from desires. This is a very wise and ancient Buddhist concept (not a Disney one). It is about letting it go. While I may not be one with the wind and sky yet, I am getting better at understanding non-attachment.

Ritualistic pizza destruction

If you have seen “7 Years in Tibet” or “House of Cards” season 3 episode 7  you will be familiar with the idea of a sand mandala. This is a Tibetan Buddhist practice of creating a beautiful image out of coloured sand and then ritualistically destroying it. The purpose of this is to be reminded of the transient nature of material. Nothing lasts forever, so don’t get too attached to it. My pizza is my sand mandala.

Mindful eating

Mindful eating is actually becoming quite a popular concept. At edgy tech companies in Silicon Valley, they hold mindful eating lunches where staff are taught how to savour their meals. They will try to be present for every aspect of their food. They will look at the colours on their plates. They will smell the food before they place it in their mouths. They will chew their food and notice not just the taste, but also the textures and even the sounds that the chewing makes.

Meditation for fat loss

The benefits of mindful eating are not just mental. Chewing your food for longer helps with digestion. Slowing down the eating process allows time for your stomach to signal to your brain that it is satisfied and to start producing the fullness hormone, leptin. Slowing down eating also means that the post-meal insulin spike will be lower. This helps the body store food inside of muscle cells rather than fat cells. Plus it lessens the post-prandial crash, aka food coma.

This guy knows.

So, not only does your pizza meditation help you to enjoy your food but it will also contribute to better weight management and increased energy. As with so many things about our health, they are holistic. I.e. food contributes to your mood, your weight and your energy.

Are you aware of how much stress may be interfering with your weight?

When you are stressed you are more likely to overeat. When you are stressed your body releases cortisol.

High cortisol levels contribute to fat storage, especially around the waist.

What can you do about this?

How about adding a pinch of gratitude to your meal?

It is physiologically impossible to feel anxious when you are being grateful.  When you are being grateful the threatening messages from the brain’s fear centre, the amygdala, are cut off. Plus the anxious signals from the brain-stem do not function. Be grateful for all the people, plants and animals that have contributed to bringing the food to your plate. From the farmer who grew it, to the pilot who has flown it from Argentina to the chef who washed and prepared it for you.

Do try this at home

Give it a try for your next meal. Chew your food around 30 times per mouthful. Put your knife & fork down between mouthfuls. Listen to the difference in the crunch between a piece of celery and a tomato. Smell the food before you shove it down your gob. Notice the colours. Say thank you and enjoy it without getting attached to it. Each time your attention wanders, gently bring it back to your food.

Floatopia

 

Surely you know what floating is by now? Everyone has been doing it. From John Lennon, who credited it with weaning him off of heroin, to Wayne Rooney using it to recover from injury. Floating is mainstream now so I thought I had better give it a go. And when I give things a go, I dive in head-first, although that would be pretty dangerous in a float tank. So I committed to floating 3 hours per week for 2 months at The Floatworks in Vauxhall to see if it would make me any more enlightened. Which, would be pretty darn enlightened. (I rank enlightenment by how big one’s topknot is).

Famous Floaters

What is floating?

For the uninformed, floating, aka isolation tanks, aka sensory deprivation tanks are a form of therapy where you lie in a pool of water, about 1 foot deep, usually for an hour, without getting out. The water is filled with so much Epsom Salt that you remain buoyant and weightless, like if you were in the Dead Sea. The water is set to your body temperature so you don’t notice hot or cold. The pod is pitch black so there is no light and you wear ear plugs to keep the water and sound out of your ears. Hence, sensory deprivation.

 

Intentions

The first few floats were very challenging as I was still trying to control my thoughts. My intention was to go into the tank with some questions for myself and come out with answers. Big questions, like ‘what is my purpose in life’, ‘how can I be less selfish’, ‘what is god’ and ‘is our civilisation going to collapse’? My mind wasn’t up for that though. He wanted to run its usual cycle of planning, then food, then self-help activities then things to buy and back around again. He just wanted to keep running on that hamster wheel, around and around, while getting nowhere. I had a really uncomfortable premonition that if my thoughts were to stop, the walls of my mind would close in on me like the garbage compactor Luke and Han get trapped in on the Death Star.

 

Back in the womb

What happens to you when everything that occupies your life is taken away? It would probably be the first time since you were in the womb that you had no stimulus to be occupied with. You have nothing to distract you from yourself. This could be a chilling idea to some. When I first encountered it, I was introduced to my holes. These are the holes that A.H. Almas writes about. The empty parts of me, where I have lost contact with my essence. My holes are usually filled with work, with productivity, social media, food and relationships. Once these are stripped away, I am left with the void, an expanse of nothingness. I am confronted with lack. And it is really scary! Almaas suggests that the way to deal with our holes is not to fill them, but to become comfortable with them. To face them, look into them and allow them to be. This is what I try to do in the tank but I ain’t going to fix it all in a 1-hour float.

