Mindfulness and savoring 71 grasp the key issue of his meditations, the subdued student quietly took his leave and headed back up the mountain. In its full essence, as the story reminds us, mindfulness needs to become a way of life. Becoming more mindful is the way we extract more enjoyment and pleasure, in their healthiest forms, from life. Life as a human is full of much fear, heartache and pain. The amazing thing about us humans is our capacity to love and be heroic in the face of this fear, heartache and pain. To counter these negatives we need to become masters at extracting as much pleasure as we can from those opportunities that present themselves to us. We do this by becoming more mindful, more connected to these times in our days. We need to train ourselves to notice the beauty in life; a child’ s laugh, a glorious day, a perfect flower, a funny joke, an act of kindness. Maybe you can now see how this relates to food – which I will come to in a moment. For some time after I was first exposed to this thinking, over a decade ago now, I trained myself to ask myself the two Zen questions. What I liked about this exercise was its practicality. I could ask myself this question several times a day. Sometimes, several times an hour. I was surprised to find how often my mind was not present with my body but off somewhere else. And only then did I begin to appreciate its full power to deal with another Western problem of epidemic proportions – stress management. A full explanation of how to use mindfulness to deal with stress is outside of the scope of this book. In simple terms, while we are fully in the present we cannot experience anxiety about the past or the future. If you suffer from anxiety you will find that the better you get at being mindful the less anxiety you will feel. This is because rarely is our moment-by-moment life unpleasant. Even for people going through difficult times in their life 90 % of the moments in their week are not unpleasant. Focusing on these moments, mother nature, and our interactions with people who care about us – just to name a few