12. Creative Meditation
Show Notes
Big 3 Ideas from this episode:
There are many different types of meditation - I show you one method I’ve created to help my in my own creative process.
Ripple Meditation: One simple process to keep the creativity flowing
Creative meditation can help you not only in art, but in your business as well.
EPISODE No. 12
Creative Meditation
Creative Meditation can expand your imagination
to allow for many new ideas, including mythology, surrealism, abstraction, or simply new ways to compose a picture or concept.
3 simple ways your can nurture your artistic voice
through Creative Meditation:
Listen - to yourself, to your subject matter, to colors, line, shape, and then to yourself again.
Be - with your ideas, your work, with nature. Spend time so you can gain insights - take it slow.
See - Look deeply at your subject, and see what you are not able to see at first glance.
Speak - Be brave - draw, paint, speak with courage and self-love.
Ripple Meditation:
Sit quietly for 10 - 20 minutes
Use soft music without words if that helps to set the creative mood
Drop a “thought pebble” into your mind. Watch your mind work with that thought - let it “ripple out” where it will
Draw or Jot (half between drawing and writing) ideas/thoughts down in your journal
Go create something new!
“Metaphorical thinking "increases enormously
our powers of perception, our understanding of the world,
literally creating new objects.”
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
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TRANSCRIPT:
Episode 12: Creative Meditation
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[00:00:00] The metaphor mindset is a podcast for artists and creative thinkers, entrepreneurs and leaders who want to explore ideas around creativity and commerce.
[00:00:09] And this is episode 12, creative meditation.
[00:01:00] Fred Armisen is meditation.
[00:01:02] Sounds like what's going on in my head when I try to meditate.
[00:01:05] I know a lot of artists who meditate for their art, but for a long time I just needed to sit and breathe in stillness to help me overcome overthinking and anxiety. But over the years it did become something much more, and I'd like to share that with you today. I'm not an expert like Fred Armison, but hopefully this will be helpful.
[00:01:28] first, let's look at a real expert, the writer and scholar of Eastern Traditions Damo Mitchell talks about five types of meditation in his book, White Moon on the Mountain Peak.
[00:01:40] First there's devotional meditation, which is just a prayerful mode used for spiritual guidance or worship.
[00:01:48] Then there's visualization, meditation. Where the imagination is used to picture objects or places in the mind's eye for some specific reason. This is also called guided meditation.
[00:02:00] The third type is observational meditation. Mitchell says, this is used to calm the mind and body by focusing on different parts of the body or breath. This is what we think of as meditation.
[00:02:16] Then there's alchemical meditation, and this is part of an Eastern tradition meant to modulate the energies in the body and to create an inner transformation.
[00:02:28] This type of meditation paves the way to deeper emptiness meditation, which is the final type, and this is often seen as the to silence thoughts and attain a state of nothingness, emptiness, or nirvana. I'm not sure that I've experienced any of these types of meditation,
[00:02:46] but I've kind of come up with my own, I call it creative meditation, and I'll share a little bit of it with you. Here.
[00:02:53] I see creative meditation as a subset of Visualization. with some important distinctions. Guided [00:03:00] meditation is usually led by someone else, whereas in creative meditation, I encourage you to lead yourself in solitude in order to discover more about your own creative process and your thoughts.
[00:03:11] I love this quote by Julian Jayne. He says, metaphorical think increases enormously our powers of perception are understanding of the world, literally creating new objects.
[00:03:25] We often don't think of ideas as objects, but literally they are.
[00:03:32] They're chemicals and neurons and physical places in our brains where new nodes and pathways are built.
[00:03:40] New things. When I dive into the pond of creative meditation, of metaphorical thinking, the liquid light muffles other noises, and I can listen for these new objects,
[00:03:52] new creatures, to make their submerged music sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of my bedroom window. The pale morning light illuminates my shrine.
[00:04:06] Essentially, it's just a box of life's detritus, little lost objects I can fill with meaning to help my mind find rest and comfort. There's a stone, there's a shell, there's a leaf, there's a feather. There's a card from a friend and a circle of candles each representing a day of the week.
[00:04:25] the today candle is in the center.
[00:04:27] I usually pick a card from a tarot deck or just an image to spark my imagination. Everything here is imbued with meaning
[00:04:35] imbue to soak, to keep wet, to saturate from the Latin to moisten and fill. From the old French to drink or imbibe.
