Have you watched a toddler while away his/her time? I am watching my granddaughter grow up daily. There are many moments when she is so engrossed in thought. I used to wonder what she was thinking. I would keep on asking her. I would ask if she was in communion with Brahma our creator. I would ask her to share what he told her.
Then when she is in play she would be so absorbed in her make-believe world that she becomes totally oblivious of her surroundings.
There were moments when she would spin round and round. She spins and spins her body until she is dizzy. But she enjoys doing it and goes for it over and over again. This I came to know was one of the ways the chakra is activated by an ancient Tibetan practice. It is the first and one among the sequence called 5 Tibetans.
First Tibetan(Source: https://upliftconnect.com/the-five-tibetans/)
Stand erect with arms strong, outstretched and horizontal with the shoulders. Now spin around in a clockwise direction until you become slightly dizzy. You can employ a ballet-like technique of keeping your eyes on one spot and then returning to that spot when you turn your head in a full revolution.There is only one caution: you must turn from left to right. Breathing: Inhale and exhale deeply as you do the spins.
Children are the ones who are living in the present moment. Give them ice cream and watch them savor the desert. They look at it, feel it with their fingers, take it to their lips, taste it with the tip of their tongue and only then begin to eat it. Watch an adult on the other hand. He would immediately take large bites of it, want to comment or talk about other things while eating, not savoring the uniqueness or the distinct taste and texture of the food taken in. We are distracted by other thoughts too while eating. Now we seem to have become a nation of couch potatoes, munching while watching television without even knowing what goes into our mouth.
Lama Surya Das in his "Awakening the Buddha Within - Tibetan Wisdom for the Western World, Bantam Books, 1997, teaches us the chewing meditation. "Eating meditation is a marvelous way of putting ourselves in touch with now-ness. It can really slow us down and make us more aware of compulsive behavior", he writes. This meditation does try one's patience to the limit he says. For instance, he says we are accustomed to eating raisins by the handful. Here we take in one at a time. But before we put it into our mouth we feel it, we look at it as if we have never seen it before. We are taught to direct our total attention to the raisin, which otherwise we hardly do. We are asked to examine it thoroughly. Smell it. Only then do we begin to chew it slowly, actually tasting it for the very first time. Chew till it becomes juice.
Our stomach would very much appreciate the juice rather than chunks of food swallowed hurriedly. In old age, there is a reason for the teeth to fall, for it would force us to substitute solid foods to liquids as our internal digestive system and its co-partners have sort of resigned to a quiet life then. Taking this into consideration, nature decided for us that we should not shove in more than they can handle. This is substantiated by medical findings at https://www.webmd.com/digestive-disorders/features/digestive-health-aging#1
One of the most common things we see, certainly as people are getting into their 60s and 70s, may be a change in bowel habits, predominantly more constipation," says Ira Hanan, MD. Your digestive system moves food through your body by a series of muscle contractions. Just like squeezing a toothpaste tube, these contractions push food along your digestive tract, Hanan says. As we age, this process sometimes slows down, and this can cause food to move more slowly through the colon. When things slow down, more water gets absorbed from food waste, which can cause constipation.
And as we age, we start to have more health problems that require medications. Several common medications can cause constipation.
People often become less active as they age, says Ellen Stein, MD, and being inactive can make you constipated. Some people may avoid drinking too many fluids so they don't have to run to the bathroom all day long. Between urinating more and drinking less, you can become dehydrated.Then you have the aging colon and all the problems related to it says Hanan.
While aging alone doesn't make your stomach more prone to ulcers, the chronic use of NSAIDs does raise your risk. More often than not older patients don't have pain from ulcers, says Hanan, but they can have painless gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding.
Like the colon, the esophagus can also slow down with age, moving food through more slowly. This can cause problems swallowing food or fluids.
After age 50, the risk increases for developing polyps, or small growths, in the colon. Polyps may be noncancerous, they may become cancer, or they may be cancer.
So should not we rethink and retrain ourselves to eat right, right now to safeguard us from future ailments?
Eating meditation is exactly what my granddaughter does. She has a hundred and one questions asked before she puts any food into her mouth. It is the same question over and over again, asking as if that was the very first time she saw the food. She would want to look at it first as if seeing it for the very first time. She holds it, takes a teeny weeny bite first, taste it, if it agrees to her palate only then does she swallow, otherwise, it comes to our face. But the sad thing is we hurry them up because we have other chores to attend too.
Ervin Laszlo gives us an insight into the mind of the child, besides talking about the Akashic records.
"Young children up to the age of 4 or 5 are reincarnation personalities we are told. They don't distinguish between their own identity and the identity they pick up. They are permanently in the open region of activity, alpha region or theta region. Children are in that region until they are 8 or 9 years old. Therefore they are open to this information. So they pick it up, it feels to them that that's who they are."
Could this be the reason newborns are known to smile and cry as if in conversation with another being? As they are picking up messages from around them and elsewhere, they do not have an identity of their own till later. They tend to mimic the parents way and others. We are told too that "Kuzhanthaiyum Deivamum ondru", that the child and God are one. Are they picking up the personalities of divine souls? If that is true, I guess we have to learn from the child rather than have the child follow our dictates.