Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Rewire Your Relationship To Food | Brother Pháp Lưu

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

The science and dharma of mindful eating. How it can stop over eating—and how to actually make the habit.Brother Pháp Lưu is an ordained monk in the Plum Village tradition started by Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh. He’s worked with scientists at Dartmouth College and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health to develop research on the effect of Plum Village mindfulness practices on children.This episode is part of our monthlong Do Life Better series. We talk about:The health benefits of mindful eatingThe line between moderation and restriction The five contemplations before eating The basic steps of mindful eating How to ensure mindful eating doesn’t feel like a chore or burdenFasting and our culture's dysregulated relationship to foodMindful consumption in generalThe four nutrimentsAnd much moreRelated Episodes:Do Life BetterGet Fit SanelyThe Anti-Diet | Evelyn TriboleThe Science of Why You Eat When You're Not Hungry–And How to Stop | Judson BrewerSign up for Dan’s newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/phap-luu-889See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, how we doing everybody? It's a new year. We're right in the heart of resolution season and the most common resolutions tend to be related to health and fitness. So today we've got a Buddhist take on food. Not so much what you eat, but how you eat.

To be very clear about this, this episode is not about wrenching your body into some sort of arbitrary aesthetic shape that may have nothing to do with your underlying health. This is not about getting you to look like your favorite Instagram influencer. Instead, this is about rewiring your relationship to food and to your body. And let me say to the dudes listening, you may think of this as a female issue, but it is not. We just tend to mask our dysregulated thinking around food and body image as biohacking. Anyway, today we're talking about mindful eating, which the research suggests can reduce overeating and improve digestion, blood sugar regulation,

and gut brain communication. My guest is Brother Fahp Luu, who's an ordained monk in the Plum Village tradition, which was started by the great Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh. Brother Fahp Luu has edited several of Thich Nhat Hanh's many books, and he also works a lot with young people. In fact, Brother Fah Brother Frog Blue has been working lately

with scientists at both Dartmouth and Harvard to develop research on the effect of mindfulness practices on children. That though is a subject for another time. Today we're talking about mindful eating. We are covering such topics as the health benefits of mindful eating, the line between moderation and restriction, the importance of eating with other people, the five contemplations before eating, the basic steps of mindful

eating, how to ensure that mindful eating doesn't feel like a chore or burden, fasting and our culture's dysregulated relationship to food, mindful consumption in general, a list called the four nutriments, and much more. Just to say this is the second episode in our month-long Do Life Better series. Every week we're going to examine the most popular resolutions from the perspectives of both modern science and ancient wisdom. This week it's physical fitness. Back on Monday we focused on exercise.

Today we're looking at mindful eating. Next week, by the way, we're doing several episodes on the psychology of improving your finances and your relationship to money. Brother Fahblou coming up right after this. But first, before we get started, you are invited to join a live AMA, meaning Ask Me Anything, with me tonight at 7 Eastern. If you want to join, just sign up at danharris.com

and then download the Substack app. It's all pretty easy. This is all part of our big, free seven day New Year's challenge, which also features chats about the resolutions most of us want to make. You'll also get exclusive access to podcast transcripts and podcast cheat sheets and much more. We'll see you tonight at 7 on the Substack app.

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Find your push, find your power with Peloton at onepeloton.ca. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankenpen. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season we're looking at the life of the most famous queen of France, Marie Antoinette. Her death is seemingly more well known than her life, but her journey from the daughter

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So I'm curious, just as a starter, how did you get interested in this issue of mindful eating? Well, I got interested in meditation, first off, and was just seeing how helpful it is to transform suffering, right? My suffering as a young person, I went through a short depression trying to find my way, as many people do, and I found that mindful breathing and just sitting with my anger was so transformative. And I felt joy again for the first time in many months, when I was about 24. And when I learned that this mindfulness could be applied to anything, to eating, to walking, to really any position of the body, then I started to rediscover the joy and the wonder

of life. And especially with eating, the sense pleasure of eating, it's like coming alive again with the pretzel or the broccoli or whatever I'm eating eating is seeing the beauty of it in, as our teacher often said, as a representative of the entire cosmos. So in there, there are so many elements. There's the sun and the rain and the earth and all the elements that came from supernovas of stars ended up in the crust of our earth. When you start to look deeply like that, then everything becomes a profound reunion actually.

We say mindful eating is a reunion because the broccoli is made up of the elements that I'm made up of. And so by eating it is a new encounter of what we're made up of rediscovering our wondrous nature. So I basically started applying the mindfulness that I was using for my breathing, for my body, that was bringing me joy to the act of eating. And going even further, I mean, in those early kind of experimental times

when I was just learning meditation, I was actually very interested to go out into the forest. I was in Connecticut where I grew up and finding wild edible foods. And I started to try to see, well, what is this relationship? What is this profound act of eating where we actually put something in our body? It's so intrusive. And incorporate it into our cells, the makeup of our flesh, our bones. How can we rediscover the sacredness of eating?

And since I've discovered that actually mindful eating is something that's been in part of indigenous cultures all over the world. There's something sacred and communal about eating. I mean, even the word companion in English comes from eating bread with somebody, right? So there's a sense that there's a profound attention that every culture in its indigenous form brings to food that we somehow have lost in this kind of post-industrial landscape of cheap food.

And yeah, and the deterioration of kind of family structure of eating together. So that's kind of been part of my path. I am grateful because at least in my family, we always sat down for one meal together and my dad kind of enforced that. And we even would eat for a moment in silence. And so I came to enjoy that.

And so it was quite natural when I discovered the Plum Village community and I saw this mindful eating where we'd sit together as a community and eat for 10, 15 minutes in silence. I felt something that was held in that family space of silent eating was actually a profound practice of opening my mind really to the wondrous nature of things, of reality. Is there research into the benefits of mindful eating? There is, yeah. I've been working at Dartmouth College and there are many other studies as well.

