When feeling stuck on a creative endeavor, a difficult conversation, or any big decision, sit and meditate to quiet the mind. Clarity on the next step often emerges intuitively from that meditative space.
Avoid forcing or militaristically trying to achieve results in creativity and meditation. Instead, adopt a leaning-back, receptive mode where magic and intuitive insights can happen naturally.
Embrace the notion of ‘being less, not more’ by letting go of self-aggrandizement and refining your motivations from self-image to a feeling of service. This allows you to engage fully with the world from a selfless place.
Acknowledge and embrace the truth that ‘anything can happen anytime’ in life and meditation. This acceptance, rather than causing paranoia, can lead to peace, acceptance, and a vitalizing perspective.
Engage in meditation to cultivate silence, stillness, and receptivity in heart and mind. This quiet space allows creative intuition to arise naturally without effort, fostering inspiration for various endeavors.
Understand that a major part of the art of writing and creativity is revision. This process allows for the exploration of greater subtlety in form, style, and content, contributing to the joy of the creative process.
In the busyness of daily life, consciously give yourself space to hear the more intuitive level of your experience. This prevents overriding these moments of insight and allows them to flower.
Consciously reflect on death, not just intellectually but viscerally, to feel its immediacy and naturalness. This practice can bring forth insights and acceptance about life and its impermanence.
Beyond formal meditation, cultivate a ‘poetic mind space’ to let experiences, feelings, and emotions ‘flower’ and unfold fully. This allows you to appreciate the richness of moments rather than just noting their impermanence.
Cultivate sensitivity to ordinary, common experiences, like simply sitting and doing nothing, to drop beneath usual perceptions and discover their richness and beauty. This prevents passing over them as boring or insignificant.
Engage in creative endeavors (poetry, writing, music) to ‘savor the moment’ and let experiences emerge in their fullness. This approach allows for appreciating and reflecting on moments, which can be a source of great beauty often overlooked.
Contemplate mortality by cultivating an aspiration to approach death from a place of love, with the determination that if you return in some form, your purpose is to be useful to others. This can be a comforting aspiration in the face of fear.
Consider reframing the dying process not as an end, but as a ‘birth canal for rebirth,’ leading to a new beginning. This perspective can transform a potentially fearful experience into one of anticipation and possibility.
Observe your deep attachment to ‘beingness’ and conventional reality, understanding that it is like ‘aging children playing with sandcastles’ that are constantly destroyed by waves. Yet, we cling to these impermanent constructs.
Engage in activities and pursue desires with delight, but ‘without hope’ (meaning without attachment or clinging). This allows you to participate fully in the world from a selfless place, without strengthening a sense of self-aggrandizement.
When you notice the mind claiming ownership or clinging to an idea, simply observe it as another impersonal pattern arising. See it as ‘another star sparkling in the sky,’ without judgment or further entanglement.
Be aware of when to conclude the revision process for creative work, as it could otherwise become an endless cycle of tweaking. Recognize when a piece has reached its complete and intended form.
Seek out quiet spaces, especially during vacation or downtime, to be receptive to new experiences and creative inspiration. Joseph Goldstein found that absorbing poetry in a quiet space allowed poems to start coming out.
Share your early creative attempts with supportive friends who can provide enthusiastic feedback. Their encouragement can help you overcome doubts and take your work more seriously, as Joseph experienced with his poetry.
Recognize that what seems solid is not, and embrace the truth of impermanence to avoid taking things for granted. This perspective fosters a vitalizing appreciation for life and its fleeting nature.
Engage with art and creative expression to open yourself to new ways of seeing, perceiving, and feeling things. This practice fosters incredible sensitivity to the world, revealing beauty in ordinary things.
Beyond conceptual understanding, embrace the truth of impermanence on a deeper, visceral level. This acceptance can lead to peace and a vitalizing perspective on life and death, rather than fear or resistance.
When alone at night, especially lying down, pay attention to the feelings and intuitions that arise. The quiet space allows new things to surface that are normally covered by the busyness of daily life.
Consider visiting the Insight Meditation Society and the Barry Center for Buddhist Studies in Barry, Massachusetts. These two places are highly recommended for deepening one’s meditation practice and engagement with Dharma teachings.
Read Joseph Goldstein’s new poetry book, ‘Dreamscapes of the Mind,’ available through the IMS website. This book offers a unique way to explore the depth of his Dharma teachings through poetic expression.
Download the ‘10% with Dan Harris’ meditation app, which offers a library of guided meditations for stress, anxiety, sleep, and focus. It also provides access to weekly live Zoom community sessions and ad-free podcast episodes.