Meditation: The Gate that Opens the Creative Expression
I never knew how busy my mind was until I started meditating. Without meditation, I wouldn’t be the same person I am today, writing this article. We get so caught up in our busy living that we don’t even realise when we are performing life from our automatic pilot. The first time I heard this term was when I started dipping my toes into the world of meditation, approximately six years ago. I needed to learn what it meant to be in the “present moment”. I had heard those terms before, but I didn’t know what they really entailed until I experienced them.
The first book I read was The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle. That’s a great book to start spiritual awakening, because it clearly helps you to develop awareness of the thoughts that belong to the past and the ones that fantasize about the future; both of them distracting us from the present, which is the only time that really exists. We cannot change what happened yesterday, we cannot predict what will happen tomorrow. For someone that has an established practice of meditation or someone that has managed how to be aware of their thoughts, this may seem very obvious. This wasn’t the case for me and I’m pretty sure this is not obvious for most of the population either.
I wanted to further my knowledge about this, so I found Mindfulness: A practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world, by Mark Williams and Danny Penman (2011). There’s a whole chapter called “Waking to the Autopilot”, where they explain how being ingrained into our daily habits without being aware of them, can take us away from the task we initially intended. “It’s almost as if the mind is in one place and the body in another (…) We miss seemingly obvious things through automatically paying attention elsewhere” (2011).
This concept initiated me into the practice of mindfulness as a way to develop awareness of the present moment and how to quiet my mind, which was always full of thoughts. This brought me to the realisation of how anxious my life had always been. Always needing to keep myself busy to distract myself from a deep pain I wasn’t even aware was buried within my soul.
What living in the present moment truly means
Have you ever noticed your mind being completely focused on something you really love doing? There are no thoughts, no worries, it seems like the world stops. This is called a state of flow, “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990 cited by Oppland, M., 2021). This state of flow is also experienced when we live in the present and we enjoy what we do as a result of being focused.
In contrast; have you ever noticed that you spend 10 min looking for your keys everywhere, just to realise that you had them in your hands all the time you were looking for them? You are looking for your sunglasses and after searching everywhere, you notice they were always sitting on top of your head?
The reason for not remembering the time where we took the keys before leaving the house, or having put the sunglasses in our head, is probably because we were thinking on something else whilst doing those simple actions. Simple actions like brushing our teeth, having a shower, washing the dishes, eating our meals, driving, doing exercise or simply going out for walks, are the actions we mostly tend to do on automatic pilot, because they don’t require us to think how to do them. We simply know how to do them because we’ve been doing them our whole life. During those activities, we tend to think of the tasks we’ll be doing next: the email we forgot to reply, that uncomfortable conversation we had three weeks ago with a friend, or whether or not we want to remain in a relationship because we don’t see a future together. Those are the thoughts from the past or the future that detract us from living the reality of the present moment without really paying mindful attention to what we are doing.
We have been conditioned to build our lives fantasizing about the future and regretting or resenting the past
The script that has been created by our society is based on the actions we need to take since we are very little in order to step up in the ladder of social hierarchy. We’ve been told that the natural course of life follows education, job, marriage, children, owning a property, growing family, dying. There’s nothing wrong with following those steps, in fact, I believe growing a family is a privilege and a blessing that not many people have the opportunity to experience in this life. The problem lies when this structure conditions the decisions we make and we end up living a life that has been planned for us, not the one we’ve always wished for. In other words, we become prisoners of our own conditioning and we never give ourselves the chance to fulfil our dreams and our deepest desires.
I get this. I’m talking from first-hand experience. It’s very scary to acknowledge to ourselves what we truly want to achieve in life. It happened to me when I decided to dedicate my life to music. I admitted that desire to myself at the age of 29, quite late to start a career in the music industry. I followed my heart and started learning how to sing and how to play the guitar, but the fear of failing and being told since I was a child that creativity wouldn’t put food on my table, has stopped me from being a hundred percent invested in fulfilling this dream. I’ve found other trainings that are close to music as a backup plan for the future; just in case I never made it to be a full-time musician. I don’t regret those decisions, as I’ve had the privilege of receiving full time higher education and the courses I’ve done have brought me the healing I needed in order to enhance my music practice.
