Cooking Meditation

(​By Paolo Propato, LAc) People have been contacting me about finding the time to practice meditation. Being home in quarantine, many are still working, home-schooling their children, doing household chores, and the list goes on. St. Paul writes to "pray unceasingly." These moments of work, children and chores are great opportunities for practice. 

Cooking with Love
In many cultures, cooking is a way to express love and to deny food offered to you can be perceived as a rejection of love. It is a giving of the Earth, our time and attention. What is Love, but a giving of ourselves? In this spirit I will share a passage from the book Spiritual Ecology: 10 Practices to Reawaken the Sacred in Everyday Life by Llewellyn Vaughn Lee:

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1. Begin with the trust and confidence that love is accessible and can be worked with. Cultivate that trust that love is always available to an open heart, with that loving attention we can create ways for love to flow.
2. Let that feeling of love come through for your partner, children, yourself or who or whatever you are cooking for. 
3. As love animates all of life, it is not limited to ourselves and others. It can be found everywhere and in everything. It is abundantly present in the ingredients that we use in our cooking. We can access it simply through bringing our open attention to them as we work. Begin by slowing down-- don't rush; give yourself time and space to cook. Look closely at the ingredients you are using. Consciously touch and smell them. Recognize the bright beauty of the carrot; the symmetry of a cauliflower, the simple wonder of an egg. Breathe in the scent of the herbs and be conscious of their unique properties-- how one can revive the liver and another soothe the stomach. Imagine the cow, chicken, milk, cheese that you are cooking, acknowledging the living animal whose life has become part of your food. Feel the love from the Earth that made all this bounty available to you.
4. The love that gives life to all things also comes alive through your hands. It is accessible through the simple awareness and care you bring to chopping the vegetables, stirring the pot. As you work, bring the feeling from your heart into your hands, from your hands into the food. Love is alive; it wants to flow and through your attention you can participate in that generosity.

Cooking involves all the elements. It is such a wonderful way to learn about the flow of life. It connects us to our past by using recipes that flow generation-to-generation and to our future, because it provides us with nourishment for tomorrow. All of that is done in the present.

Hopefully, we will all see each other soon and perhaps share some recipes. ​