Another very common bridge to use is mindfulness eating or drinking. If you have a box or a bag of raisins in your kitchen, go get a single raisin. I want you to be present enough in every moment in eating this raisin. I’m going to break it down into a whole bunch of steps for you and see if you can acknowledge each step and bring all your senses to bear in every moment.

1. Feeling it in your fingers

2. Feeling it against your lips

3. The smell

4. The transitional moment between your lips and your tongue as the raisin enters your mouth and your taste buds start to engage the raisin.

5. Your tongue’s ability to move the raisin from your lips over to your teeth in order for you to start chewing.

6. The different taste buds that get engaged as you start to manually chew that raisin and the taste changes.

7. The more you chew, the differences in the smell as you inhale

8. Feeling the difference within your mouth as your body produces more saliva with the sweetness of the raisin

9. Finally the tongue’s ability to position the raisin in order to be ready to be swallowed

I bet you never realized there were so many steps into eating a simple raisin. With a little bit more work you could probably add three or four more steps to that depending on your ability to be present on changes within that process. Again, eating a raisin mindfully will not make you mindful but this bridge levers in how to bring mindfulness into your daily tasks. Something as mundane as eating a raisin becomes the practice arena for you to use it for the bigger things when you’re breaking down the steps of an event that’s happening around you. Some side benefits to it, you might fall in love with some foods that maybe you never noticed before so there’s always that.