We've been working mainly to study the effect of mindfulness on snacking with children. So Professor Diane Gilbert-Diamond, she's an epidemiologist, but specifically on the epidemiology of obesity. And so actually she was a classmate of mine at Dartmouth, but we reconnected through various networks a few years ago during the pandemic and started designing a pilot study, which we're now extending to eight weeks, where we look into the effect of just doing a few mindful breathing exercises as well as learning about mindful eating just by slowly eating a tangerine. And then after that we observe if there's an effect on the kids on their eating that kind of they're presented with cheap goldfish crackers and kind of cheap snack foods and

we see is there an effect. And it does have an effect on their eating habits, which I've noticed too in my own and many people come to our centers notice that we bring more mindfulness. Actually, we eat less and we have less kind of craving for food. If you really enjoy the activity, even if it's food that's not particularly healthy, you really be mindful while you're doing it. You somehow don't feel that need to put your hand in again so much. It becomes over time a bit weaker, that tendency to crave for more food.

And that's what we found with the kids. But there are many other studies too. That's just what I was going to ask. Did the studies go beyond kids and snacking? Well, right now we're in the midst of developing an eight week intervention. Because that was a kind of one-off mindfulness short video we made, because it was during the pandemic, so we couldn't do it in person. So now we're actually in the middle of producing a larger intervention for families, which

would not cover only eating, but every aspect of mindfulness that's based on our children's programs at Plum Village. I developed the program in Plum Village over eight years, working with kids, and a mindful snack was a part of every day. So we were just out trying to see if we can develop that study into an intervention, which families can do right in their home over the internet. An intervention, meaning a training

that any family can do virtually. Exactly, yeah, right, Through an online learning platform and as well as a little, we have a little screenless device so that most of the guided meditations can be offered without a phone or anything distracting. Stepping away from your work specifically, I'm wondering if there's a body of research generally that would suggest that if we pay attention while we eat, it has salutary effects. So there is. I'm not an expert in the research behind it. So I know that that's the area of the new Thich Nhat Hanh Center for Mindfulness and Public Health at Harvard. And so I guess if I was more of a scientist, I would have them available for me, but I can't speak directly to all the studies that are out there.

Because, you know, our way with mindful eating in the community is based on our own experience and a little bit less on the science. But what I've heard of scientific studies that have been done is corroborated in our experience. So let's talk about the how of it. Like any good Buddhist, you have some lists. And one list is the five contemplations before eating. So there's stuff to do before you start filling your face hole.

So can you walk me through the five contemplations before eating? Sure. Yeah. So this is rooted in the East Asian tradition, mainly in China, in Zen temples. So there's these five reflections that we do before we even begin to eat the food, mainly to nourish our gratitude for the food, that we have food to eat. So it's similar in many ways to Western prayers that might be done in Christian or other Jewish or Muslim meals. And this starts with recognizing that the food is a gift of the whole universe, of the

earth, the sky, and much hard and loving work. So we visualize all those people who have contributed to this food, but not just the people, also the living beings. We eat mainly vegan in our community, so that's a decision we've made. We see that it has less impact on the planet and as well less suffering. And so we're aware of the fruit trees that have been planted. We're aware of the ancestral trees which have been cultivated from wild ones over hundreds of sometimes thousands of years.

Just through the taste and the nutrition. One generation after another picks that particularly tasty apple or a citrus tree and then cultivates it and grows it so that it's a bit more sweet each generation. We're aware of the sun and the rain which have contributed to the food. So it's really developing a sense

of what Thai, our teacher would call interbeing. Nothing is by itself alone. So the orange is there because of all of these conditions. But if we just see it as an orange, it just seems like something very normal or not particularly special. But when we look into it and we see the sun and the orange and the rain and the earth and all these other elements, we realize if we take any of those elements away, then the orange cannot be there. It requires everything.

In fact, when you go farther out, you see that the entire universe is present in that orange. And so your heart becomes filled with gratitude that you have this wondrous object here, which is actually a profound combination of so many different elements. And here it is available for me to put in my body, to give me energy to continue.

So that first contemplation is to nourish our gratitude and to help us to look deeply into all the conditions that have come together in order to have this orange or carrot or whatever it is. And the second contemplation is may we eat it with gratitude so as to be worthy to receive this food. We nourish the gratitude for all these conditions coming together.

Sometimes actually we don't feel worthy to eat the food that we eat. That's why we treat our bodies so poorly. You know, when we're especially snacking on something, I notice in my own mental makeup that there's a kind of depreciation of ourselves. Like we're somehow not worthy of this food. I mean, that's literally. And so then we, when we feel not worthy, then we feel like there's something lacking in us.

And then we eat more. And so we've tried to fill that void inside with more potato chips or whatever it is. And so it's very important to feel worthy to receive the food. And knowing that with gratitude in our hearts, we are worthy to receive this food, it creates a sense of meaning in the act of eating. That it's not just a transfer of energy, but rather it's a profound and wondrous process that's going on when we eat food.

And that should be treated in a sacred way. Sacred meaning we nourish our gratitude for it. And then we learn to recognize and transform in the third contemplation, those emotions, what we call mental formations. I think people on your podcast would be familiar with that term. It's kind of these emotions like greed or craving.

We recognize and transform those emotions so we can eat and practice to eat in moderation. And this is where I find eating as a community is very helpful because when you're eating with others, you're a bit more accountable. And so I think a lot of the difficulty people have around food is that we tend to hide away by ourselves. We kind of get our food and then we sit in front of the TV or we are by ourselves. We kind of get our food and then we sit in front of the TV or we are by ourselves and when we're eating together with others, especially we're eating in

silence, then we are much more supported and not overeating, not just getting in this automatic mode of just motivated by our craving or greed for the food and just kind of stuffing our face and not being really aware of what we're doing while we're eating. I trust you, so I know that you're not doing what some people listening might worry that you're doing, but there's a very important line to be walked or drawn, I suspect you

would agree, between being moderate in your food consumption and artificially reducing how much you eat because you think other people are judging you because you're overeating or because you want to look a certain way or whatever it is. Yeah. So, which would cause an eating disorder, of course. So, we don't eat for beauty. We don't eat because we want to look a certain way or eat because people will judge us, right, or eat less because we feel, otherwise we feel judged. When I've gone to, for example, to Vietnam and I participate in a more traditional food offering at a temple or somewhere else, because I quite often go, I mean, our teacher is Vietnamese

