From Medication to Meditation

I don’t see that there is any other psychotherapy than love

No other animal on Earth is such a problem, an anxiety, a tension, a disease, an illness, in the way man is. And this condition itself has given man all growth, all evolution, because “disease” means that one cannot be happy with where one is; one cannot accept what one is

I hate being overweight but can’t lose any weight for very long in spite of all the diets I have tried…

So smell the food, look at the food. There is no hurry…take time. Make it a meditation. Even if people think you have gone mad, don’t be worried. Just look at it from all sides. Touch it with closed eyes, touch it with your cheek. Feel it in every way; smell it again and again. Then take a small bite and chew it, enjoy it; let it be a meditation. A very small quantity of food will be enough and will give you more satisfaction. ✀

Many experiments have been done. If your nose is completely closed and then something is given to you, you cannot taste it. Then you will understand that the taste was more smell than taste. If your eyes are closed, you cannot taste it even that much, because the color, the appeal to the eyes, is no longer there. They have done beautiful experiments: eyes closed, nose completely closed, and then they give you something; you cannot even tell what it is. They may give you onion and you cannot say that it is onion because much depends on the smell. That’s why when you have a cold you cannot enjoy food, because the smell is not there, the taste is not there. When people are suffering from a cold they start eating spicy food because only then can they feel a little tingling

So whenever you are eating, chew more, because the enjoyment is just above the throat. Below the throat there is no taste – nothing of the sort – so why be in a hurry? Just chew it more, taste it more. And to make this taste more intense, do all that can be done. When you are eating something, first smell it. Enjoy the smell of it because half the taste consists of smell.

The second thing: when you eat, chew it well. Don’t swallow it in a hurry, because if it is oral, you enjoy it in the mouth, so why not chew it more? If you take ten bites of something you can enjoy one bite, chew it ten times more. It will almost be like taking ten bites if your enjoyment is only of the taste.

So first start learning something which is natural and which will come because we have only forgotten; it is there in the body. When you are going to take your breakfast, close your eyes and see what you want; what your desire really is. Don’t think about what is available; simply think what your desire is, and then go and find that thing and eat it. Eat as much as you want. For a few days just go with it. By and by you will see that now no food beckons you.

It will take a few days, even a few weeks for you to come to feel what appeals to you. Eat as much as you want of what appeals to you. Don’t bother about what others say. If ice cream appeals to you, eat ice cream. Eat to your satisfaction, to your heart’s desire, and then suddenly you will see that there is satisfaction. And when you feel satisfied, the desire to stuff disappears. It is an unsatisfied state that makes you stuff yourself more and more and still to no purpose. You feel full and still unsatisfied, so the problem arises.

From everywhere the bottle is calling you, beckoning, “Come here.” And suddenly you start feeling thirsty. That thirst is false. I’m not saying don’t drink Coca-Cola – but let it hum; make it a point.