Imagine you are a professor at the Harvard Medical School and an active psychotherapist. Is it going to do your reputation any good to tell people to listen to a raisin? It might.
Getting to know a raisin very well, in every way possible, is a famous exercise advocated by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn. He is a biological researcher who took a course in meditation and mindfulness and realized from it that people at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center who had tough cancer treatments could benefit from the same things he was learning.
Amazon.com and the Amazon-owned company Audible.com that sells audio books are both selling more of the Great Courses. I have purchased and listened to many of the audio versions of Great Courses but I am just beginning to pay attention to the Amazon sources for them. I just started "The Science of Mindfulness" by Prof. Ronald D. Siegel of the Harvard Medical School. It is excellent.
When Siegel is explaining exercises to increase one's habits of paying attention to what is happening right now, right in front of our nose, and in our mind right now, he includes Kabat-Zinn's raisin work. As part of awareness of everything you see, hear, touch, smell and taste, as part of paying strong attention to what you eat as you eat it, you can get to know your food in detail. You can examine a raisin, an apple, a cracker fully and slowly. You can listen carefully to any sounds that come from touching or biting or chewing your food. You can pay the fullest attention to chewing and swallowing, to sensations of hunger and satiation. You can know your food more completely. You may find you want less of it and have more satisfaction at the same time.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