and so we'll quite often go to Vietnam and they often arrange dishes on a table. Many small dishes with different items. So sometimes there's boiled okra, maybe there's a bowl of white rice, there's some spring rolls, all kinds of delicacies. And we'll sit around the table, maybe four or five, six of us, sometimes circular tables. The food culture is such that you try to look to see,

can everybody reach all of the dishes that are in the center of the food? Is there anybody who's on some part of the table who can't reach this particular dish? Can I put a little bit of that food on another dish so they don't have to reach across the table to do it? So it's like a kind of cultural training, not in judging each other, but seeing how to offer to each other. So it's a positive. And the other aspect of it is just kind of fun, is that, because as an American, when I first went to Vietnam,

actually with our teacher in 2005, I would usually put like all the food I wanted to eat into my little bowl and then I would just eat. And then when I felt full, I would stop eating. But actually in Vietnamese culture, if you're sitting there with your empty bowl, then people will say, oh, don't you want more food? And then they even put food into your bowl. And I say, no, no, no, I had enough. And so I learned I had to slow down. Otherwise people were going to put more food in my bowl than I wanted.

And that's part of a kind of communal act of eating, right, that helps us to actually eat in moderation. So I feel without triggering some of those disorders that you mentioned, there's a sense of feeling like shame around the food, but it's more kind of sharing and knowing that everyone have enough. I remember one of our elder sisters in our community, when she first ate an omelet with a Westerner, she noticed that he wanted to cut it all into equal pieces for everybody and then take his whole piece on his plate, which seems very normal for us.

But in Vietnamese culture, you only take so much as you're just going to eat in the next few mouthfuls. And then when you want some more, you reach with the much as you're just going to eat in the next few mouthfuls. And then when you want some more, you reach with the top six and you take a little bit more. And so there's a sense that you cultivate an awareness of the others that are at the table. And that's really essential in eating. So not sense of others around you because you feel shame, but others because you're doing something that's very pleasant together. You're sharing an experience of eating.

And that is the sense of the word companion, right, of these are the people I eat with. So I want to do it together. And when you do it with mindfulness, it's even more powerful, I feel. So actually, the essence of mindful eating, according to Zemmastah Tigna Han, our teacher, the things he emphasized was really just two things. The interbeing nature that I mentioned and the community that eats together with us. And actually everything is encompassed in those two elements. So I found that it's a little bit difficult now.

I mean, having lived in the monastery for more than 20 years to go eat by myself, it feels a bit weird. But I think it's become the norm for most people. And so I think part of mindful eating is actually recreating what is inherent actually in the root of our culture, which is sharing spaces of eating together with our families, with our friends, with our colleagues. Given that so many of us live alone or are actively lonely or isolated in our individualistic culture, I can imagine some people listening to this thinking, well, I can't do what this monk is suggesting because I just have people to eat with. Yeah, and I think it's a seed that you start to observe when there are opportunities, whether

it's just a dinner with friends, that you start to maybe in the past you think, no, I just want to be by myself. But it's actually a decision we make every moment when we become more aware of it, that I want to look for spaces in which I can eat together with others, then actually those opportunities start to appear. So it's not that they're not there, but sometimes we've just constructed our life in a way that it seems like they're not there anymore. I know a good friend in Holland and he actually has a, there they have a rotation.

He lives by himself and so he often will end up eating by himself. So they decide every, I don't know, every week or every so often they rotate around each other's apartments and each one of them will make a meal and they'll just come together. They don't have any other relationship professional or even necessarily, I mean, they become friends over time. But it was mainly because there's people who live alone who want to just eat together. It's a way of building relationships and building community by rotating and going from one apartment to the other and each person will cook on a particular week. And so

there are creative ways I think if we're motivated. I personally find like finding creative ways to eat together is more fun than like counting calories or taking a more quantitative approach to eating, but rather just depend on how to find ways through food to build community. Yes. Plus one to that. Okay, so I think we've worked through the first three of the five contemplations before eating, but maybe tell us numbers four and five before we dive into the practice itself. Yeah, so the fourth one is aware of the effect that eating has on the planet, especially with regard to climate change.

So this is where the traditional one has been updated for our present moment. We try to eat in such a way that we can reduce the suffering in the world. So we're aware that eating has a massive effect on the planet, not just through climate change, but also biodiversity, through land that is used for growing grains to feed livestock or whatever it might be. These have real effects on the world, and they're observable. There's no debate about that.

We remember that we are taking something. Everything is a give and take, right? And I think food is a more obvious example of that. And the more that we are taking from the universe or from others, I experience the more I suffer. But where I learn to give and take, there's a flow. And I learned, for example, to not only just eat food, but maybe get involved with the local organic community garden

and help to plant food that others can enjoy, not only myself, or support a local community-supported agricultural farm. These kind of things where we create a visible and also experiential relationship between the land and our food and the people who are taking care of it. Then that suffering, I feel, goes down most times because we have more awareness of the kind of chain of where is this food coming from?

And then the fifth one is that we accept this food in order to nurture our community and realize the path of understanding and love. So it means we want to help all beings to suffer less. So by eating mindfully, we're actually in the process of building our relationship with each other. And so it comes back to my original point about the word companion, which I just love, this sense that we build our brotherhood, our sisterhood, our siblinghood, whatever word you put on it, our affective relationship with each other by eating together and sharing

the food together. And that's a conscious thing that we do that we contemplate on that because we don't just think it's just an energy interchange, but it's actually building relationships with each other as we eat together. And do you actually run through all five of these in your head before you sit down and eat?

Yeah. So we do it silently most of the time, but usually at our lunch meal, we'll come in, we'll serve our food. Usually in our monastery we have a buffet style. And then we'll sit down. Then there's a brother who, our sister will be at the bell and they'll invite a sound of the bell.

