Does Meditation Affect Creativity?
By Tergar Meditation Community • 5 min read
Meditation charges the mind like a battery. If you want to embark on an artistic endeavor, or a scientific, environmental, or academic line of inquiry, a culinary creation, or a musical composition – wherever your creative impulses take you! — meditation enhances that creativity. It gives you the necessary energy to engage creatively.
The stereotypical image conjured by the word “meditation” looks something like this: a person sitting peacefully with their eyes closed and their mind blank. Actually, it’s a major misunderstanding to think that meditation means to sit still and think of nothing, or to be blissed out. If it were really like that, a meditator would be totally unable to create anything. They’d be more or less a zombie! In reality, meditation and creativity go hand in hand.
The main point of meditation is to develop awareness, mindfulness, so that you can be present. The mind becomes aware of, and works in concert with, the body, the actions, and the senses. That enables you to see the objects that make up the world clearly, without projecting your own stories onto it. What effect does that meditation have on creativity, specifically, though?
Picture a flag tethered to a flagpole. If the wind blows one way, so does the flag; when the breeze comes from the opposite direction, the flag has to follow. Generally speaking, our minds are like that too: completely dependent on, and subject to, feelings and thoughts. There’s no real freedom in it, and no control. But by practicing meditation, our mind becomes pliable and workable. This grants you more freedom and control. Instead of thoughts and emotions pushing you around, you can direct your mind toward a different purpose.
“Everything you perceive, you perceive through the power of your awareness. There are truly no limits to the creative ability of your mind.”
– Mingyur Rinpoche –
Ordinarily, our minds are narrow, capable of seeing the world only as we expect to see it. And then, there are so many thoughts in there! Preoccupied with our countless misconceptions and projections, there’s little space left over for new concepts, knowledge, or wisdom. The storage on our mental hard drives are already full…and what’s in there is, let’s face it, largely junk. Meditation frees up that space. Your mind becomes open and spacious. Your creative goals, and your creative process, become more clear, refreshed by new ideas.
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Tergar Meditation Community supports individuals, practice groups, and meditation communities around the world in learning to live with awareness, compassion, and wisdom. Grounded in the Tibetan Buddhist lineage of our guiding teacher, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, our online and in-person programs are accessible to people of all cultures and faiths, and support a lifelong path toward the application of these principles in everyday life.
If we’re coping with a heavy, complicated problem, we’re often too busy to feel lonely. But sometimes, loneliness itself becomes our major problem. What’s happening is that our monkey mind is zooming in on the feeling, exaggerating it. Sometimes we think, “I don’t really have any good friends,” when what we really mean is we do, but they’re not around, or we don’t feel connected to them at that moment. Sometimes we think, “Oh, I don’t want to be around other people,” and we isolate ourselves. Later on, when our mood has shifted and we want company, we forget that we ourselves created that environment, and we feel lonely.
Once I was giving a teaching on love. The theme of the talk was that everyone has love within them. No matter what the circumstance, who you are, or where you are in the world, you have love 24 hours a day — even when you are feeling anger or hatred. During this talk, it looked to me like all the students were very happy. I was, too.
Although the good qualities are right there within us and all around us, if we fail to recognize them, there’s not much they can do for us. But if we recognize them, it opens up a world of possibilities.
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