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.
If you enjoyed reading our articles, please join our mailing list and we’ll send you our news and latest pieces.
Listen to a 15-minute guided meditation on body sensations by Tergar Instructor Dr.Cortland Dahl
Learn meditation under the skillful guidance of world-renowned teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche at your own pace.
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.
Deadlines, competition, pressure — the concept of “burnout” to describe a sense of nervous exhaustion has been around since the 70’s, but never has the feeling of burnout been as prevalent as it is these days. In a situation that’s demanding too much of us, it’s natural to experience burnout. Still, there are certainly a few things we can keep in mind.
In my tradition, we believe that with any type of relationship — between friends, family, teacher and student, or even the relationship between yourself and the society you live in — there are four points that need to be considered, sometimes called “the four enlightened activities.” These consist of peaceful activity, enriching activity, magnetizing activity, and powerful activity. All of them hinge on interdependence.
As we know, personal relationships can get stuck in an unhealthy pattern. Someone raises their voice in anger at you, and even though you don’t want to, you react by lashing out with cruel words. Of course, you want to change this reaction. To do this, you need to rely on the basic practices of awareness, love and compassion, and wisdom.
If you enjoyed reading our articles, please join our mailing list and we’ll send you our news and latest pieces.
2025© Tergar International. The Tergar logo is a registered service mark of Tergar international.
