Why Writers Need Meditation
Without meditation, I would have not published my novel, nor would I be close to publishing my second novel, with many more to follow. Without meditation, I would not be writing these words for you now. Meditation has helped me concentrate and focus as well as face my fears over putting my name out there and becoming something I’ve always wanted to be: a writer. Perhaps most importantly, it allowed me to see the transitory nature of everything. Publishing, marketing, sales, and the like are nothing more than shadows in the wind.
It might be helpful to mention a basic meditation fact that is true regardless of what kind of meditation you do. All meditation is about being aware of your present mind and the world around it. All meditation includes bringing your mind back to its focus, even if it is focusing on itself.
Doesn’t that sound like trying to focus when we create?
Navigating Ups And Downs In Sales And Marketing
Being a writer or creator is difficult, especially if it’s not a full-time job but a practice driven by passion for your art and the stories you want to tell. I am a small-scale, indie creator, so the pressures I feel are entirely self-imposed. Needless to say, it can be an emotional roller coaster. We are committed to our craft, wanting it to succeed and grow. It is easy to get upset at the lack of sales for your book or receiving bad reviews, not to mention the hours we have to sometimes spend on the sales and marketing when we would rather be writing. Mediation can help us stay balanced and not let the challenges and frustrations of being a creator get to us. Those frustrations are also clouds temporarily sailing across the sky.
Connecting With Our Vision
As writers, we are both the creators and the inhabitants within our imaginative worlds. Sometimes the pictures, characters, or emotions we imagine are crystal clear and make perfect sense. Hopefully we remember to write them down before we forget them! Other times, those impressions are vague and ill-defined at best. Even if we do write them down, meditation can help us to better capture what we visualize in the following ways.
Focus on what our imagination has created with less distractions.
Observe the world around us with more clarity and open gateways for inspiration.
Have more success remembering our less defined ideas and give them a head start in reaching full maturity on the page.
Experience more complete ideas.
I have meditation sessions where I have conceived entire outlines for books. It was not something that I was actively looking for, since when we meditate we want to give our whole attention to our meditation practice. Nonetheless, in between my breaths I’ve dreamed up complete books. Not the full details of course, but enough to write down an outline later and save it for future working and writing.
If that does happen to you, it can be tempting to stop meditating and write things down. Sometimes I’ve done that; other times not. However, trying to wait until your meditation session is finished to write down your idea is a good exercise in remembering more specific details and experiencing more complete ideas as listed above.
Remember, there is no judgment in meditation!
Dealing With Distractions
When we create, we get distracted. It’s the way our minds work. Distractions are a natural process as they are in meditation. There are as many ways to get distracted as there are grains of sand in the desert. Some of them we are in control of: phone notifications, research we do in the course of our writing that leads us down endless and likely unnecessary rabbit holes of information. Maybe we decide we need a snack. Others are out of our control: taking care of the needs of our families and those around us, animals included. Especially if we are in a flow, having that interrupted and refocusing once we’ve tended to our interruption — or stopped doom scrolling — it can be difficult to get into that state.
The heart of any meditation practice is bringing your mind back when it gets distracted. It doesn’t matter if you are watching your breath, chanting a mantra, or using a visualization. Meditation is always bringing your mind back to the now of your breath, your mantra, or your visualization.
If you are a writer or creator of any kind, meditation is a practice in regaining your flow.
Another fact of meditation is that we don’t assign a value to the thoughts that interrupt us. They are all clouds passing through the sky on their way to wherever they are going. They are neither good nor bad. So, we can take the same approach to whatever distracts us from our creative pursuit.
Opening to Inspiration
As writers and creators, we can be inspired by almost anything. A conversation, an event we see on the street, the smell of something delicious cooking. It doesn’t matter. If we limit our inspirations we limit ourselves and our art. Meditation can also be helpful in being open to those inspirations. It’s too easy to label everything we sense or encounter in any one of countless different ways. That categorization can cause us to write off something that might be helpful in finishing our novel, or resolving a plot thread that definitely refuses to be resolved.
Writers Need Meditation
We are writers and we need to focus, we need to be inspired, and we need to fend off the army of distractions that tempt us every day. Meditation can help with all of that. Even if we don’t think we are meditating, anytime we return to our work and re-focus, we are in a sense meditating already. And, if meditation can help us to be more in the flow with our writing, how much more so will that affect the other areas of our lives, too.
Sadly, we have to do more than just write all day and every day. At least I do. And for all the reasons above, I wouldn’t write at all without meditation.