If you don’t fancy mindfulness, then try cooking instead
Chloe Faure argues that cooking offers a practical, multisensory form of mindfulness that suits people who find traditional sitting meditation unhelpful. Scheduling a ‘cooking day’ and making familiar or experimental recipes lets you focus on tactile tasks—kneading dough, shaping [[brioche]], or chopping vegetables—and engage smell, sound, sight and taste, similar to the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique. Practitioners and therapists quoted include Todd Essig at [[William Alanson White Institute]] and Emmanuelle Turquet of [[Cuisine Thérapie]], who see recipeless and playful approaches as routes to presence, memory and emotional restoration. Cooking also links past memories with future wellbeing through shared meals and intentional scents. The piece recommends starting with easy dishes, treating the kitchen as a consequence-free space for play, and noticing bodily and mental changes as you cook.