The Sense of Taste

How does your soul savour life? Or what in your life does your soul savour?

I love food.  It so delights my senses with smells, textures, flavors, colors, and shapes.  But now I am feeling seduced by my senses because inner maturity wakes me up to the reality that what I eat needs to delight my body, not my senses. My senses get my attention and they give me a sensation that becomes a perception but then I must seek the substance living behind the perception.  I must engage my selfhood and seek the meaning the perception offers. And that goes for every morsel I put in my mouth and every perception I put into my soul.

With the sense of taste, we suddenly have a new, more active relationship to the perception then those five senses that have come before.  We can spit out anything that does not please our sense of taste. We can decide to swallow only what tastes good. 

There is a more developed relationship to flavors beyond easy choices of like and dislike.  We can acquire taste - learn to find pleasure in what we formally found nothing pleasing and rejected.  My acquired food tastes are olives, blue cheese, liver, sushi, etc.  I love them all even though I found them utterly disgusting when I was younger.

Now take the notion of acquired tastes into your soul functions.  What thoughts have you acquired a feeling for?  What feelings do you express, even celebrate now that in the past you found unbearable?  And your will, your energy, your disciplined practices...what strength of attention and force of engagement has developed in your life?

What soul tastes would you be willing to acquire if you knew you would find truth, beauty, harmony, goodness in digesting a new soul diet?  Would you let go of your familiar identities? Your convenient prejudices? Your habitual behaviors? What exotic and nutritious tastes have you been unwilling to try? Now is the time to be adventurous in your tasting. Seek out flavors that heal, that liberate, that empower. 

This week chew on a new food for your soul - read a challenging book, practice a different meditation, listen to different music, write in your journal from a new perspective or focus on feelings you find difficult to swallow. Notice all the subtle new tastes.  Just imagine acquiring a new taste every week of your life...how wise you would be.