PAGE 3

Feasting On Feeling


So far we've covered four senses: taste, smell, sight, and hearing. The remaining sense, touch, can provide the most amazing feasts yet. Leading the list of tactile feasts is good sex—need I say more? A luxurious massage can be added to or substituted for this kind of pleasure, depending on your state of mind and social calendar. Then there are other spa-type activities: facials, manicures, elaborate baths. Just making sure you have appealing textures next to your skin can make the day feel festive. Flannel pajamas are a feast for a tired hide. So are fuzzy slippers or your favorite old T-shirt.

There's a sort of feeling called proprioception, the sensitivity that tells you how your body is positioned and how it's moving. Just lying down and relaxing can be a feast for the body, especially if you can get away with doing it for a few minutes in the middle of the day. Stretching, scratching, skipping, dancing—anything that moves your body in a pleasurable way can be a feast.

Another entry I'd put in this feasting category is that sublime nourishment, sleep. Our economy loses billions every year because of problems caused by widespread, chronic sleep deprivation. I myself slept for approximately 15 minutes between 1986 (when I started graduate school and had my first baby) and 1993 (when I finished my degree and sent my youngest child to preschool). Since then I've slept pretty much continuously. If your lifestyle doesn't permit you to sleep until you feel rested, commit to changing it. If you have insomnia, see a doctor. Reclaim naps not as the refuge of the lazy but as the birthright of every creature able to snooze. There may still be times when you won't be able to have as many sleep-feasts as you want, but these should be rare.

Feasting On Love


In the end, there is one sort of feast that eclipses all the other kinds put together, and that is a feast of love. If you don't know what I'm talking about, keep searching until you do. There are as many different love-feasts as there are moments when one person reaches out to another, and all of them are wonderful.

To me a feast of love is any instant (or hour or lifetime) when human beings exchange affection. I see my 14-year-old son and his friends giving each other gentle punches on the arm; that's a love-feast. A client tells me that I actually helped, and I tell him it was his doing, not mine; that's a love-feast, too. A crowd shows up to cheer for the runners in a marathon, and the runners wave back. Massive love-feast. It's true that sometimes we head hopefully toward what we think will be a love-feast, offer our hearts, and meet rejection. It's true that this hurts. But you'll find that love-feasts are so incredibly nourishing to your soul that it's worth the risk of heartbreak to attend even the smallest or most crowded one around.

Here are some ways to make sure you never miss a love-feast you could have attended. (1) In Benjamin Franklin's words, "If you would be loved, love and be lovable." Love-feasts are always potlucks: Each person must bring the ability to love, somehow, some way. If you're waiting for someone else to supply 100 percent of the love you need, find a therapist who's willing to accept reciprocation in the form of cash. (2) Don't hide love. If you feel it, express it—not to demand that others love you back, but simply to live outwardly the best of what you feel inwardly. The worst that can happen to your heart is not rejection by another person but failure to act on the love you feel. (3) If you have a choice between a feast of love and any other option, go with love.

Compared to other activities, love-feasts will mess up your life, complicate your career, wear you out, make you crazy. But I guarantee that when you look back over the time you've spent on earth, the feasts of love will be the events you'll remember most joyfully, the experiences that will make you glad you have lived.

Consciously choosing to have at least three square feasts a day may simply cause you to notice the sacred and wonderful ceremonies that already fill your life. Or it may remind you to discover and enjoy things you would otherwise never experience. Either way, it will ensure that you have a more joyful, balanced life, a life lived in the conscious pursuit of your dearest longings and grandest hopes. Now, that's what I call a healthy diet.

More Martha Beck Advice
From the May 2003 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine.
From the May 2003 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine

NEXT STORY

Next Story