Meditations on taste

Allow me, if I may, to introduce you to a novel meditative practice. It is, of course, drawing on a variety of existing traditions, and is in most ways quite mundane, but I think it is very likely a meditation that the specific details of which have never been performed until I invented it recently. Or maybe they have, I don’t know. Meditators are weird.

The meditation starts off in a relatively classic mode: Find yourself a comfortable seating position. I use a meditation cushion and a fairly relaxed cross-legged position (certainly not a full lotus on the ground), but sitting on a comfy chair is of course acceptable. You won’t be able to do this particular meditation lying down.

Now, having found your meditation position, take your glass of Cynar and take a sip.

Ah, yes, sorry. I should have mentioned. You’ll need a glass of Cynar for this.

If you want to replicate my practice perfectly you’ll need the 70 proof version:

But I’d expect normal Cynar will work just as well. Probably most Amaros are approximately equivalent for these purposes, although you’d ideally want one with a proper bitter finish to it, and the Cynar 70 proof is at a nice middle ground of drinkable and challenging.

I recommend a small glass (probably a single shot’s worth), served over ice. You can certainly drink it without the ice, but I’m not sure at this point in your spiritual development you are ready for Cynar without ice.

For those unfamiliar, Cynar is an artichoke-based herbal liqueur. I was introduced to it years ago by a Swiss friend who described it as “This absolute nonsense drink mostly drunk by Italian grandmothers. I really want cocktail bars to pick it up as the next hot spirit just because that would be funny”. It only took a handful of years before they did. Cynar was big for a while. Maybe it still is, but I’m less connected to the cocktail scene these days.

I once gave my friend Mike a sip of my Cynar. He blinked a couple of times, looked confused, and said “That’s really interesting”. “Would you like some more?” I asked. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard Mike say “no” quite so emphatically before or since.¹

Anyway, where were we. Ah, yes, meditating.

Sit down on your meditation cushion, couch, or other convenient location. Maybe close your eyes, maybe just let them go out of focus for a bit.

Now, sip your Cynar… mindfully.

Hold it in your mouth, try to keep the whole of your attention on the sensation of it. Move it around your tongue, notice how the tastes change as you move it around. Those nice, tidy, maps of where your tastebuds are on your tongue are a bit fake, but they’re not totally fake and you can absolutely tell where on your tongue bitterness is most intense when you’re drinking Cynar. You can also find the sweet receptors.² In general, take the opportunity to truly attend to and experience the Cynar, with as little distraction as possible.

You can, eventually, swallow this sip of Cynar of course. Pay attention to how the taste changes as you swallow it. You’ll get a lot more of the bitterness. It’s probably the most intense part of the sip. It’s not exactly enjoyable, but it works well as a complement and contrast to the rest of the flavours.

Keep the Cynar in the focus of your attention. Every time you notice your mind wandering, gently bring your attention back to it. You don’t have to maintain it as your meditation object until you finish (I confess I haven’t, and am still drinking it as I write this), but it wouldn’t be a bad idea. If you don’t, I recommend continuing to drink each sip of it mindfully.

Why do this practice? Well, I wanted to find out what it was like. And I figure if David Chapman can drink piss without even using Tantra, Cynar with basic mindfulness is probably a more achievable goal for most people.

Also, pleasingly, it turns out I actually genuinely do like Cynar. I wasn’t sure this was going to be the case.

It’s not that the entire experience of drinking it is fully pleasant - there’s an intensity to the bitterness of the finish each time you swallow that is just on the edge of unpleasant, and there’s a bit of an alcohol burn to it that you naturally get from drinking a 40% ABV spirit. But most of the flavours are neutral to pleasant, and those that are not are both interesting and complementary.

This isn’t often the case for me when I do mindful eating practices, and as a result I typically avoid them (I don’t meditate much at all, truth be told). One reason is, it turns out, that I’m often wrong about what I like, and there’s something genuinely unpleasant about discovering that you don’t like a thing you thought you liked.

Prior to drinking the Cynar this evening, I’d eaten a couple of these mindfully:

I’d previously thought of these as very nice sweets. Arguably they even are. But when I tried eating them mindfully, they tasted… dissonant. Fake. The “nice candy” flavour dissolved into three different flavours - sugar, acidity, and a simple fruit flavour, none of which integrated or complemented each other all that well. Better than my home made orange sweets certainly, but a not dissimilar experience.

In contrast, the Cynar flavours all blend well together. There’s a relatively continuous spectrum of flavours from the sweetness of the sugar to the bitterness of the wormwood that makes it feel like a well integrated flavour. Harmony, not dissonance.

After writing the above, I decided to try this again with a banana. It turns out I… maybe don’t like bananas? The primary flavour is OK, but at the end there is a lingering sickly flavour that I don’t like.

