BY: ADRIAN SMITH
I started meditating when my creative work made me more anxious and unconfident than happy. I would wake up afraid, knowing there was a new project to start that day or that I’d have to continue the ones I’d been working on already. I found myself avoiding the work. And if I ever did get started on something, one small annoyance would take me away from it completely. I’d just give up before getting into the thick of it. It got to the point where I was afraid to have new ideas, or better ones because I didn’t think I’d actually be able to produce them. I knew they’d just sit there in my head until I eventually discarded them. I was beating myself up before I ever got the chance to start, and it was crippling creativity. I couldn’t focus. I just keep running through ideas in circles until I felt resentment for them all and eventually crept back into bed, defeated. I finally voiced these frustrations to a friend who has always worked on films, figuring he’d identify with what I was feeling.
“I thought this was interesting,” he said, and sent me a YouTube link of filmmaker, David Lynch’s lecture on meditation. In his segment, Lynch describes his experience with the same sorts of anxieties and fearfulness I’d been dealing with, while answering questions from people in the audience. When a film professor asks him, “how does meditation help the creative process?” he responds by telling her, “if you have a golf ball-sized consciousness, when you read a book you’ll have a golf ball-sized understanding of it. But if you can expand on that consciousness, you’ll have more understanding. It’s all about consciousness, and it’s at the base of mind. Meditation allows you to dive within, and experience this consciousness.” At first I thought his answer was too mystical, or spiritual for someone like me to take seriously. But I figured it’d be something worth trying either way since nothing else seemed to settle me down to that point. I started off meditating once a day for five minutes in the morning just to get into the habit of things, and found simply doing it was helpful right away. Meditating helped me clear my head by focusing on nothing but my breathing. Although I’m not a Buddhist monk yet, and may never achieve that level of concentration and enlightenment, it’s calming to be able to rid your mind of everything—anxieties, fears, frantic thoughts, even if only momentarily. It allows me to think deeply and focus on one thing at a time once I do shift my attention from my breathing to an idea. And as soon as my thoughts begin to clutter, I simply zone out again and refocus on my breaths. I don’t sit there and confuse myself with problems I can’t tackle all at once. Instead I slow down and think deeply and openly about a solution. There’s no panic.
In the video, David Lynch explains what modern physics call ‘the unified field’ in meditation. This field possesses qualities such as bliss, intelligence, creativity, energy, and peace. He goes on to mention it’s not the understanding of this field, but the experience of it that does everything. You’re able to catch ideas at a deeper level and intuition grows in this field of pure knowingness. You just know what to do. You know how to find solutions. Your enjoyment of things grows. There’s no negativity. It’s familiar, and it’s you. The practice of meditation itself gives offers a level-headedness that allows me to sit in front of a blank document confidently, even if nothing great comes out that day. Just being at my desk, in front of my laptop is a step up from sitting in bed, spending my energy thinking about all of the fears and doubts I have about my work. I’m able to get away from that by trying to find the purest frame of mind that exists within myself. I realized I’ve been afraid of being unable to write like I wrote last year because I don’t have that same anger, that same chip on my shoulder. But I don’t need it. David Lynch discredits the idea that you’ve gotta have anger and an edge to create, and instead clarifies that “you gotta know about anger. You’ve gotta have energy. You’ve gotta have clarity to create.” This segment was a great first step in finding the solutions I needed to expand my consciousness and creativity, while helping shed negativity and doubt.
Check out his lecture on ‘Consciousness, Creativity and the benefits of Transcendental Meditation below:
