Leading a Good Life, by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

This short, lucid piece appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of Buddhadharma. As is often the case with Chögyam's writing, I found it very clear, easy to understand, and enlightening.

The practice of meditation is not so much about a hypothetical attainment of enlightenment as about leading a good life. In order to learn how to lead a good life, a spotless life, we need continual awareness that relates with life constantly, directly, and very simply.

The attitude that brings about mindfulness and awareness is not an opinionated one. Mindfulness is simply about a sense of being; you are in contact, you are actually being there. When you sit on the meditation cushion, you feel you are sitting there and that you actually exist. You don't need to encourage or sustain your sense of being.

We might actually question what is the purpose of meditation, what happens next, but actually the idea of meditation is to develop an entirely different way of dealing with things, where you have no purpose at all. One is not constantly on the way to somewhere, or rather one is on the way and at the destination at the same time.

Meditation is not a quick cure or cover-up for the complicated or embarrassing aspects of ourselves. It is a way of life. It is extremely important to persist in our practice without second-guessing ourselves through disappointments, elations, or whatever. We might actually begin to see the world we carry with us in a more open, refreshing way. Meditation is very much a matter of exercise, a working practice. It is not a matter of going into some imaginary depth, but of widening and expanding outward.

The end of overeating, by David Kessler

My mind is currently being blown by this book. It concerns the science of human appetite and the biological reasons why we overeat. I'm only at the end of Ch 1, but the way he describes how the trifecta of fat, sugar and salt screw up our brain's reward mechanisms and make us crave those foods, then overindulge in them once we get them is fascinating. He also describes how the first epidemiological studies in the early 90s first identified that obesity rates were climbing, and what a huge deal it was to confirm that fact scientifically because humans have basically had stable weights for thousands of years. What began in the 70s and 80s with the burgeoning of commercial fast food and the corporate processed food supply chain appear to have led directly to our currently skyrocketing obesity rates.

In a Food, Inc. kind of way, the author also describes a meeting with a food industry insider who admitted off the record that commercial food scientists make specific, targeted efforts at creating the most perfect mix of fat, sugar and salt that seems to make people become addicted to the stuff. I find this terribly enlightening and I look forward to the dietary recommendations the author lays out later in the book. I suspect that they'll be common sense, like Michael Pollan's edict, eat food, not too much, mostly plants, but there's something very compelling and reasonable about the way Kessler writes about this topic that might resonate more strongly with me.

He's also a former fatty, which makes his message ring that much truer.