Luckily, this has changed for me. The more I accept myself and drop any expectations for the future or how I will manage to generate income from music, the freer I feel to experiment with my own creative expression. The more present I am when I play music, the less anxious I get about performing my music to others. The more I trust that my creative expression has its own purpose, the more it pours out of me. I’m just a medium for the creative energy to express itself; all I need to do is to remain present so I can listen and give way to what comes out. Meditation is the tool I’ve found to learn how to remain present and to gain awareness of my mind wandering and patiently bringing it back to the present by focusing on my breath.
I found Vipassana meditation and it changed my life.
I’m not a fan of preaching for a specific meditation technique. I think everybody should choose the technique that works better for themselves and apply it to your own convenience. In fact, Vipassana is not a practice that would suit everyone, as it can be quite rigid in its terms of practice, even for me.
However, I find it efficient because I’m not the same person I was before I went onto my first Vipassana retreat, and still to date, after 5 years of practice, it’s the discipline that better sustains and grounds my spiritual development.
Vipassana means “to see things as they really are. It was taught in India more than 2500 years ago as a universal remedy for universal ills” (dhamma.org/en).
The technique is taught during ten-day silent retreats, where you learn how to develop awareness of the breath (anapana meditation) and then deepening the awareness into body sensations (vipassana meditation). Alongside practicing noble silence for 10 days (this include avoiding eye contact, writing, reading or any form of communication with any other person in the course; except the Assistant Teacher or the Course Manager), the students commit to practice the main Five Precepts of Buddhism for the duration of the course:
to abstain from killing any being,
to abstain from stealing,
to abstain from sexual misconduct,
to abstain from wrong speech,
to abstain from all intoxicants.
These guidelines ensure that after 10 days of intensive practice, the students leave with a full grasp of the technique by learning how to remain balanced just by observing pleasant and unpleasant sensations we continually experience in our body. By practicing Vipassana we learn how to observe these sensations and not to react or avoid pain or to crave for pleasurable sensations.
After those ten days, my whole being experienced a big shift. Somehow I managed to let go of a weight from the past that I wasn’t even aware I was carrying and I also left with the knowledge of a technique that I can use throughout my day to ground me back to the present. My life stopped being what it was and that’s when I decided to carry on practicing. The benefits were too obvious to ignore.
A daily practice of meditation enhances my mental health and boots my creativity
“Scientists have discovered that practising certain forms of mindfulness meditation for ten to twenty minutes a day can enhance creativity, problem solving and decision making. They also dissolve anxiety, stress and depression, while enhancing happiness, wellbeing and resilience” (Penman, 2015).
If I skip a day of meditation I can truly notice the difference. The more I meditate, the more my mind remains clear of thoughts and brings silence; which allows me to appreciate every little detail that life has there for all of us. I’m more in tune with nature, with its colours, with its sounds. I’m more in tune with myself, because I can observe my feelings, emotions and decide how to react or not to react to them. I can observe if my mind has wandered to somewhere else and decide to bring it back to the present by reconnecting to the breath. I live a healthier life because everything else I do is more aligned with preserving the healthiness of my mind and body. I decided to quit any consumption of alcohol and smoking, so I could remain balanced for longer periods of time.
My creative expression has grown because I’m able to focus on my music practice, with less anxiety and more enjoyment. I’m able to sit down and write articles, poems or simply journal a stream of thoughts that needed to be expressed.
I’ve learnt to accept reality as it is, because I’m not trying to change what is out of my control to change.
By being present, I don’t indulge on thoughts that show me other possible realities, where I would like to change events that didn’t happen as I would have liked them to happen. I simply come back to the breath and accept things as they are. Exploring my creative expression as well as guiding others to find their own creative voice has become my soul’s purpose.
References:
Dhamma.org. 2021. Vipassana Meditation. [online] Available at: <https://www.dhamma.org/en/> [Accessed 31 March 2021].
Penman, D. & Williams, M.: Mindfulness, a Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World (Piatkus, London, 2011)
Penman, D.: Mindfulness for Creativity. Adapt, Create and Thrive in a Frantic World (Piatkus, London, 2015)
Oppland, M., 2021. 8 Ways To Create Flow According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [+TED Talk]. [online] PositivePsychology.com. Available at: <https://positivepsychology.com/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-father-of-flow/> [Accessed 31 March 2021].
Tolle, E.: The Power of Now (New World Library, California 2010)