According to Buddhist principles, there are four kinds of
nutriments that lead to either happiness or suffering. These nutriments are
edible food, sense impressions, volition, and consciousness. You see examples
of all of these nutriments in your everyday life. It is what you choose to do
with each of them and how you choose to water them that will determine how much
you suffer or how happy you will become.
The first
nutriment is edible food. We need to pay attention to what we eat ingest so we
can preserve a healthy life style and well-being for ourselves and for our
family. “Much of our suffering comes from not eating mindfully. We have to
learn ways to eat that preserve health and well-being of our body and our spirit.”
(page 32) We need to think about how much suffering went into getting our food
and try to minimize that for our own well-being. We feel better about what we
eat when less pain went into making that meal. Also what we put into our bodies
should never be any type of toxin. When we smoke and drink alcohol, we are
putting toxins into our body. These toxins eat away at ourselves and our
family. When children see us putting these toxins into our body, they think it
is ok to do so too, and it ends up hurting them. We need to be mindful of
everything we put in our body not only for our own well-being, but the
well-being of those around us too. If you want to enhance eating well, you need
to be mindful of everything you eat. Don’t ingest toxins, but ingest things
that help your body and will have a positive impact on you. Doing this could
easily increase your happiness in the long run. I have seen a lot of how food
can affect you in either good or bad ways too. When I eat desserts too much, I
can see myself being temporarily happy, but on the long run it does not help.
It causes way more suffering compared to the happiness you get. Instead, when I
eat healthy options I feel so much better, especially the next day when I go
for a run. I am able to run longer and harder and I feel so much better at the
end of the run. A lifestyle with mindful eating is a much happier one.
The
nutriment of sense impressions is another one that is very important to be
mindful of. When we look around, hear things, smell them, and sense them, our
body’s sense impressions are being used. Being mindful of how we sense things
and what we allow to stay in our mind determines how much pain we will feel or
how happy we can become. “Advertisements that stimulate our craving for possessions,
sex, and food can be toxic.” (page 33) If we allow these ideas to take over our
senses, we feed our negative feelings such as fear, anger, and violence. These
feelings cause us pain and suffering every day, but if you are able to be
mindful so that you allow yourself to sense only the good senses and ignore the
bad ones, you can protect yourself from feeling suffering and make yourself
much happier. Too live a happy life; make sure you and your family do not
ingest too many toxic sense impressions. Keep yourself mindful of what you are
sensing and judge whether or not it will help you be happier. Let the good
sense impressions into your life and keep the toxic ones out of your life. Sense impressions occur all the time every
single day to us. I have been subjected
to so many as a child, where I would watch television for hours on end. This
was a very unhealthy lifestyle because I let everything in. Only now do I
realize how much those shows and advertisements caused nothing but pain and
suffering because I let it all in. Now I practice mindfulness of what I watch
to keep out as much suffering as possible and to create as much happiness as I
can.
“The third
nutriment is volition…- the desire in us to obtain whatever it is we want.”
(page 34) This desire we all have causes us pain. We do everything in our power
to fulfill our volitions, and they end up hurting us more than helping. Because
they are our volitions, we believe they will make us happy. This is not always
true because getting to that point is often difficult and filled with a lot of
pain and suffering. We always want more and more and can never be satisfied,
but we need to realize that this is just a vicious cycle that causes more and
more pain to be thrust upon us. If you want to free yourself from these pains,
you need to wish to be free of your volitions and enjoy the wondrous life you
have and your surroundings. People always strive for more and more and never
look back at what they have accomplished thus far. If you see what a wonderful job you have done,
Desire |
The fourth
and last of the nutriments is consciousness. “Our consciousness is comprised of
all the seeds sown by our past actions and the past actions of our family and
society. Every day our thoughts, words, and actions flow into the sea of our
consciousness and create our body, mind, and world.” (page 36) When we fill our
Consciousness |
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