And then we'll listen to these five contemplations being read. And then we'll begin eating in silence for maybe 15 or 20 minutes. So we can really allow the contemplation to go in and really be present for our food, not get lost in our thinking, our projects. Which is really important, part of both mindful breathing and mindful eating. Because that's a big tendency, is to get lost in your thinking while you're eating. You have an initial sensation, we say it's like eating a ghost carrot. You have the carrot, you put the carrot in your mouth, but actually there's an initial

moment where you get this burst of flavor and then you're just thinking about your projects or what you want to do in the future or some regrets about the past. And the experience of eating the carrot is completely lost because you're lost in your thinking. And it's like you're eating the carrot is completely lost. Because you're lost in your thinking. And it's like you're eating the carrot. Once you know the carrot tastes okay, it's not rotten. It's not... That's enough information and then you're off in your thinking.

And that's the way most of us eat. And so mindful eating is letting go of whatever our projects are, whatever ideas. Like I notice I get really great ideas when I'm eating delicious food. But it's like the wires are crossed in my brain. It's because of the delicious sensation of eating the food and that idea seems so good. So actually we're like crossing wires in our brains so that we don't actually understand where the pleasure that comes is when we have that idea is actually coming from, which is from the food.

So I notice that happens a lot if I don't bring my attention back to the live visceral experience of chewing the carrot while it's in my mouth. And so creating a new, not eating a phantom carrot or a ghost carrot, but actually eating the carrot that's in my mouth right now. Not my past experience of eating carrots. I mean, you can think of it as a ghost carrot, or you can think of it as a ghost carrot or you can think of it as a ghost eating a real carrot.

Yeah, also. Which is like the hungry ghost metaphor, right, in Buddhist texts of these beings that have a very narrow neck and so even they are very in a big stomach. This is in Buddhist mythology, right? But it's a teaching that's just there to help us to see that sometimes we are like hungry ghosts. We have a huge desire, but actually we're tortured because we have this narrow neck and we can only eat a tiny bit at a time. So we always feel hungry, no matter how much we eat.

And that's the way many of us live our lives, like these hungry ghosts. Whether it's with food or with our projects, our career, our goals in life, we feel like no matter when we get there, it's still not enough. We need something more. And so we can't be truly happy. So transforming that ghost inside of us is a key part of mindful eating. I keep saying I want to get to the practice itself and we will, but just one last observation. I don't know if this is a question or not, but my understanding is as it relates to

these five contemplations before eating that any sort of pause before eating St. Grace or whatever it is, can boost your mindfulness quotient and reduce your mindless eating or overeating quotient. I believe there may be actually evidence for this, but I've always found that compelling. Yeah, it's my experience too. It's when we just take, I mean, we do it with the bell. It's the sound of the bell,

which is how we remind ourselves to come back to our breathing. And so that sound of the bell and just taking a moment to breathe in and out, just be aware of this present moment and just, yeah, see everybody or even just, but if you're there alone by yourself, just being with your body, being with your breathing, and then that creates a sacred moment and then you're ready to eat.

Coming up, Brother Fahp Lu talks about the actual practice of mindful eating, how to do it, the role of your senses, how to pay attention to your satiety cues, how to ensure mindful eating doesn't feel like a chore, the role of fasting, and our culture's dysregulated relationship to food. Keep it here. On January 5th, 2024, an Alaska Airlines door plug tore away mid-flight, leaving a gaping hole in the side of a plane that carried 171 passengers. This heart-stopping incident was just the latest in a string of crises surrounding the aviation manufacturing giant, Boeing.

In the past decade, Boeing has been involved in a series of damning scandals and deadly crashes that have chipped away at its once sterling reputation. At the center of it all, the 737 MAX, the latest season of business wars, explores how Boeing, once the gold standard of aviation engineering, descended into a nightmare of safety concerns and public mistrust, the decisions, denials and devastating consequences bringing the decisions, denials, and devastating consequences bringing the Titan to its knees, and what, if anything, can save the company's reputation now. Follow Business Wars on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can binge Business Wars, The Unraveling of Boeing, early and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus. If you are looking for a gift this holiday season, consider a subscription to the happier on Wondery Plus. and messy and beautifully imperfect in themselves, visit meditatethappier.com slash gift to share the gift of mindfulness this season. Okay, so when it comes to the actual practice of mindful eating, how do we do it? So first we come back to our body. So we're aware that this body is made up of food.

We are what we eat. And we do that by being aware of our breathing. And we can do this even when we're cooking and preparing the food, but if we're just eating food that's been prepared for us, we can sit at the table and even just take one in and out breath. We say we return to our body because usually our mind is somewhere else, even if our body is there, right?

So we want mind and body to become one, and the mind keeping our full attention on the breath, for just one in and out breath, will already bring our mind and body together. That's the first aspect. And then the next is we're aware of the food in front of us. So we see the colors, we see the interbeing element that I spoke about, which is that this food is made up

of many conditions, including the cooks and the ones who transported the food to the restaurant or wherever we may have gotten the food. So we see that there are many things that have come together to bring this food to us. It's very precious. And then next we can smell the food. So it's like looking at it, smelling.

Sometimes we might take, if I have a tangerine, I like to take it with my finger now, just a little bit of the peel off and then hold it up and smell. Just to really prepare our body as well, you notice that you start to salivate. Your body is preparing itself to receive the food. And then we can put the food in our mouth. And it's nice to really, when you're starting mindful eating, to just not start chewing right away, because that's a tendency. You notice there are all these kind of habits of eating where we just shovel the food in

our mouth and then we're already thinking about the next morsel of food. So it's good to put it in our mouth and then what I like to do is put down my utensil. So if I have a fork or spoon or whatever it is, just put it down. So you're not using your hands to prepare your food or some people like to move the food around. If you notice, maybe you don't notice you're doing it, but a lot of us tend to kind of be playing with the food to prepare it for the next spoonful or forkful or whatever. So if you just put it down, then that reduces that distraction.

