Before the Beginning—Arrive
Welcome to Discover Mindful Eating. The book you are about the explore is an journey into mindfulness itself, both for you and your clients. It requires a sense of trying something new and of delving into little-explored areas of awareness. But most of all, it asks of you and your clients to arrive fully in the moment.
Mindfulness is as close as the next second. It’s a matter of turning on your awareness—of arriving just where you are. It can be that simple.
The process of acknowledging the moment before you is called “arriving,” and this simple step can be viewed as the most important in creating a mindfulness practice. All the steps that follow rely on this initial step. You might be use to thinking about arriving as something that happens at the end of a journey, but here, arriving begins the journey.
Arriving at food, at eating, at the body, at the table, are all crucial elements of the program ahead. But arriving is an important part of your activities as well. Learning to arrive each time you meet a client, when you introduce yourself, when you listen deeply to the client’s words and longings and ideas is the essence of mindfulness. This is because when you open yourself to being 100% present with your client, you become available to the moment at hand.
Before you read on, you can take a minute to feel yourself arrive right now, no matter where you might be reading this. Take a deep breath or two. Invite your mind to put down any residual chatter. Feel the page under your fingers. Relax and become alert. Arrive fully, with great joy and purpose, and watch what wonders flow from the moments that follow.
This is the essence of the practice you are about to discover.
