Stillness 8-4: When my children were young, and they weren’t sure about something they had to decide on or choose, I’d advise them to close their eyes and lightly smack their tongue and lips around as they pondered the issue. How does it taste? I’d ask. “How does it feel for you now?” Clairgustance, or cleartasting, is another form of clairvoyance that’s available to all of us and can help inform, guide, or help us to “see” clearly. Yum yum yum.
We have an incredibly complex taste system in our mouths that gives us the ability to taste in countless ways. Scientists have determined five main tastes, familiar to us all: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. But they keep finding more, like fatty, alkaline, and metallic. They’re also measuring additional aspects of taste, like intensity, touch, temperature, and smell, which, combined with the thousands of taste buds we already have, create infinite ways for us to taste.
So, how can we taste energy? How can we develop our innate clairgustance? It is simply a matter of attention, intention, and practice. The more you do anything, the better you get at it. Practice focusing your attention on how something tastes, not just when you’re biting into a fresh, sweet grape, but when you’re about to make a phone call or visit a friend. Clairgustance is one of the rarer “clairs”, but I wonder whether that’s because of our typically complicated relationship with food. Food can feel so political, stressful, expensive, cruel, and confusing we forget that, at it’s heart, nourishment is goodness and it’s tasty. How we taste is what keeps us wisely connected to our beautiful planet and our remarkable bodies.
It helps to become aware of the source of everything we put in our mouth and to make sure it is as pure as possible. When we heighten our physical sensory perceptions, our spiritual senses are enhanced as well. Those who are well-trained in the area of food and nourishment are instinctively advanced in this. They can energetically “taste” the fruit at a market stall to know whether it is ripe, rather than having to look, squeeze, or smell it. With practice, they excel at this way of knowing what to buy.
Before going on an expedition or when you’re planning something, try tasting it to see what it will be like. Bring your attention to those thousands of taste buds in your mouth. Roll your tongue around, and imagine what it tastes like. Sweet? Sour? Bitter? These are all emotional words and carry great weight in our psyche, which makes sense since taste is linked to our emotions through our involuntary nervous system. Bring to your consciousness first the physical sensation of taste, then your emotional response to it, and then allow your perception of its energy to penetrate into your psyche as intuition and knowing. The more you use taste to see into spiritual or ethereal realms, including looking into the future, the clearer it all becomes.