Dinner Is Served (Mindfully)!

Many of the participants of this Springs Mindful Eating Workshop gathered last night to share some of their most delicious and healthy dishes, and somehow, no one included dessert, not even the hostess!

There was a red potato salad with freshly dug potatoes from the garden, a cold, refreshing yogurt-cucumber-dill soup, (again with fresh cucumbers from the garden), a black bean-papaya salad, a chickpea-kale salad, artichoke-spinach dip (easily eaten as a meal), a zesty oriental coleslaw, fresh pink lemonade, and veggie burgers of assorted varieties with tomato and lettuce.

Though we ate and talked (how exactly do they make those Chik-N-Patties to taste like fried chicken, anyway?),and generally carried on, there was the unspoken sense that we were participating together in a conscious awareness of what we had put on our plates, who had created which dish and how, where the ingredients had originated from, and how our consumption not only fed the body but also the heart-mind, the soul. And when we feed the soul, we feed the world of Hungry Ghosts.


In a sense, we practiced a form of liturgy, a form of Oryoki, each silently considering just how much is enough.

It is a question we can ask every day, in every aspect of our living, as we practice living directly out of our immediate experience, one breath at a time.

We laughed when we realized there was no dessert. Someone mentioned heading to Leo's for some of his excellent homemade ice cream, but no one moved until the sun had long set and it was time to head home.

Leo's will be another foray into mindful eating!

If you live in the Carlisle area, you have several great choices for purchasing local foods from Farmers Markets. Farmers On The Square in Carlisle runs every Wednesday afternoon 3-7 p.m., until early Fall.

You can find more information about the Market at www.farmersonthesquare.com.

Under construction is a page of farmer's favorite recipies!

Other interesting sights in Pa include:

Pennsylvania "Buy Fresh, Buy Local" at

www.buylocalpa.org and Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture at www.pasafarming.org

Check it out!