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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It’s really important to have confidence — we hear that a lot, and we might believe it, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to do. Sometimes when we try to believe in ourselves, dark clouds of doubt or even self-loathing gather. Sure, it’s possible to fake confidence, but what is the trick to building genuine self-esteem?
If we want to release tension or rumination, we emphasize the exhalation and the gap at the end before the inhalation. If we want to energize, we emphasize the inhale, and the place at the top of the inhale.
As a beginner, if keeping your eyes open during meditation is too distracting, it’s fine to close them. And, as your practice progresses, you may encounter particular types of meditation that involve visualization, in which case, having your eyes closed can be helpful. Generally, though, in Mingyur Rinpoche’s tradition, you are encouraged to meditate with open eyes. If you’re unable to do so at the outset, it’s recommended that you practice it a little at a time until you find it comfortable.
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