How often do you cook? Cooking is an exceptional opportunity to practice mindfulness. You work with your hands and touch the different ingredients. You can smell what’s in the pot, feel the heat, and hear it boiling.
When you are cooking mindfully, you stay in the present moment. There is no need to think about past mistakes or plan your next day.
You don’t need to cook on autopilot. You are already in the kitchen, doing something that stimulates all your senses. Use this opportunity to keep your focus on the current step in the recipe, whether in your mind or on paper.
Just like in regular meditation you use the breath as your object of focus, you can focus on your current step while cooking. When your mind wanders, you can always come back to your current step. Senses work well, too. If you don’t need to do anything else, you can focus on the smells, sounds or sights.
“In the end, just three things matter: How well we have lived, How well we have loved, How well we have learned to let go” ― Jack Kornfield
My personal tip is: prepare everything in small bowls. Your washed and chopped ingredients. Even your spices. This way you can focus on each step and it won’t be hectic.
Reading Recommendations
Leading teams with Empathy -Providing Psychological Safety - Coding with Empathy
In her book “Daring Greatly”, Dr. Brené Brown uses the metaphor of a jar of marbles that fills up based on level of trust. Each positive interaction between people adds to the jar and each negative subtracts.
To Decode the Brain, Scientists Automate the Study of Behavior | Quanta Magazine
Machine learning and deep neural networks can capture and analyze the “language” of animal behavior in ways that go beyond what’s humanly possible.
Test Smarter, Not Harder by Scott Sehlhorst - developer.*, Developer Dot Star
There may be millions of configurations for a single business notebook. With this complexity, we often can't afford to test all possible combinations in our code, even automatically. So what should we do instead?
Weekly Mindfulness Practice
The next time you cook, practice mindful cooking. Prepare everything you need and keep your focus on the current step.
End note
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Have a great week
Simon
PS: If you found an article you think others might appreciate and that fits this newsletter, I’d love it if you write me an email.