On Eating and Nibbana

At the monastery, dinner is not served. After the midday meal, there is only tea at 6 pm.

Due to a medical condition, I was advised to eat something before bed, a requirement I find genuinely difficult. I eat very little by nature, and counting or measuring food is foreign to me. A volunteer suggested I return to the dining hall to reheat what remained from lunch. Instead, I went to a nearby grocery store to find something with the calories listed on the package. I found a cucumber sandwich and felt a small relief. My quest was complete.

I came back and ate too quickly, not mindful at all, rushing to return for the evening chanting. By the time we gathered, I could barely focus. The physical discomfort pulled me far from my practice. The monks chanted “freedom from physical suffering.” I prayed that for myself in that moment.

The next morning the fullness remained. Even tea felt like a chore. I sat with my cup half-empty after thirty minutes, holding it for its warmth rather than drinking, and truly wondered why this was being asked of me.

Then the Buddha gave me peace. The food was not punishment. It was grounding, a return to the body, to this life, to this practice. Half an hour for half a cup of tea is itself mindfulness. The point is not consuming, but experiencing. Experiencing what arises. What falls. What remains.

Buddha pointed me to the Nibbana Sutta:

“There is, monks, an unborn – unbecome – unmade – unfabricated. If there were not that unborn – unbecome – unmade – unfabricated, there would not be the case that escape from the born – become – made – fabricated would be discerned.”

– Nibbana Sutta: Unbinding

Because everything in Samsara is conditioned, impermanent, subject to cause and effect, there must exist an unconditioned, unchanging reality beneath it all. Without this unfabricated ground, liberation would be impossible. And yet, as the Buddha knew firsthand, enlightenment is not only possible but is the soul’s ultimate purpose in the earthly plane.

I know this teaching in my bones. In past lives I have been a sage, a scholar, a scientist, spending those lifetimes in the mind, studying what the body needs versus what the spirit wants. And here I am now: a young woman whose nature is to rely on prana more than food, being called back to the physical by something I find deeply uncomfortable. But it is just another experience of Anicca. Impermanence. It comes. It goes.

Our sufferings may differ, but the nature of suffering is the same. We hold on to what is familiar, dreading tomorrow for what we did or didn’t do yesterday.

May those who seek the truth know that the truth has always been with you, unborn, unbecome, unmade, unfabricated.

The tea sat unfinished.