Chewing, Programmable and Sogyal Rinpoche
September 7, 2025
8 min read
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Newsletter
{Body}
Chewing your food
There’s an old saying: “Drink your meal, eat your water.” Aka, chew your food so thoroughly that it becomes liquid, while sipping water as slowly as you can.
Your mouth functions as a preliminary stomach, initiating digestion through mechanical breakdown and enzymatic action. When you chew thoroughly, your saliva becomes loaded with digestive enzymes like amylase, which begins breaking down starches before they even reach your stomach. This pre-digestion significantly reduces the workload on your digestive system, increasing surface area, and in turn increasing the bioavailability of the food’s nutrients.
Saliva also acts as a chemical messenger, signaling to your gut exactly what's coming down the pipeline. The more you chew, the more detailed information your digestive system receives about the incoming food — its pH, nutrient content, and so on. This allows your stomach and liver to prepare the appropriate digestive juices.
Beyond biochemistry, thorough chewing also forces you to slow down and actually taste your food. This mindful eating activates your parasympathetic nervous system, the "rest and digest" mode that optimizes nutrient absorption. When you rush through meals, your sympathetic nervous system remains activated, diverting energy away from digestion.
{Mind}
The mind is programmable
You assume the thoughts you have are being created by you. But your mind is hardware, not software; it adopts and runs whatever program comes its way. Unlike a computer that requires deliberate installation of new apps, your mind automatically downloads and executes any content it encounters (as long as there’s enough repetition or emotional intensity associated with it.)
Consider what happens after binge-watching a series or listening to hours of a particular podcast. The characters' voices literally appear in your head, right? You find yourself thinking in their speech patterns, adopting their perspectives, even hearing their actual voices commenting on your daily activities.
The same process occurs with anything/everything you consume: news, social media, overheard conversations, books, music. Your subconscious mind’s job is not to logically parse these inputs, deciding which ones to adopt and which ones to toss. It simply acts as a receiver, seeing patterns and (eventually) generating thoughts in similar frequencies.
This fact makes humans very susceptible to propaganda and programming. Almost everyone is out to change your mind — me included.
It also creates a profound problem with mental identification. When you think "I believe this" or "I feel that," you're claiming ownership of thoughts that almost always were planted by someone else. Corporate jingles deliberately engineered to create positive associations, repeated exposure to political messaging until it crystallizes into personal conviction, targeted ads that slowly reshape your taste in clothes.
To identify with these implanted thoughts as "yours" means you end up defending positions, fighting internal battles, and making life decisions based on mental content that was never even yours to begin with.
Feel free to listen to the meditation below for a deeper explanation, and a few suggestions for developing immunity to mental programming.
{Soul}
Reality is a living Field, not a mechanical assembly line. Experiences don't roll off a conveyor belt in a predictable order, engineered to specification — they bloom in accord with what’s been planted and tended.
A rich, tender fig is the result of favorable conditions and adequate care. A dry, tasteless peach is the result of unfavorable conditions and inadequate care.
It could not be more simple than that.
Tend to your garden every day, even when all you have grown are unimpressive shoots demanding your energy without bestowing any gifts. In time watch as your delicate care and rapt attention pay off and feed you for seasons to come.
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