Collaborating with nutritional professionals, mindful health advocates, chefs, and food systems experts has created a powerful framework for empowering communities through health and wellness. Many narratives emerged from the realization that the act of preparing, sharing, and consuming food has become detached from its traditional cultural contexts. Mindful Eating for the Beloved Community is a new approach to disrupting the current lack of awareness by cultivating a focus on healthy food and approaching health equity as an expression of dignity, self-respect, and self-actualization. The goal is to remind people that investing in our own health is an essential way to tend to ourselves, increase our productivity, and care for our environment and community. We aim to reconnect food to family, community, culture, and faith.
Interactive Workshops and Mindful Meals Participants gather to share a healthy meal, using traditional foods and recipes that can be replicated and incorporated at family and community gatherings. Six critical questions to foster understanding: What is a food system? How am I taking care of myself? Am I present when preparing food? Am I mindful of the food I am preparing? Do I appreciate the food I am serving? Am I mindful of others? Can this help me become a better leader and role model?
“Feelings, whether of compassion or irritation, should be welcomed, recognized, and treated on an absolutely equal basis; because both are ourselves. The tangerine I am eating is me. The mustard greens I am planting are me. I plant with all my heart and mind. Nothing should be treated more carefully than anything else. In mindfulness, compassion, irritation, mustard green plant, and teapot are all sacred.”