Taste experiences like you are tasting wine.
Plus a Mindful Walking Meditation.
We live through our senses. Every moment, every emotion, thought, memory, or dream is filtered through them. Yet, we rarely pause to explore the way we interface with reality. We think, we react, we label—and in doing so, we often collapse rich, multi-dimensional experiences into narrow frames of meaning.
This is an invitation to open that frame again.
Sensory Awareness as Meditation
Whether you're walking, sitting, or just listening, treat this as a kind of guided meditation. Let your awareness soften and follow where your senses lead. Every sensation—physical, emotional, or cognitive—is a doorway into presence.
Thoughts? They're made of images, sounds, sensations. Emotions? They too arise as sensations in the body. Everything is sensory, and yet most of us have never been taught how to simply be with sensation.
Instead, we rush to do something with it: act on it, fix it, or spiral into thoughts about it. But what if we just sat with the sensation like we would with a nervous pet or child? With patience, kindness, and curiosity?
Sometimes, that's all it takes.
Collapsing the Dream
Ever tried to explain a vivid dream upon waking? There's that surreal, emotional richness that starts to slip away the moment we try to capture it in words. You remember your childhood home—but it wasn’t really your childhood home. You spoke with someone, but it wasn’t really them. Still, it meant something, didn’t it?
As we wake, we instinctively collapse the dream into a story, a to-do list, a message. But the dream wasn’t designed to be logical—it was multi-dimensional. When we try to make it linear, something gets lost.
This collapsing happens all the time—not just with dreams. We experience a feeling, and we rush to name it. But “anger” today is not the same as “anger” yesterday. Words never capture the full terrain.
Wine Tasting, Word Tasting
Here’s something curious: when you taste wine, and someone says, “Do you notice the peach?”—suddenly, you do. The experience intensifies. The label expands the sensation, even though words usually shrink things.
Why?
Because the right word can open a space—a pause, a kind of reverence. Just like saying “peach” during a wine tasting draws your awareness in, naming a feeling—“this is grief,” “this is longing”—can expand your experience of it. The word doesn’t reduce the emotion; it invites you to taste it more fully.
So here’s a practice: be a sommelier of your experience. Taste the moment like you would a fine wine. Explore the earthy notes of your tiredness. The bright acidity of your joy. The smoky swirl of your confusion.
Walking Meditation: A Sommelier of Now
As I walked the other day, I did exactly this. I tuned in, and dipped into each sensation, each sound, sight and feeling. This is what I noticed:
The sun on the right side of my face.
My feet pressing into the ground.
A car fading into the distance, dissolving at the edge of hearing.
A thought arose: Is this making sense? I felt it behind my forehead. I stayed with it.
The wind brushing my back.
Children playing. A smile rising unbidden.
The awareness danced—not held tightly to one thing, but freely moving, guided by curiosity.
This is a kind of meditation too. Not rigid focus, but free awareness. You're still “doing” life—walking, talking—but with an added layer of attention, a deepening into the moment.
Emotional Tasting
Eventually, I’ll guide a practice in emotional wine tasting. But for now, just notice: every emotion is experienced through the senses too. A tightness in the chest. A heat in the face. A hollow in the stomach.
And sometimes, just naming it—this is sadness—opens a space. That space is where transformation begins.
Final Thoughts
So ask yourself:
When do words collapse your experience?
When do they expand it?
What happens when you stop trying to “do” something about a sensation and just sit with it?
Let me know what you taste when you listen to your life this way.
And next time you feel something—before collapsing it into a label—pause.
And sip it curiously.