Hi guys,
today I want to share about mindfulness, especially in difficult moments. Or better described as “the precious challenging moments we are given to learn and to grow”, where mindfulness can be your perfect life-support. For exactly these moments we need it the most, to be able to be fully present for your life while it happens. Not pondering the past or already thinking about the future. But be able to be fully present in these precious moments.
why practice mindfulness on a regular basis if life goes well?
Have you ever wondered why it is recommended to have a daily practice of meditation? Or, why it is so treasured to create moments of mindfulness throughout your day? I mean these precious moments when you can recognize your breath flowing IN and OUT. Where you are fully aware of the stairs you are walking up or down, feeling your heartbeat change. The moments you savor the delicious aroma of your morning tea or coffee. Or, while you are walking, feeling the soft wind caressing your face and recognize the smile of a stranger. Moments where you are fully aware that you are washing and cutting your carrots, the kale, the parsley. You are looking at the colors, feeling the different texture and taking in the aroma of your veggies and herbs……
it is not about what happens in your life, but how you are dealing with it that makes the difference between happiness and suffering!
More often than not, life goes astoundingly well and smooth. And yes, there are the other days! So, today I would like to share about one of THOSE days and how mindfulness can make a difference in your life’s quality. And these are exactly the days we are preparing ourselves for by practicing mindfulness.
A good analogy might be like preparing yourself for a marathon. You do not make the decision to run a marathon, run it the next day and expect to finish it, right! But you will plan this months and months ahead by setting up a daily training routine for fitness, endurance and strength. First you start running shorter distances daily before you increase it progressively. And having a healthy, nutritious diet is crucial to get ready and fit for the marathon you signed up for.
Well, your daily practice of sitting meditation and your daily mindful moments are the same and equally important. You start with daily sitting – if only for 5-10 minutes in the beginning – but daily and sprinkle in mindful moments throughout your day as described above.
In positive psychology research they found out that the art of mindfulness, as well as savoring all the good, positive, and beautiful things, creates positive neural networks and strengthens your happiness muscle, so to speak! It creates a strong vessel of resilience to hold all the smaller and bigger difficulties and sufferings life throws at us. These practices help you to grow, stretch and become stronger, but not break or give up. But what we so often do instead is training our un-happiness muscle. We are pondering and focus on the little things that did not go well over and over again like a prayer mill. This creates neural networks too. Not ones that strengthen you but rather those that can suck the life energy out of you.
a regular mindfulness practice creates endurance.
Remember the marathon? Mindfulness enables you to create space between stimulus and response. It will make all the difference in the world in the moments when you most desperately need it and enables you to stay calm. Instead of getting angry at yourself you are able to just smile or laugh out loud and stay open to explore! This is the space where you create the quality of your life – where stars are born! Well, maybe not always stars but sometimes a saved cake or meal. Different, yes – but still delicious!
Now let’s start from the beginning here with my accidental “caved-in-cake” story and how my mindfulness practice helped me to not freak out but stay calm and open to a creative solution – which saved the cake, and allowed me to have fun and laugh without adding to the drama on the oven stage.
I guess all of you know that I have a handful and a pinch approach to cooking. And sometimes – despite knowing better – I unfortunately cannot resist it in baking too! I know, I know – baking is more a science and needs a precision approach and not so much creativity. So, being creative in baking mostly does not turn out so well!
this was my plan
To bake two versions of a pound cake using crab apple jam. A small loaf with crab apple jam swirled into the batter before baking. And a larger loaf to be cut lengthwise when cooled down, filled with a layer of the jam. Then glaze the cake with warm jam and cover it with chocolate. That was the plan. Sounds good, doesn’t it! But often in life, you make plans and life throws you a curveball. Well, in this case, I threw it myself.
this is what I did
I pre-heated the oven and prepared the loaf pans. I used my mom’s recipe that called for milk mixed with some lemon juice to curdle the milk. Well, I still had some buttermilk in the fridge, so why not use this instead, right! Switching into my creative gear, I just used the buttermilk. Other than that, I did everything according to the recipe. Mindfully measuring, adding one ingredient after the other, all at room temperature, filling the batter in the pans and off into the oven. So, all should work out fine, right! But NO! WRONG! Very wrong!
Do you also like to watching batter rise? It is like my favorite TV-program – very meditative. I love it! So, I switched on the oven light to check on the batter while I was cleaning all the bowls and tools. Great, the batter is rising – and rising, and rising, and…… You get it! The batter started to overflow.
Ok, meditation over! Mindfulness in action on!
I first stopped and recognized that I took a deep breath in and a long breath out! Was there an “oh my gosh” coming out of my mouth? I laughed and continued
mindfully acting
- first, adding a baking pan underneath the loaf pans to prevent batter getting scorched on the oven bottom. Breathing in and out
- collecting the overflow of batter and trying to push the batter back into the loaf pans with an “I can toss it later” attitude
- I continued baking
- and all of a sudden, the cake caved in – a big sinkhole in the middle of what was supposed to be cake. Now it’s getting interesting!
- I started laughing, as I continue baking the cakes until done.
my creative approach and staying open for the process
Now my mind was going: “Is there something like a cake-crumb dessert???? And all of a sudden, I remembered a childhood pastry, called “Granatsplitter” (in english chocolate mountain), our baker sometimes offered. It has a biscuit base, cake crumbs mixed in rum-aroma butter cream, molded into a mountain shape and covered with chocolate. Well, that still was an option. But I am not a big fan of butter cream. Butter? Ohhh yes! Cream? – sure! But butter cream – not so much and not with rum taste!
This is what the loaves looked like when they came out of the oven. See what I mean with the sinkhole?
When the cakes finished baking I got them out to cool on a rack. Looking at those two “cakes” in front of me, I thought:” Maybe the small one will fit into the hole of the large one? I tried and – yeap, it fits! Ok, now the crab apple jam came to work. Not just as a taste enhancer but more like a sweet and tasty glue. Besides, having something enhancing the taste for something that’s looking like this project doesn’t hurt either.
And this is what they looked like mounted. Well, you know me – I would not be happy offering something that’s looking so crappy. Oh, have I ever shared rule #1 for sweets and dessert?
rule # 1: “There is nothing that can’t be covered by chocolate!”
So, I first covered the cakes with a glance of crab apple jam, and then the layer of chocolate and some sprinkles of freeze-dried raspberries. Wasn’t this the original plan?
Well, this is what the cake now looked like when rule #1 was applied. I know – a “perfect” pound cake looks different and for sure not in any way what I had intended. But nevertheless, I must say, it was very delicious! Juicy, fruity, and very chocolaty and it stayed fresh for almost a week!
I wanted to share this story with you to encourage you to never give up too early, stay calm and open and enjoy the process especially when it is not quite as you had planned it. But sometimes you know, these are the moments where new inventions are created! Not that I would call this one a new invention – but you never know, what’s emerging!
Or as Friedrich Nietzsche said: “One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star”
I would love to hear about your dancing stars, your creative, funny, learning, mindful moments.
Just email me at magdalena@handfulandapinch.com or leave a comment here.
In mindfulness,
Yours
Magdalena
hi, i am magdalena and I'm so happy you are here to share my passion for mindful vegetarian cooking and a creative life.