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HOW TO HARNESS MINDFULNESS FOR CREATIVITY

There’s nothing more detrimental to a creative mind than automatic or mindless behavior. A lack of awareness or intentionality about the here-and-now, or what’s inside our heads, is poisonous to creativity.

Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.

In this insane world where everything and everyone competes for our attention, one of the best ways I achieve mindfulness is through meditation. Throughout my life, I have practiced different types of meditation without necessarily being married to a specific one.

While I think that just sitting in silence, eyes closed for at least 10 minutes every day has enormous benefits for creativity, there are two big different types of meditation styles.

One is “Focused Attention,” which emphasizes channeling thoughts by repeating a mantra and staying on a breathing rhythm. The other is “Open Monitoring,” where you are open to perceive and observe any sensation or thought without focusing on a concept or a fixed item; your attention is flexible and unrestricted.

How Mindfulness Helped Change Art History

Hilma af Klint in her studio in Sweden in 1895.

Around 120 years ago, when all these classifications weren't really available to anyone and meditation grottos with infrared light and incense diffusers didn’t exist, the extraordinary Swedish artist Hilma af Klint invented abstract art.

Before Hilma, there wasn’t anybody making paintings or drawings that weren’t figures, interiors, landscapes, or seascapes. But in 1906, after being a part of a theosophical society and deeply immersed in the practice of meditation, Hilma said that the abstract shapes she captured in her work just “came to her”.

This has been one of the greatest leaps in art history and one that changed the course of it forever. We know through Hilma’s notebooks that she spent a good deal of time in silent meditation (my guess is that it was an Open Monitoring practice, but I can’t confirm that).

af Klint’s series “The Ten Largest” from 1907 at the Guggenheim in New York City in 2018.

“Only for those prepared to leave their familiar life behind, will life emerge in a new gown of continually expanding beauty and perfection. But to attain such a state, it is necessary to achieve stillness in both thought and feeling,” Hilma wrote in one of her journals.

And how important are these words: “Stillness in both thought and feeling” to be able to see things that you may have missed before, to spot a new opportunity or to get that idea out of your head and into the world?

Catching Big Ideas Through Transcendental Meditation

David Lynch in his studio on the Hollywood Hills in 2004.

Transcendental Meditation (or TM) is a bit of a mystery to me because to fully understand how to practice it you have to enroll in a special course and pay for it. It’s not something that’s just freely available to anyone and I haven’t found the time to go and physically complete the program although the people I know who’ve done it say it is absolutely life changing.

The TM technique involves no focused attention nor open monitoring. It is a process of automatic self-transcending, allowing the practitioner to experience a field of calm deep within.

David Lynch has been practicing TM since 1973 and says he’s never missed a day since. He credits his creativity in his films, paintings, and writings to it. In fact, he wrote an entire book around his meditation practice and how it has awakened his creativity in ways he never had experienced before.

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deep,” Lynch wrote and he believes that “there’s an ocean of consciousness inside each of us, and it’s an ocean of solutions” that is easily attainable through meditation.

How Zen Meditation Helped Change The World

Steve Jobs was a huge proponent and practitioner of Zen, another form of Open Monitoring meditation. The goal of Zen meditation is to regulate attention. It’s sometimes referred to as a practice that involves “thinking about not thinking.”

Meditation helped Jobs come up with ideas, as he told his biographer Walter Isaacson: “If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is… but over time [with meditation] it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things…”

Zen also influenced the aesthetics of the iPod and later the iPhone because Jobs saw Zen as a direct connection to minimalism and simplicity.

The most Zen of all simplicities was Jobs’s decision that the iPod would not have an on-off switch because there was no need for one. This later became true of most of Apple’s devices which go dormant if they aren’t used and wake up when any key is touched.

Any Meditation Helps

About two weeks ago, I started a new meditation challenge that is to last for at least 48 days if done twice a day or 90 days if done once: practicing Sandghuru’s Isha Kriya, which is available for free here and also on his app. (You don’t even need to register or give your email away if you don’t want to and the app makes it all very simple to do this every day.)

After months of the stress that came from launching my book and being up to my eyeballs with work, I needed something to help me refocus, and this somehow fell on my lap. While I can say that I am always coming up with ideas, in the past two weeks I have been clearer about which ones to pursue and have found solutions to business problems that I hadn’t thought about before.

Research shows that prior meditation experience has no significant effect on one’s ability to activate divergent thinking, so if you want to try meditation for creativity, there’s no better time to start than now.

And if you have seen a direct impact between a meditation practice and your creativity, especially TM, let me know, I’m curious to learn more.

Have you already watched my TEDx Talk: “NFTs, Graffiti and Sedition: How Artists Invent The Future”?

I share three lessons I have learned from artists that always work for anyone in their careers. Watch it here.

Thank you for reading this far. Looking forward to hearing from you anytime.

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The Groove Issue 84 - How To Harness Mindfulness for Creativity