So you can be totally present with the morsel of food that's in your mouth at that moment. So the segment of the tangerine or the piece of broccoli, whatever it is. Yeah, I don't do it every time, but when I teach people to eat mindfully the first time, I think it's nice to not chew right away, just to feel the texture with your tongue, with your, so you're getting all of your senses involved. You've had your sight, your smell, now your taste, now also the sensation of the texture of the food in your mouth.

And then you can start to chew it and swallow. And just, you can also be aware of the sound of chewing because we make a lot of noise when we're chewing. And sometimes we're embarrassed about the noise we make when we're chewing, but it's fun. And sometimes we have the kids, they put their hands on their ear like this. You have to do this in public in a restaurant.

But if you're by yourself, you can put your hands on your ear and you actually hear the sounds of, sometimes the kids are like, eww, or it sounds like walking in snow or something. But you hear the cracking noise of your jaw and so you're aware. Actually, you make a lot of noise when you're eating your food and chewing. So you kind of involve all the senses, that's the main point. So that you can see that actually just a tiny bit of food can be a massive sensory experience. And then you're aware as well as you swallow, going down into your stomach, help with your saliva and then the sensation in your stomach.

It actually takes a while for our body to realize that we're full, that we've eaten enough. And when we eat very quickly, we're short-circuiting that. So by eating mindfully, we tend to naturally eat more slowly. And then when the food is there, we feel we don't need to eat so much. I can't tell you how many times I've heard in our retreats, people say, I can't believe how full I felt eating the food. And it's not necessary because we do serve healthier food than most people eat, but it's really the act of mindful eating. When they eat slowly and aware of their eating, they

find that they feel full much sooner. And then they have less digestive trouble afterwards because when we overeat we have problems with digestion. I always remember this moment when I was a young monk in Columbia village. We have these big family retreats with hundreds of people and I was never in big crowds when I was young. So I had to get used to being in a monastery with hundreds of people in the summer. And sometimes feel a little bit anxious about whether I get enough food because sometimes we'd run out there'd be no more rice or whatever and so this one time that anxiety affected me as I was serving my food and so I filled my bowl with brown rice and beans I think and it was way too much but I was committed because we tried to practice to eat all

the food that we serve and so that day I sat there and it took me more than an hour, I think, to eat all that food because it was like maybe twice as much as I really needed for my hunger. It was unpleasant. I see now years of also doing fasting sometimes that is much less painful or unpleasant to be a little bit hungry than it is to eat too much food. You're over full, it takes a long time to digest it. It's like you can't get it out of your stomach once it's in there and your body has to digest it. So if you learn with mindfulness to have a little bit of hunger at the end of a meal, I find it's very beneficial.

We should feel hunger when we eat a meal. I've noticed that if I'm not careful, I can go day to day and not feel any hunger. And I just come to the meal and I eat at that time, but I'm not actually feeling hungry. And I found that it's not very healthy for me. So now I practice to eat less and feel a little bit of hunger at the end of the meal.

So a little bit less than I'm feeling totally full. And then when it comes to the next meal, I feel hungry already. That's a healthy feeling. I believe the Buddha explicitly advised people to finish their meals six mouthfuls before you feel full. Okay, yeah. That's very much the way that we were trained as well in the monastery.

Yeah. I don't know how I got to six mouthfuls. That's oddly specific and it's hard to, it's very hard to judge, but it's a good way to provoke mindfulness to think, to get you to really like pay attention to the satiety cues of like, okay, I'm still a little hungry, but if I had six more bites, would

I be full? Exactly. And I think it's also a safety measure because at that time, the monks were begging from door to door. And when we eat a little bit of food, a little bit of food that might have been rancid or something, it can be a bit off, our stomach can handle it. But if we eat a little more, it'll tip us over the edge and we get severe food poisoning. That did happen in the Buddhist time.

So there was certain guidelines that also had to do with just keeping the monks healthy. Yeah, I mean, if memory serves, the Buddha himself died of food poisoning. Right, right. Voluntarily. Yeah, voluntarily mean, if memory serves, the Buddha himself died of food poisoning. Right, right. Voluntarily. Yeah, voluntarily, right? He accepted that food.

Just getting back to the, to use an inappropriate phrase here, but the meat of the practice. One advice I've heard, it landed strangely for me and it may for others, but I'll say it nonetheless, because it's kind of interesting. One advice I've heard when I've gone on meditation retreat for mindful eating is to pay attention to what the tongue is doing. The tongue is really weird and it's doing all this subconscious, automatic stuff as we eat. And if you just make the tongue an object of mindfulness, it can be disconcerting, but it'll bring you into the moment. Yeah, you realize this thing is, you live with it every day, it's right there in your

mouth and it behaves so strangely. It's a great practice, I think. But yeah, I agree. When you start to be aware of these things, it feels weird. It feels like you've got this worm in your mouth. Like, where did that come from? That's my tongue. That's what it does. I think it's a good thing if mindfulness feels a bit funny at first because you're relearning things. Just like when you're a little baby and you're doing things for the first time, it just feels a bit awkward when you bring so much attention to it. Yes.

Babies are awake in the moment. Watch them stare at their hands and object to wonder. Okay, so just saying with the practice again, I often make the joke that I have this power of knowing what my audience is thinking, even though the audience isn't even here right now, they're listening at some point in the future, but I know what they're thinking. And I suspect that some of them may be thinking,

this sounds like a pain in the ass. I have limited time, you're now turning my meals into work. I don't know if I'm on board for this. I will say just for myself, having done many retreats, sometimes the mindful eating feels like a bit of a chore, and I often forget to do it in my day-to-day life where I know I should do it, but I don't want to do it. So I just get you to talk to that resistant part of people's minds.

So it should be a joy. I just get you to talk to that resistant part of people's minds. So it should be a joy. So I think if it feels like a chore, then in that moment, just let it go. So I think it's not beneficial to force ourselves to practice, but mindfulness can be a joy and it can be a source of joy as well. And that's one thing that I learned from our teacher, Tai, is that if it's not joyful, then just let it go. And then you come back to it later on. You'll have a different experience.

