Monday, January 2, 2012

Backtracking

I want to share a great exercise with you called "backtracking" as written in Joanna Poppink's book Healing Your Hungry Heart: Recovering From Your Eating Disorder.

In her book, Poppink explains "backtracking:"

"Pick an item of food. Trace it back to where it began. Go back as far as you can, paying attention to the hands, minds, hearts, and backs of the people who were involved in the chain that brought it to your table.
For example, consider an apple. Take it from your hand to your refrigerator, to the grocery bag you carried it in to your car, to the market display, to the storage bin, to the truck, the loading dock, and all the people who picked and packed the apple, to the farmers who planted the seeds. See if you can get to the orchard and the individual tree."


This great exercise can be practiced with any item of food, and also with anything at all. It becomes a mind and soul-expanding practice that helps to make your presence more real in the world by making your food and the forces that brought your food to you more real to you. This is also a great exercise to help you cultivate gratitude and appreciation for the things in your life that sustain, nourish, and enrich you.

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