SALT: A meditation to keep you "perfectly seasoned."

A practice that brings you back to yourself.

me, on a better day, feeling salty ;)

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There are a million reasons why we lose touch with who we are, why we get pulled off our center line, why we abandon ourselves from some job or some relationship or some idea of success that someone else gave us.

Listen, I get this.

Sometimes it’s a Major Life Event.

But often it’s just … the day to day.

We get so damn busy, going back to back to back to back to back. Rushing from one thing to the next.

Stress pulls us away. Caretaking can do it. Distraction and too much social media can definitely do it. Worry, self-doubt, jealously, feeling like we need to impress other people by presenting some shiny, polished, filtered version of ourselves can do it.

Really, anything can do it.

It’s that moment during a packed day when you look up and realize “Oh damn? Where did I go? I am definitely not where I say I am right now.”

It happened to me just last week.

It was a total curveball week. Sometimes they come your way. It’s just like that. I’m getting used to not being AS surprised or agitated when they happen.

My sweet, but still-almost 3-year-old kid was home all week from daycare and — despite what you may think of me as a well-meditated person — I am not so easy-breezy about this scenario.

By day 2 of being home as the PCG (“primary care giver”), I have forgotten my own name or that any place has ever existed for me in the outside world.

And then this week, I was mostly stuck at home myself with a very sexy case of full body hives, an unexpected allergic reaction to a prescription med. And only lying in bed in the air conditioning, mostly covered in cool wet towels, watching endless hours of Magnolia Network shows streamed on Hulu has gotten me through it. 🫠

At some point in all of this, I popped out to teach my Monday lunchtime meditation class at our Hudson Valley studio.

As I was driving to work, trying to remember my own name — let alone something to offer that was grounding, connecting, and coherent to my people — and I remembered a meditation that I created a few years ago for my program, 40 Early Mornings.

I call it “SALT.”

I have formal meditation teachers and understand where I fall in the distillation of different meditation lineages.

But mostly, I draw inspiration for my practice and my teaching from the real life wild of my everyday life.

My kids are my most influential meditation teachers because DAMN if they do not make me work with my own edges daily.

My marriage, my mothering, my writing, my small-business-ownering, my friendships, my community shaping and space holding — all of these are primary, yet everyday, sources from which I draw deep understanding and growth.

Also, the unshouting-to-be-heard, yet-infinitely-generous wisdom of the natural world around me could probably teach me everything I came here to know.

And … cooking!¹

I just love food. Cooking. Preparing a meal. Gathering people around it. Shopping for food in a beautiful way (give me a farmers market or a cheese shop or a roadside farm stand or a pick your own, any day! Place me in a gigantic supermarket and I am hopeless!).

And I love reading about food. Cookbooks are in my top-three literary genres, and I love curling up with a good one, filled with story, picture, and recipes that give FREEDOM, rather than proscribe dogma.²

So, here’s how cooking and meditation intersect in today’s essay and practice.

A few years ago, I watched the delightfully talented Samin Nosrat’s documentary on Netflix, based on her book of the same name: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.

As Samin waxed positively poetic about the characteristics and qualities of salt — I couldn’t help but see the parallels back to a meditation practice.

On the one hand, salt can certainly make food taste “salty,” especially when something is excessively seasoned.

But that’s not actually the point of salt (or a meditation practice!).

Salt’s primary function is to make things taste more like themselves. 

You salt a carrot to make it taste more like a carrot. 

You salt a piece of meat to bring out the essence of that particular cut. 

And in a similar way, we practice meditation so we can feel more like ourselves. 

The point of meditation isn’t actually to turn us into some fantasy version of something that we’re not and never will be. Calm, saint-like, unflappable, endlessly productive, patient, & accomplished just cause we get up at 5am to meditate, with the perfect morning routine — there’s just no guarantee.

Sorry/not sorry to burst that bubble!

Because even better — we practice so we might bring ourselves back, everyday, again and again to the truest version of ourselves.

Who we actually ARE, before, below, and beyond our reactions, our habits, our caretaking, our illnesses, our failures & successes — anything that hooks us and takes us away from who we really are.

So, hungry for all kinds of nourishment, I came up with SALT: a 4-step meditation practice that provides a path back to yourself at any point you need it throughout your day. 