So it doesn't mean that you just give it up. And that's our approach is very gentle in that way. It's very deep, very powerful, but gentle in the sense that in that moment you just feel like, okay, it's not working for me, this feels like a burden. But if you force yourself, sometimes then you have a negative experience and then you don't want to come back to it. So it's better to just enjoy your food.

Don't think about all the steps that the monk told me about mindful eating. Because even if you do just one of the things that I mentioned, that's already bringing some mindfulness. And then the next time a little bit more and a little bit more. And then it becomes an enjoyable experience. You don't actually feel like you want to eat in another way. You want to bring mindfulness because it's for your own well-being as well, your own health, your own enjoyment, because it's much more

enjoyable to eat with mindfulness. I mean, there's something there in great food, people who love to eat food, that's already going in the direction of mindfulness. That's really just savoring each bite and noticing the care and the preparation and the flavors and everything that's been carefully and artfully put together. You become a real food connoisseur by eating mindfully. But you don't have to eat as much as well. So you're you don't have putting such a load on your body. So I'd say if it's becoming a burden, just let it go in that moment and then come back to it. Slowly, it will become more enjoyable.

I like that advice and just come back to it. Slowly it will become more enjoyable. I like that advice. And just to add on top of it, it's reminding me of something I once heard from a woman who's been on the show before her name is Janice Martorano and she is really a leader and has been for a long time in introducing mindfulness into corporate contexts. And when it comes to mindful eating,

her advice, if I'm remembering this correctly, so my apologies in advance, Janice, her advice is just commit to making the first three bites mindful and see what happens from there. Yeah, exactly. Slowly, you're actually taking care of your body and your body will respond. When we treat our body poorly, it has a reaction, a response. And if we treat it with care,

then it responds positively. So you start to see it as it's not a burden, it's something joyful. That's why it's nice to do it together when you're starting out in the context of a retreat to kind of get the feeling of doing it where everyone else is doing it.

So you feel supported actually, not pressured, but supported in your practice of mindful eating. And that makes it easier when you go home to even take just three mindful bites. But I do say that a lot of people find support by creating moments of communal eating, whether in the workplace, just putting out a notice on your intranet or whatever, however you communicate at your workplace. Hey, we're going to do mindful eating. You don't have to have any special training.

Propose maybe once a week. We'll have a meal and then people get together and you can eat for even just a couple of minutes in silence and then have conversation. It's not complicated to organize. Usually most people have a place they can reserve at their workplace where they can eat together. And I've found that it's a way of, yeah, on all these levels of creating relationships, of enjoying the food, there's something inherent in our social nature as human beings that likes to eat together.

But make sure it's a joy. Don't pressure yourself. I appreciate that. If memory serves, your practice of mindful eating, as we've established, it begins even before you eating with these contemplations, and then you walked us through how to do it during the meal. But if my understanding is correct, your practice of mindful eating extends to well after the meal.

Because it can take a long time before you feel full and you can be mindful of the process of digestion. Yeah, that's right. So that story I told about eating that whole bowl of rice and beans, because I felt the pain of digesting this over the next couple hours, I kept my mindfulness. So we say mindfulness goes together with concentration. So concentration is the ability to keep that awareness over time. Because then when you do that, you actually see the cause and effect. Because many times when I was a kid, I'd have stomach aches when I'd eat that awareness over time. Because then when you do that, you actually see the cause and effect. Because many times when I was a kid,

I'd have stomach aches when I'd eat too much or food that wasn't very good for me. But somehow my mind, because I didn't keep awareness, it didn't really make the causal connection between what I'd eaten and the pain I was feeling in my stomach later on. But with more mindfulness and awareness,

you see that it's all connected. And then experientially, not just intellectually, but experientially, you feel, it's like this heavy feeling. The reason I love to tell this story is that the next time when I found myself in that situation, as a novice monk getting to a table and there are lots of people serving and I started to notice that anxiety coming up, will there be enough food? All I had to do was just call back to memory that painful feeling of digesting all that food. And then right away I serve less because I know I can come back and serve more food later. It's not intellectually I'm thinking, oh, I have to eat less food, but rather I can

feel it in my stomach. Oh, God, I remember that day when I ate too much and then I bring it back and it reminds me, oh, take a little bit less. And so that's an awareness, that's a mindfulness. Mindfulness is also remembering, right? Remembering what has happened in the past and so we remember that moment and so then I serve a little bit less food and I know I can come back if I'm still hungry later. Dr. Judd Brewer talks about this a lot, my friend Dr. Judd Brewer, who's been on the show many times.

I'll put some links in the show notes. He's actually coming up again in a couple of days. And in his training people how to use mindfulness or attention, not overeating, he will often say like, go for it, eat a whole box of cookies. Just see what it gets you, pay attention. And that's when learning can happen. That's right, exactly. I had the same experience.

And also one fun thing to do in that respect is one of my sisters, she came up with this practice because she really loves chocolate. So she made the commitment to herself, I can only eat chocolate with somebody else. So she had to go find another person to have the chocolate with somebody else. So she had to go find another person to have the chocolate with her. He's kind of a way of playing with your own mind.

You have the craving for the chocolate. Okay, but if I want to eat the chocolate, I got to go find somebody. And already the craving becomes a little bit less. And then the effort of doing it. But then when you get with that person, then you get to share chocolate with them. So it's a very enjoyable experience.

