Baking for A Balanced Brain

You might be surprised to hear I don’t formally meditate very often on this journey towards achieving a balanced life.

Yet this entire blog is about mindfulness right? Right.

And my message to you is that you can find mindfulness and balance in your day, throughout your day, in a million different ways. Here’s my blog about it.

And while I do try to take time for quiet presence each day, it’s usually in quick 3-10 minute sprints in the morning or evening. Then every few months a more formal sit at a yoga studio (I adore a good sound bath at Wild Root) or an online guided practice with one of my favorites (right now I’m really digging Deepak Chopra).

So the rest of the time my practice is cultivating mindfulness through my daily activities, and that shows up for me big time when I bake. As a matter of fact, I think it’s the reason I bake.

Baking is my most favorite form of mindfulness meditation, of finding balance.

You’ve heard this from me before, many times :), but you might be thinking, “So what’s so mindful about baking Katherine?” Easy.

The focus. Measuring ingredients, discerning instructions, even down to how you scoop or weigh the flour, every step of baking requires supreme focus for a successful bake. Baking gets me out of my head and away from those thoughts that don’t serve me. It plants both of my feet (and my brain) firmly in the kitchen.
The fun. Pumping up the baking music, enjoying my favorite time of day (dawn), getting messy (both in what I’m wearing and what I’m preparing), and drinking copious amounts of coffee creates a surge of joy in my bones that oftentimes sticks with me the rest of the day.
The service. Many mindfulness teachers will tell you that finding ways to be of service to the world will plant you more firmly in your journey towards living a balanced life. It will give you more peace and pride in your day. For me, baking is my way of showing love both for my people and sometimes for nonprofits (I’ve donated baked goods, done bake sale fundraisers, etc.). And for a gal whose trauma makes it pretty hard for her to open up and show emotion, discovering that sharing my baking can help me with that has been a major gift on my path toward wellness.
The presence. Trying baking distracted, inexact or messily rushing through a bake and the outcome of that will probably tell you all you need to know about why presence is so important in baking. A burnt cookie or a cup of forgotten flour in a flat cake can be as much of a guru as any great meditation teacher.
A continued reminder to trust my gut. A big part of mindfulness and living a balanced life is listening to and trusting the whispers that come when you have created space between your thoughts. I could give you example after example of a time I didn’t listen to my gut on a bake, and how that resulted in one baked good in the trash can and a “take two” in the oven. I’m grateful to have something that is not only a constant reminder to listen to my whisper, but also that if at first I don’t succeed, there can be a lot of joy in the trying (and trying :)) again.

So for me, baking is as much of a guru as Deepak is. And if this sounds absolutely crazy to you, then baking probably isn’t your teacher, and that’s when you have to remember there are zero one-size-fits-all approaches to this balance (or baking) thing.

Remember, know thyself.

Find those things in your sphere that give you this kind of peaceful presence, that continue to gently remind you what you already know, that allow you to be of service, and that bring you endless joy regardless of the outcome.

THAT’S where you’ll cultivate more mindfulness in your day. THAT my darling readers, is where the magic will happen. 💗

Do me a favor? If you’re enjoying this journey towards a balanced life please subscribe, share it, and follow my Instagram for smaller bites.

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Balancing a Brain that’s Fighting Back

By Katherine Warren • April 6, 2025

Your brain will straight up lie to you. There’s no way to sugar coat that, friends, there just isn’t. But your brain also creates beautiful ideas and inventions, and well, everything you see that surrounds us. It’s the power of the AND. Your brain is the king of the “and.” The first step in finding balance is recognizing this. The second step is discerning the beautiful part of your brain from the beast. The third is not reacting to, judging or negotiating with the beastly part. It’s tough, tough work. It’s lifelong work. And even if your friends start calling you things like the “definition of balance” (a term so kindly bestowed on me by some friends recently). You’re still gonna have to work your a** off on this part for the rest of your life as you sway back and forth, in and out of balance. Does it get easier? Yes and no. The beauty of understanding the feeling of balance is that you don’t have to rely on your brain so much. You know how it feels to be in a place of solid, grounded peace, no matter what your brain is shouting you “should” or “could” be doing. The harder part is that the more you find balance, the more likely it is that you are upleveling your life. Your focus and pure presence have likely brought about more of whatever you define as a successful life--mentally, physically, or materially. That uplevel can mean those brain lies cut a little deeper, make you question every decision you make to protect your peace. If you’ve learned to sit with that pain in your belly, it might fight a little harder to make you pay attention to it. It might put up a bigger fight to try to force you to listen to those untruths. This is when you have to remind yourself, your brain will straight up lie to you. Under no circumstances should you negotiate with these thoughts. That’s where spiraling lives, that’s where lack of balance lies. Sometimes holding hard to your balanced routines will do the trick.