Reclaiming Spaciousness: Reflections On The Conscious Food Workshop
From April 25th to May 4th, the Life Itself Bergerac hub was host to the 'Nourriture D’Eveil' residency, an integrated conscious food workshop, facilitated by Valérie Duvauchelle. In this blog post, Valérie shares her reflections on this experience.
It is the invisible territory of food that we have been searching for, this space behind desires, opinions, and positions that cannot be separated from our posture in the world nor from the question of identity.
It was therefore the question of intimacy that we explored during these 10 days, with practices that allowed the deep word to emerge, the word that is no longer hidden behind fixations.
Thus, every afternoon, we engaged in this sympoiesis, a "letting go with" what is discovered in the reassured vulnerability of the circles.
Here are the different activation protocols we experimented with:
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Moving debate, allowing us to hear all the angles of a subject and to listen to different views with respect
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Mandala of truth, allowing us to put down our anger, our despair but also our emptiness in front of our food today
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Open-ended sentences to be completed, allowing us to express to the other our feelings for the world
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Contemplation of the mirror of nature
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Meditation of the imaginary kitchen
From these times together, sitting in openness, one word kept coming up: space and from day to day the feeling that our body was transforming, as if our reality was expanding.
And with the open space, fluidity was invited, laughter, creativity, joy, quite simply.
Space is also what we found in the kitchen where I shared the intuitive methodology of the kitchen of benevolence (practice of the Zen temples updated) which is based precisely on the void. Whether it is through the neutral cereal, the alternation of flavors and textures, the silence in the kitchen or at the table, our ability to deal with it without further injunction, it is the subject of the encounter with the living authorized by the place discovered. Of course, the encounter with the ingredients that we touch, that we wash, but also with the others, all the others, all the things that our eyes meet and that come to life because they are looked at.
We left enthusiastically and with the joy of having found our place again, the joy in the kitchen of having nothing else to do but to be the activator of the elements, in a framework that is both efficient and creative, and in this posture, the joy of being able to sit in the world in a more serene way.
After these 10 days, too short for all, I could see how much unnecessary stress, tension and responsibility had been lifted from the shoulders of the participants and how the joy of cooking for others had been transformed into something much more peaceful.
The abandonment, the joy of doing, the effortless movement, the right intention is the whole practice of the community cook and this is what manifested itself during our time together .
Deep gratitude.
Valerie D.H Duvauchelle