It’s possible that bananas are fine when I don’t try to eat them mindfully, but I’m not sure. Back in the 90s, my brother ruined the game Planescape Torment for me by teaching me to hear the random looping background noise of someone shouting “Boop boop bada boop”. I could never unhear it, and the game became markedly more annoying to play as a result. It’s like learning to notice bad keming in fonts - your experience of the world will forever be slightly more annoying.

Perhaps relatedly, I’ve learned recently that I’m remarkably sensitive to a particular flavour that I associate with overripe fruit - I find papaya repulsive as opposed to the normal opinion of it as merely bland. I get a lot of this flavour from passionfruit too, a fruit that people allege to be nice.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t like fruit, or even tropical fruit. Mango is great. Prickly pear is pretty good though not very interesting. I’m more of a berry man, personally, but I appreciate a wide range of fruit. I think. It’s just that some specific fruit flavours are very much not for me.

And, sadly, it turns out this might include bananas. It’s a different overripe fruit flavour, but it’s definitely the flavour I associate with overripe bananas. This banana was a bit ripe but not especially so, and now I’m going to have to go make myself some tea to wash away the flavour. Hopefully I won’t discover that I secretly dislike chamomile.

What’s especially infuriating about this whole experience is that I knew I didn’t like mindful eating. I’ve done this before and I disliked it. Right now I don’t know if I dislike it or not. Certainly I’m infuriated by it. But one of the reasons I’m infuriated by it is it turns out I was wrong about why I disliked it. Or, perhaps more likely, my internal experiences have changed in a way that makes the old reasons no longer relevant.

I’m happy to report that chamomile is fine by the way.

I’ve previously described my problems with mindful eating as it being too intense. The basic experience of focusing on the sensation overwhelms me, even with relatively simple flavours and textures. That doesn’t seem to be true any more.

I think part of that is that I’ve got better at handling intensity. I fixed most of my anxiety a few years back and it’s entirely possible that mindful eating has been fine ever since and I’ve only just noticed. More likely, some of the things I’ve done subsequently on emotional release have both increased my sense of safety and also given me a better baseline for how much I can handle. Maybe it’s something else, I don’t know.

In “Already Free”, Bruce Tift contrasts buddhist meditation with psychotherapy, and portrays them as usefully complementary disciplines. One of the things he highlights as a strength of meditative practices is that they allow you to experience your emotions and the world as just sensory data. They are things that are happening that you can observe non-judgementally, and evaluate your ability to handle them in and of themselves rather than reacting blindly to them. I think my newfound experience with intensity is something like that - it’s not necessarily that things are less intense (although I think they must be a bit), but that I’m more able to acknowledge that something is intense but that I can handle it.

Under this theory, it could be simply a natural consequence of meditative practice that I’m now better able to handle the experience of mindful eating. This would be an excellent theory except that, contrary to what you might reasonably assume from this post, I don’t actually meditate.

Another theory of course is that intensity is much easier to handle when slightly drunk, but I don’t think that theory holds water either - I had the candy before I had anything to drink and it was still fine, and most of the experience of meditating on the Cynar would have been before the alcohol hit.

Doing some experiments I think I have, somewhere along the way, picked up a skill of being able to directly experience sensation as just that. It’s an experience that I’m having, but one that I can choose how to respond to. e.g. at some point a few years ago I figured out where the mental levers were to go “Oh, that’s interesting” and attend to sensations of pain. They become much more manageable when you do, and you become more easily able to assess whether there’s anything to actually worry about. It doesn’t work for everything - for example I can’t do this to headaches - but it works for many things.³

Whatever the reason, apparently my belief that I can’t handle the intensity of attending to my experience is false - maybe it was always false and I got something wrong, or maybe I just learned how at some point and didn’t update my beliefs.

Ironically, the reason I’m finding out that I don’t like things I thought I liked is that I’m trying to learn to enjoy things.

A longstanding theoretical goal of my program is to experience more positive emotions. I wouldn’t say it’s been a wild success. I’ve learned many interesting things and improved many of of my experiences of the world. Certainly some positive emotions have become easier to access, and many negative ones have become lessened or more functional. But I wouldn’t exactly say I’m bubbling over with joy.

For various reasons I thought it would be a good time to have another run at it, and mindfully attending to specific experiences and finding out what about them I like seemed like a good starting point. If I can figure out what exactly it is I already enjoy, it’s a simple matter of creativity to seek out more of that. So I thought I would investigate the character of experience and see what I actually like about it.

And apparently when it comes to flavours… not much so far. Oh well. I guess that figuring out what you don’t like still helps you find things you like by process of elimination.

Also, more optimistically, it turns out that my self-image of the sorts of things I like isn’t completely wrong, and I do genuinely like Cynar. It’s really interesting.