What do haiku and cooking have in common? Adamantia Velonis, Founder, Marmalade +Kindness, explains the surprising link between these two ancient practices.
Using poetry in mindfulness practice
Poetry is frequently used in mindfulness and meditation practices, as it can help to bring our attention to the present moment. Often poems about mindfulness or the attitudes of mindfulness are used as part of formal meditation practices. They can be a useful entry point for participants as ‘poetry can both illustrate the state of awareness through the response it elicits in the reader and act as a powerful means for developing the capacities for attentiveness,’ says Julie Connelly, MD in Being in the Present Moment: Developing the Capacity for Mindfulness in Medicine.
In this way, poetry can help us focus our attention, but also to connect us to our senses. Reading poetry often leads to cognitive freedom and openness, as distinct from pure comprehension. In novels or stories, there is often a linear sense of action – a beginning, middle and end. In comparison, poems speak to us figuratively – in metaphor, metonymy, aurally, even visually (through formatting and punctuation) – to access our imaginations. Using a handful of well-chosen words, they create a ‘microcosm’ that we can keep returning to, contemplating, time and again.
Poems have the power to capture the essence of life – those fleeting moments that connect us to ourselves, other people and nature. They have the power to get to the core of how we conceptualise our experience of the outside world – our ability to observe through all the senses (as beings), rather than in patterns of literal thought.
Accessing the contemplative mind
Poetry can also be read mindfully. That is, by slowing down, savouring each word, allowing time for reflection and re-reading, we can access the deeper meaning of a poem. We are not reading to ‘find out what happens.’ We are reading to experience, focusing on the process itself. Like mindfulness, poems invite us into wider awareness, to step away from ‘doing-mode’ (where we live from thought to thought) to ‘being-mode,’ where we feel and sense, without judgement.
In education, incorporating mindful reading into students’ learning experiences has been found to have a positive impact on learning outcomes, as researchers, Barbezat and Bush explain in Contemplative Practices in Higher Education: ‘Mindful reading as opposed to speed-reading, slows down the reader and the reading; and that alone changes the student experience. It is a process of quiet reflection, which requires mindful attentiveness, a letting go of distracting thoughts and opinions to be fully in the moment with the text. It requires patient receptivity and an intention to go further, and it moves the reader into a calm awareness, allowing a more profound experience and understanding.’
The reason for this may be because the combination of mindful reading and poetry shifts our default, super-alert Beta brain waves, to slower Alpha brain waves, achieving a ‘relaxed awareness.’ As, neuroscientists have observed that mindfulness can increase alpha brain waves, increasing creative thinking (and reducing depressive symptoms).
Educator, Tobin Hart observed a similar effect, saying in Opening the Contemplative Mind in the Classroom: ‘The contemplative mind is opened and activated through a wide range of approaches – from pondering to poetry to meditation – that are designed to quiet and shift the habitual forms of chatter of the mind to cultivate a capacity for deepened awareness, concentration and insight.’
Haiku and mindfulness
The famous French impressionist painter, Claude Monet, once said, ‘If you must find precedents, compare me to the Japanese masters. I approve of their aesthetic sense, their powers of suggestion which evoke presence by a shadow, the complete picture by a fragment.’
It wasn’t just Monet, who was inspired by the Japanese masters. Vincent Van Gogh also admired this form of visual art:
‘I envy the Japanese for the enormous clarity that pervades their work…they draw a figure with a few well-chosen lines as if it were as effortless as buttoning up one’s waistcoat.’
While describing the elegant precision of Japanese woodblock prints, his statement could just as easily have described the Japanese tradition of haiku.
Developed by Buddhist monks, haiku is both a form of poetry and spiritual practice. Bringing together Buddhist, Confucian and Daoist teachings they arrived at a structure where ‘language’ (despite its limits) could, as closely as possible, capture the essence of living mindfully.
Written in the present tense, haiku poems are direct and immediate, describing the ‘here and now’ in a short set of words, that capture a complete thought. Haiku distils everyday moments to their essence – adjectives and adverbs are absent – there is no noise, just space.
Consider this haiku penned by Matsuo Bashō one of the early masters of this form:
In the cicada’s cry
No sign can foretell
How soon it must die.
Despite being written hundreds of years ago, the image still resonates with the experience of high-summer. It takes me back to one particular memory of being on school holidays as a child in Australia. The summer was long and hot, and I was struggling to get to sleep over the deafening chant of cicadas, I kept asking my mother when it would stop, hoping she would have an answer.
Reading poetry, and haiku, in particular, produces the feeling of a ‘mental cleanse,’ a quietening of the background noise in the mind. In haiku, every word has significance, and so too, mindfulness teaches us that every moment has value.
Connection to ‘mindful cooking’
Poetry is one entry points to mindfulness, but many daily activities can bring us to this state of awareness. For some, it’s gardening or playing a musical instrument – but for me, that activity is cooking. It’s a daily activity that I can keep coming back to, to connect with my senses and be present.
Haiku captures the ‘extraordinary in the ordinary’, allowing us to come at the familiar with a beginner’s mindset. We absorb poetry with a ‘feeling’ ear – not so much to analyse – but to experience the words and their emotional impact. So too, in mindful cooking, bringing an appreciation to the whole cooking process (from the produce to the preparation, consumption and waste) allows me to deeply reflect on the connection between my inner and external landscapes.
Like the writing of haiku, the process of cooking sharpens my awareness of life naturally unfolding moment to moment. In cooking, we become one with the process of creation, and through the heightened use of the senses (particularly, smell) can access deep memories and explore (and share) our sense of identity. Like poetry, cooking invites us to connect with what we already know – with what is already there (sometimes, described as honouring the light or the teacher within).
So to answer the titular question: haiku and cooking are both ‘practices’ that are linked to our senses – they are personal, embodied and deeply meaningful and can only be fully experienced by being in the moment. Through their continued practice, we can keep coming back to the ‘how to’ of mindfulness, but also keep developing our understanding of the very nature of living mindfully.