As a meditation practice alchemizing us, SALT kind of does exactly what Samin tells us literal salt does:

“Salt’s relationship to flavor is multidimensional: it has its own particular taste, and it enhances the flavor of other ingredients. Used properly, salt minimizes bitterness, balances out sweetness, and enhances aromas, heightening our experience of eating.”

SALT — the meditation practice — requires no equipment or special set up. You can even practice SALT in the middle of whatever situation you’re in and the people around you won’t even know. 

Similar steps are found in many meditation traditions, and SALT too is basically a path back to the present moment. To paying attention on purpose, to the essence of who we are in that moment, without judgement, without story, without the filter of good / bad, right or wrong.

SALT brings us back to our own essential flavor, you might say.

So, when I felt totally far off base from myself these last two weeks, I practiced and taught SALT.

And the next time you feel carried away, pulled off course, feel a burn, start to shut down or feel like you’re closing off or tightening up or spiraling out, try practicing these 4 steps to see if you might create just enough space to get yourself off the hook, take a breath, and come back to yourself.

Here, we go: SALT:

S - Stop. When you feel yourself GONE in any moment, for whatever reason — see if there’s some way you can pause, to stop yourself from going down your usual path on auto pilot. A deep breath in and a deep breath out. Leave the room. Close your eyes. Relax your jaw. Whatever you can do to stop and create a boundary between what’s happening and your habitual reaction.

A - Allow yourself to be with whatever discomfort or “not-so-good” feeling you’re experiencing in the moment. So often, we quickly reach for the escape hatch when we feel “off,” or disconnected in some way, or even an intense feeling like anger, jealousy, literal pain. We pick up the phone or the drink or the ice cream to zone and numb out. We press “buy now” for that quick hit of dopamine. We say something nasty and reactive to our people. We over-work, we over-exercise, we over-martyr. [Fill in your escape hatch here.] Allowing just gives us the chance to experience — for 30 seconds!— whatever it is we are actually experiencing in the moment, so that we can begin to recognize and remember that we have a choice in all of this thing called living.

L - Listen to what those feelings or sensations are telling you. This is how we can begin to recognize patterns, which is the first step to choosing another way back to yourself. The more you practice SALT, the more data you collect about yourself, your life, your choices, your circumstances. It’s all just information — so you don’t need to pounce on solving / fixing / improving. This kind of Listening is kind of like spending quality time with ourselves. It’s an essential step to true self-understanding and also self-compassion, self-love, self-forgiveness, self-anything. And, of course, our ability to ripple those same gifts out to others. But, it’s also No Big Deal. Just spend 10 seconds listening to what you find in your head, your heart, your body in that moment. That’s all you have to do. Listen.

T - Touch. The physical sensation of safe, consensual touch is an essential tool for maintaining connection, presence, an integrated sense of self, and a calm nervous system. And it doesn’t have to come from anyone else. A simple, yet profound way to integrate any experience is a simple touch, like a hand to your heart. Or slipping off your shoes and feeling your bare feet on the earth. Or sliding a hand to that tender spot  on your neck or shoulders and giving yourself some love. Touch is the last step to coming back to yourself, to resolving the situation at hand. 

That’s it - SALT! Stop. Allow. Listen. Touch.

Keep SALT on hand — like how you might place a dish of actual salt on your counter where you can easily reach it while cooking.

SALT is a moment-to-moment tool for your how-to-human toolkit that you can use at any time.

You can practice SALT in most any scenario, whenever you need it, as often as necessary. To bring you back to your most YOU-feeling you. 

Don’t take my word, take Samin’s:

“It never occurred to me that salt was anything more than pepper’s sidekick. But now, having experienced the transformative power of salt for myself, I wanted to learn how to get that zing! every time I cooked. I thought about all the foods I’d loved to eat growing up — and that bite of seaside cucumber and feta, in particular. I realized then why it had tasted so good. It was properly seasoned, with salt.”

So salt a cucumber today and SALT yourself.

Let’s Sit Together,
Cath
P.S. Thanks for your grace in my timing with this week’s essay.

If you practiced the SALT meditation — how did it go?! Or if you also love Samin Nosrat, leave a comment :) A cooking / food metaphor is never far from my practice ;) Check out the real life wild of your life too for some essential inspiration! See you next time.