 

To combat the feeling of holes, my hamster-wheel brain would go into overdrive. Thinking even more furiously to avoid the discomfort of these holes. But eventually, my hamster would run out of steam. Momentarily, I would experience peace. I would experience a quiet mind. It was lovely. It was blissful. Then, the thinking mind would shove his big butt back in and start the wheel back up again. This was frustrating and I would find myself longing for the time to be over so I could get back to cramming my holes full of doing.

 

As I became more accustomed to floating, I developed tools to combat my thinking mind’s misbehaviour. When it invaded my thoughts with a suggestion to get out early, instead of indulging this disobedient child, I would curiously enquire as to why it felt discomfort. Just the simple act of asking the mind what was wrong was enough to placate it and ease its discomfort. This is very similar to what people experience with mindfulness meditation; the discomfort and urge to quit.

 

The amygdala switch

After around three floats, your mind gets used to the unusual environment and it allows your amygdala to switch off. This is the part of the brain that’s responsible for emotions and cortisol release. This post-float shut down has actually been shown to decrease anxiety more effectively than medication. The more you float, the more you benefit.

 

The way I have been writing about my mind may have you thinking that all that time alone has given me some sort of schizophrenic disorder. And if you are thinking that, my mind told me to tell you to shut up!  ‘The Untethered Soul’ by Michael A. Singer explains what I mean beautifully. You will come to see that you are not your thoughts, but really, you are the one who witnesses the thoughts. Have you ever had a really nasty thought that you felt ashamed of? (I hope so, or this analogy is going to make me look really bad.)

For example, you get that momentary urge to push an old lady into a swimming pool or pull someone’s chair out from under them as they are about to sit down. Nasty things. Then you judge yourself as horrible. Now that I have seen this separation between me and my thoughts I am able to just laugh at my mind when it says things like that. I know that it is not really me, and knowing that, I don’t feel the need to judge myself.

 

What are you doing here?

I want to know myself. I want to know what my purpose in life is. I want to get in touch with my higher self, the one who knows what is best for me, and I can only do this when my mind frees itself from distraction. These are the questions I want answers to. As your brain moves from producing high-alertness alpha waves down to theta waves, you are able to be in a more creative and present state. This is actually the boundary between the conscious and unconscious mind. The slowing down of brain waves is one of the scientifically backed benefits of floatation therapy.

 

With these slower brain waves, the realisations I get in the tank are profound. In my life, I chase discomfort, as I know that this is the fire that fuels my development. Recently,  I made a conscious decision to stop wasting money on things that make my life more comfortable and spend it on things that enable me to tolerate more discomfort. I want to be free from my wants. In the tank, I come to realise that happiness is not the satisfaction of my desires, it is freedom from desire. I want to not want. That’s a difficult one to get your head around. But it is something that Buddha realised a long time ago.
 

A safe place

(To steal a line from Jack Dee,) being an adult isn’t as much fun as I thought it would be when I was a kid. Yes, you get to run with scissors but the novelty wears off. Being an adult, especially an adult male, means I think that crying is a sign of weakness. During my months of floating, I had something very difficult and life-changing to deal with that hurt immensely. Giving myself a private little cave to cry in was so relieving. Usually, a feeling would arise and I would distract myself with doing, or TV or IG.

When we don’t feel our feelings they get buried in our subconscious and reappear in the forms of addictions, OCD, anxiety, anger or depression. In the tank, you can’t escape your emotions. You feel them and let them do their much-needed work. After crying my little eyes out I felt so peaceful. It was bliss.

At the start of the floating month, I would be trying to clock watch with no access to an actual clock. By the end, I felt cocooned in the lovely warm water. I wouldn’t want to get out because of the freedom to feel it gave me.

The big one  - 2:30hrs in the tank

I stepped up from 1 hour in the tank to more than double that after a month. 1 hour had become quite easy and you know how I feel about comfort. Before I went into the tank for that 1st double session I noticed that I was trying to delay the start by chatting with the staff or stretching. It made me laugh to see how afraid I was of simply spending time with myself. For those who have actually spent 2:30hours in my company, I’m not that bad, am I?!

 

As you will see from the image of my heart rate, in the 2nd hour my heart rate became even lower with much fewer spikes and much more consistency.

The Transformation Rating chart below shows that Floating gets a great score. It really does get easier after 3 sessions and has become a valuable tool in my battle against modern city living. In my month I have discovered what I want in life (not to want!), I have been able to feel my emotions in a healthier way and I have started to befriend my ‘holes’. I think the most valuable thing I gained is the ability to search for answers inside of myself and feel guidance from a part of me that I could not access before. 

 

If you want to give it a try you can use the promo code FLOATBLAKE which gets you 15% off the Single Float and 5 Float Experience. 

https://floatworks.com/

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