[00:04:45] at my shrine, I actively allow metaphor to run like the horse card I recently pulled from my deck of animal cards. The horse represents power, gentle, strong, physical, emotional, and I think how I can direct whatever creative energy I feel and use it for good like the horse does to nobly, serve and run free. In my mind.
[00:05:08] This space of meditation is a place of calmness for me, solitude and self-care, which I often so desperately need, this space of meditation is a space of metaphor. We need metaphor, like we need water or air. We need to be imbued. We need meaning. making art gives our lives, meaning we become our own internal culture.
[00:05:35] Then we create a culture in our community and it ripples outward and outward.
[00:05:40] So I sit at my shrine and open up this space, this window every morning and allow the flow of metaphor to fill me to soak in like fresh air or water, like sunlight, like moonlight, and its tidal pull and its connection to dreams.
[00:05:57] so in creative meditation, it's good [00:06:00] to keep things simple. Start by reading a poem which can serve as a kind of mantra, a word or sound repeated to aid concentration.
[00:06:08] A mantra is the song, the prayer, the content, the. of meditation,
[00:06:14] and there's also a term called Yantra. The yantra is the form, the piano, the song is played on the prayer book, the labyrinth that you walk, the instrument that contains the song, the body of the thing, a yantra literally.
[00:06:32] machine or contraption in Sanskrit. It's a mystical diagram, mainly from the tantric tradition of Indian religions. This makes sense to a writer or artist. A yantra can be a painting, and any painting can be a yantra. This physical thing helps you cross over into a transformative world of imagination.
[00:06:51] So when you. Even a stone can be a yantra. It can be the physical item that helps you open up your imagination.
[00:07:01] Matisse said that when he worked, he felt assisted from what he called a conjurer, whose tricks he cannot see through his muse, helped him create magic. like many he created in the language of color and line rather than the language of words.
[00:07:17] So I thought, what if I actually set aside time for this, this different type of meditation to catch some of those ideas that are flitting through my mind, unfettered and capture them on purpose.
[00:07:29] So this is how it works. I put on my favorite meditation music, I light a candle. I get comfortable. Then I close my eyesand just see the light shape and colors that my eyes are experiencing.
[00:07:41] I step back mentally and look around to find a little pebble, one of those ideas or obsessions or questions I've been trying to think about or solve
[00:07:51] and then drop that pebble
[00:07:53] into the pond of my mind. So say I'm interested in the idea of light at sunset, I'm thinking about light. I'm picturing the colors that the spectrum of light goes through at sunset.
[00:08:07] And I just let my mind process this information. What I'm seeing in my mind
[00:08:11] is shapes and colors in a whole different way than I might think about them if I were just working with a realistic model. . I think about artists like HIlma af Klint or Agnes Pelton or Leo Kenny. I've put some of their works on my website for you to look at.
[00:08:30] works are abstract and they definitely could be pictures of the things that we see in our minds.
[00:08:36] When we're meditating, there are shapes of colors, how the light enters through our eyelids. It's a really interesting practice to think about
[00:08:45] the shapes that we see when we're not trying to see shapes.
[00:08:49] This is just one example of. A creative meditation. So when I drop this pebble into my mind and watch the ripples move out, then [00:09:00] I jot down or draw in my notebook that I keep right next to me. And at the end of the meditation, I often have weird little squiggles or drawing.
[00:09:10] but I remember what I was seeing. And so then I take those and use them for the basis of a painting or of a poem. And this is a really interesting way to get new ideas.
[00:09:22] So I started doing this creative meditation with the thought pebble. dropping it into the pond and just see what would happen.
[00:09:29] Then I came across a teaching from one of my coaches, Brooke Castillo, and she talked about the idea baby.
[00:09:36] Basically taking two ideas, putting them together and see what happens. . I started doing the creative meditation with one thought pebble, and then I would actually drop another thought pebble into the pond so I could see where those two ideas would come together. So Sam thinking about light and I'm thinking about paper,
[00:09:57] I started to see light moving across paper. So then in the studio I started experimenting with drawing the different ways that light moved across paper as the sunset and as the. changed.
[00:10:12] This might be too abstract for some of you, but what I wanna do is push the idea of creativity to let you realize that you have this huge landscape of imagination inside you that you can explore and let ideas ripple into each other. so you can come up with new idea babies that can become part of your artistic landscape and your artistic language.
[00:10:40] I hope this has been helpful. If you have thoughts about creativity or meditation, I would love to hear it. find me on Instagram and I'd love to hear your thoughts there.
[00:10:52]
[00:10:52] thanks everyone and have a courageously creative week.