So there are many ways that we can deal with those things that are kind of in our blind spots when it comes to eating. You mentioned before the role of fasting. I'd be curious to hear a little bit more about that. I'll say upfront, I sometimes worry a little bit about fasting, which is de rigueur right now in our culture, intermittent fasting, et cetera, et cetera. Just because in my diagnosis, and I've been deeply influenced by Evelyn Triboli and the whole intuitive eating movement. In my diagnosis, one of the biggest problems we have in terms of our relationship with food is that we have an unhealthy relationship with food in our bodies,

characterized by mindlessness and also self-directed aggression. Yeah, like anorexia. Trying to wrestle our body or wrench our body into some shape so that it, even if you don't have anorexia, you know, a lot of men, we just mask it as biohacking or trying to look a certain way. And fasting, I worry, can aid and abet

the culture's already dysregulated relationship to food. And so I just be curious to hear you what you have to say on this. Yeah, I agree. I think that there can be an element of pride that comes up when, oh, I did a seven day fast or whatever it might be. And so that's not healthy. That's a kind of almost like a spiritual athleticism, right? One teacher gave up with that term and I always love to see and recognize in myself ways in which

I'm trying to optimize my spiritual experience, you know, and try to come out of that kind of good. That's ego thinking. Fasting, I think, is a natural part of our human experience. We had, sometimes there was food, sometimes there was not food. And it was very normal in the past for us to go a day without food and then have a day with like feasting. So in our community, we do fasting. We're encouraged to do it maybe once a year. But it can be anywhere from like just a day fast or three day fast to some

others will do, or sisters will do seven or ten days water fast. But that's something that we should do with somebody who knows how to fast. I mean, nowadays there are retreat centers where you can learn how to do it. I think it's a helpful way to become free from some ways in which eating is just a habit, but if it's not held in a space where there's people who are familiar with it, I think it can be, like you say, it can be a kind of a pride thing or like something that can cause harm. I found one very gentle way to do fasting.

You mentioned intermittent fasting, and this is something more recent that I do for the past, I don't know, maybe five, six months, which is this kind of alternate day fasting. But this is a modified. The idea is you have fast and feast days. So this is not necessarily a Plum Village thing, but our teacher did fast and so he encouraged us to do it. But this is something that I've just found very helpful because every day you have a little bit of less calories on one day. And then the next day you can eat.

You don't have to think about how much I'm going to put on my plate. I just eat whatever I feel intuitively. That's just for me. I think each person can see for themselves. But I don't think fasting is inherently bad. I do agree that if it's not held with mindfulness and awareness, like what is our motivation for fasting? Is it just because we want our body to look a certain way?

Or I feel like it can be beneficial in looking at our habits around food and kind of becoming free of those. But there can be other things at play there, so be careful. Well said. Coming up, Brother Fahblou talks about mindful consumption in general, a Buddhist list called the Four Nutriments, and much more. There are just a couple of other things I want to ask you about that kind of take this conversation and broaden it. One thing I wanted to ask you about is this notion of mindful consumption, generally consumption of more than just food.

And I wonder what more there is to say on that score. Yeah, we, in fact the Buddha talked about four kinds of nutrients. So edible food is one of them, but sense impressions is another. So what we consume through our eyes, our ears, nose, tongue, body and mind is also a kind of consumption. If I go into a grocery store and they're playing some romantic music on there, I feel, oh, I like this song. And then I find it changes my mood. I'm putting things in my basket to buy that maybe I didn't intend to buy when I went in there. So that's a kind of consumption,

listening to that music. And and it sticks in your head later on when you go out. So these are all like edible food, they're things that have a real effect on our body and mind. And the third one is we say volition. So what's our deepest desire, what is driving us forward in our life, in our career, in our relationships, in what gives us meaning in life. That's the kind of food.

And so how we take care of that volition and how it manifests, it's the kind of consumption because it pushes us forward. It also pushes us to what we attend to with our senses. So that's related to the sense impressions one. And the last one is consciousness. So we're consuming all the time things in our consciousness that are coming up like memories from the past. Maybe you smell something and it touches on or you're eating food and

then you suddenly have all these memories coming back from a time when you ate that food in the past. You're mindless from one thing to another and you're completely lost. You're not in the present moment anymore. So the Buddha used images like the consciousness food is like a thief who's ordered, is punished by the king by being pierced by hundreds of spears. And sometimes our consciousness is like that. It's just like we're being attacked from many directions with all these memories, thoughts, sense impressions in our consciousness that are actually making us suffer. And so it's not to say that there are these fundamental four kinds of nutriments,

but it's more to say to open our mind, like you said, to see that it's not only edible food that is what we become, right? Like you are what you eat, but it's also you are what you eat in terms of sense impressions. You are what you eat in terms of your volition in life. You are what you eat in terms of your consciousness, your memories, both at an individual and a collective level, by the way. We are in touch with the collective consciousness in our society, our family, and through our teachers and parents and so forth. So that is also that collective trauma, multi-generational trauma is a kind of nutriment. Run through those four nutrients again just so that I've got them. Yeah, so the first is edible food and the second is sense impressions.

So what comes in through our senses. The third is our volition and the fourth is consciousness. Is there a specific practice you recommend for each of these or is it simply just to be mindful of the fact that there's all this consuming we're doing that goes well beyond edible food and mindfulness is a way to not overdo it. So in that sutra on the four nutriments, the Buddha actually gave these really disturbing images. I was debating with it to share about it.

Let's do it. Yeah, okay. So the first one is, so edible food, he gets, he's told this story about a couple and they have a little baby boy and they're crossing a desert. They're refugees. They have to go to, across this barren wasteland to reach a city. And then they realize that they won't be able to survive. They don't have enough food or water to survive.

So they feel very sad and overwhelmed by despair. But they say, what if we killed our one little baby boy and ate his flesh? This is from the Buddha Sutra. And we dried the strips and that would enable us, at least the two of us, we would be able to continue through the desert. And the Buddha said, eating edible food is like that. When we eat food, it's like we're eating the flesh of our own sun. And that is very relevant for today's, what we see with the climate crisis. It's literally we are eating the flesh of our own sun in the way that we're eating.

He's saying if we don't eat mindfully, it's like we're eating the flesh of our own sun. We waste the food and food waste is a huge source of the CO2 going into the atmosphere. We cut down for us to have hamburger patties. We're really literally eating the flesh of future generations through our way of our relationship to food. So he used this shocking image in order to wake us up to see that there's cause and effect in what we eat. We have an effect. Even if we just eat vegetarian or totally vegan, it has an effect on the planet.

