Here's an excerpt from a very interesting academic paper I read recently. The title of the paper is "Emotion Refinement". This is the introductory section to the concept of savoring. You see, as a western culture we tend to be less aware of this concept, in various aspects of our lives. We rarely savor our food. We tend to consume it quickly. We rarely savor alcohol, we tend to binge drink to get drunk. Its a cultural thing to a large degree.
When it comes to the act of coitus, we must learn to savor our loved ones, before then savoring our own felt emotions. In other words, if you seek to reach sexual climax as quickly as possible then you've missed the whole point. You're a "bedroom binge drinker" so to speak. The journey to Nirvana should always be more gratifying than the reaching of the destination itself. Savoring is at the root of such gratification. Anyways, have a browse through this. And then ask yourself how much do you actually savor your partner during coitus. It makes for interesting discussion. Enjoy.
The Process of Savoring
The concept of savoring is linked to a number of process terms, such as evaluation of flavor, cognizance of flavor, and retrospective savoring. All these terms indicate specific modes of processing, which we will examine more closely later. In contrast, concepts that denote the content yielded by savoring are nonspecific and general. The most frequently used term to indicate that content is meaning-flavor. For instance, ‘‘therein lies endless meaning-flavor’’ or ‘‘The word ‘endurance’ has a lot of meaning-flavor’’. The term flavor does not add specific content to the first term, meaning, but it refers to the phenomenology of the experience or to felt meaningfulness.
Like other feelings, it is best understood as an inkling that the perceived entity could be explicated when attention would drift towards doing that. The inkling itself is global and holistic. Savoring also entails mental and even motor action. One devotes attention to the flavors of the experience and is receptive for them but also explores and deepens them. Pleasant flavors induce what have been termed acceptance wriggles: movements designed to enhance and prolong pleasurable sensations.
One’s tongue curls around the savors from the morsel in one’s mouth, one’s fingers follow the surface of the loved skin while one’s eyes follow the loved body’s contour. Taste and smell acceptance wriggles have their animal precursors in the orofacial patterns of hedonic response in rats and other animals, even when approach tendency is disabled and even in anencephalic infants, in which self-reflexivity is presumably lacking. Savoring takes time. One dwells on one’s object of interest and the experiences it generates. Savoring involves a lingering that slows down or halts the pragmatic progress; when used in this context, the Chinese term pai-huai literally means ‘‘slowly pacing back and forth.’’
One nibbles, one takes small bites, one throws glances, turns away, throws new glances. Such lingering is not restricted to sensory impressions. One can dwell on an object’s nonsensory properties or on the meaning of events such as the tenderness of winds or the vulnerability of a branch, an icicle, or a child. By lingering, thought produces protonarratives, which are descriptions of seemingly uneventful events that are nonetheless gravid with meaning when the potential for savoring is let loose on them. Meanings can be pursued in thought so as to produce insights about life in general, such as a sense of the vulnerability of things and the transience of fortune, rather than merely producing associations to the perceived object. Chinese treatments of savoring are explicit about the moral implications of such prolonging of savoring.
