My most dear, most kind, most precious, wish-fulfilling Marie,
Thank you for your kind email and your kind service. Thank you so much supporting the relics. This becomes great purification, and a way to collect extensive merits for sentient beings. It plants the seed of the path to enlightenment, and makes it more possible to achieve enlightenment and to free all the sentient beings from the oceans of samsaric sufferings and bring them to enlightenment.

Regarding your question about blessing the food, you can recite OM AH HUM and visualize all the buddhas and bodhisattvas blessing the food with the qualities of the holy body, speech and mind. These absorb into the food, where the food is; these qualities are all absorbed into the food. So, recite OM AH HUM.

Visualize every grain or every part of the food as HUM. Visualize a blue HUM and numberless buddhas’ and bodhisattvas’ holy body, speech and mind all absorb into that. Then do quite a number of malas of the mantra OM AH HUM. The more you do, the better. Then the HUMs become the grains or food particles.

Then make a prayer to the merit field, to Medicine Buddha, Tara and Chenrezig, but particularly to Medicine Buddha. Pray that all the buddhas and bodhisattvas bless the food and that there will never be any side effects, so it immediately purifies. The minute the food goes inside someone’s mouth, it immediately purifies all the negative karmas collected from beginningless rebirths. Not only are all the diseases and spirit harms purified, all realizations from guru devotion up to enlightenment are also actualized. All the realizations are generated, especially bodhicitta, and this brings perfect peace and happiness to all sentient beings in this world. All the wishes for happiness and all the successes, according to holy Dharma, are immediately received. All the wishes up to enlightenment are actualized.

That is what you should pray. You and your father (if he wants to) and everyone else can do this meditation. You can do the meditation and practice in the factory, and you can also do it at home, as long as all the food is piled up in one place and you know exactly where it is.

Please continue to make your life most meaningful with the thought of bodhicitta night and day and in every action that you do.

With much love and prayers...