And so he used that shocking image of a couple eating their own baby boy to just wake up. Because that's shocking for us as human beings. I mean, that's every element of our body is like revolting when we think about doing such a thing. But I see that sometimes spiritual teachers, they have to use a strong teaching in order to get us to wake up to what's actually going on. And the second image for sense impressions is of a cow which has a skin disease. So its skin is kind of exposed. There's nothing protecting its flesh.

And so all kinds of insects and bugs get in there and the maggots, they eat the flesh of the cow. And they say, when our senses are not guarded, when we're not aware of what's coming in through our eyes, our ears, nose, tongue, body and mind, it is like we are that cow with a skin disease. It suffers so much because it has no protection from all these infesting insects and so forth. And the third volition is like there's a pit of ashes and a man is walking by and then a strong man grabs him and tries to drag him and throw him into that pit of

burning coals. A volition can be like that even though, and I think we've all, if we have some wisdom in our practice, we notice when sometimes we really know that something is not good for us, whether in a relationship with somebody or something we do for our work, ethically we feel it's not right. And yet our volition, our desire for that promotion, our desire for that recognition, it just impels us and we do it anyway. We're both the guy being thrown into the burning ashes and the guy throwing. Exactly. Our volition is like that strong man and we ourselves are getting pulled into that pit of coals. And then the last one that I already mentioned, the thief pierced by hundreds of

spears. It's a very interesting sutra. And the Thai teacher is one of the few masters who kind of really shine the light. I mean, it's in the Pali Canon, you can very early Buddhist texts, you see someone who kind of brought that precious teaching out. The preciousness of the food that we eat, not to take it for granted,

that couple would never take for granted their little baby boy. And also to see that the disastrous effect or way of eating can have on the planet. And so Dr. Walter Willett at the Harvard School of Public Health, I think is the Lancet E paper that he's been the principal author on, which is including I think more than 40 or 50 authors worldwide, is really about creating a world diet, which is something very close to the Mediterranean diet, the ancestral diet, which has been proven in so many studies to be healthy.

This is pointing a way forward for us to live on this planet. Even if we have 9 billion, 10 billion people, we can live and eat well, but we need to be mindful and look and see where our food is coming from and see how we can share the resources on this planet with not only other human beings but other living beings. And it is possible to live on the earth happily without eating the flesh of our child, but we need to have awareness and learning about where our food is coming from is one way to do that. Yeah, as you've explained it today, this issue of mindful eating has profound personal implications,

sort of intrapersonal within ourselves, interpersonal as well in terms of the role of the community and geopolitical. So it's no small issue. Before I let you go, is there anything that you were thinking that we should probably cover that we haven't had a chance to cover? I think that we enter into deep concentration on what the Buddha called a concentration on non-self when we can practice mindful eating. So that it's not just the interbeing aspect, but it's also the fact that this body itself

is just a process going on, right? There's no separate me or I in it. And that's a really wondrous existence, the Buddha said, when you get that insight. So I really invite everyone out there to observe yourself eating while you're eating, without thinking, I am this or I am that, or I am this person this person. There's just the eating going on. This is wondrous experience and somehow it works. And you don't need to be anybody. You just, you are becoming the food that you're eating.

And I feel like I never get tired of that realization. It's always bringing more joy, more happiness. And it's not just for my health, but it's actually for spiritual awakening. That's why I wish for everybody here that we can experience that. Because I think in there is the key to how we can leave a beautiful planet for future generations. It's the key to our own happiness actually. Yeah, I mean, I fully agree. It's hard to wrap your head around in some ways and back to the personal and geopolitical.

It's got both in there and I can't, some of the most profound moments for me in my meditation practice, especially on retreat or when I see that the food, the ideas, the air, everything is flowing through me. And so then that raises the question of what is this me thing anyway? Like I think I'm like a solid thing, but actually I'm a sieve. Yeah, right. And the atoms that make you up were parts of stars and they were recycled into other parts of the earth and the water.

It's a wondrous cycle of no birth, no death. There's only continuation. So that's why our teacher so often said a cloud never dies. The cloud becomes the rain, becomes the water, and becomes part of our body. It's something we need to get in touch with every day and when you do that then it becomes very easy to live this life on this planet no matter what the political regime, no matter what the particular crisis that we're facing at whatever given time. We really need people to have this realization day in and day out

for this planet to be a beautiful green bodhisattva for future generations to enjoy. Well said, Brother Fuffler. Before I really let you go here, if people want to learn more about you, listen to more of your talks, read anything you've written, where and how can they do that? Yeah, so actually I've been working on a book with a Dutch brother and our community, Brother Phop Sa, on mindful walking in nature, which involves, which includes mindful eating. It's called Walking Zen, Train Your Mind in Nature, and it's coming out next May,

I think, 27th from Penguin Random House and Parallax Press. So we'd be very happy to Random House and Parallax Press. So we'd be very happy to not only practice mindful eating together by using that book, whether with friends or, I mean, our hope with the book is that people would actually organize mindful hikes and mindful picnics out in nature so you can have a more kind of holistic experience, not just eating in your particular box or your office, but actually going outside and practicing mindful walking in the forest or whatever natural space you have near you and then sitting down and enjoying this lunch in silence that I spoke about and then, yeah, mindful conversation. Anyway, if you'd like to learn more about it, you can check out that book when it comes

out in May. And if I want to listen to your Dharma talks, are they available on the Plum Village website If you'd like to learn more about it, you can check out that book when it comes out in May. And if I want to listen to your Dharma talks, are they available on the Plum Village website or the Plum Village app? Yeah, you can look on the Plum Village website or the Deer Park Monastery where I live now. Deer Park Monastery YouTube channel. We'll put links in the show notes for everybody. So if you want to go deep with Brother Fahploo, we will help you do that. Brother, thank you very much. Really appreciate it.

Thank you, Dan. Yeah, thank you for the service you do for so many people for having this podcast. It's really wonderful. Thanks again to Brother Fahploo. It was great to talk to him. Also always great to have people on from the Plum Village tradition, love those guys. Don't forget to check out what we're doing over at danharris.com, we'd love your support, we've got a thriving little community popping up over there.

And finally, of course, I just want to say thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer.

And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondry.com slash survey.