How Does Meditation Work?

meditating

Meditation is deep rest for our mind, giving it a break from the onslaught of thoughts and ego-centred feelings.

We have written evidence that for as long as people have lived, or at least for as long as things have been written down, humans have been aware of some essential truths about the human creative spirit that we still haven’t managed to absorb en masse.

Ancient sages, saints and artists knew all about these invisible truths and now cognitive psychology, cosmology, quantum physics and neuroscience are contributing to our understanding of the human creative intelligence and the part meditation plays in creating the conditions for it to flourish.

In meditation, the body settles into a stillness as deep as sleep  while the mind remains focused.  This allows the deeper dimensions of our minds – what we popularly refer to as the heart and the soul – to surface.
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Inspiration Meditation Shortlink

Clearing Your Creative Pathways

The Creative PathAuthors, artists and musicians all follow a creative path.

And so do those who decide to apply the creative process to other aspects of life.

Some paths meander gracefully downhill; some paths are strewn with debris and the going might get tough; some paths go up steep and dangerous rock faces. We have free will to help us choose which Creative Path we want to explore — and the experience we want to have on it.

When creativity comes our way too, we can make its passage easy or we can prevaricate and procrastinate. It’s amazing how creative we can be at doing everything else but what we most want to do.

When researching my book on how to allow creative sparks to arrive and give them smooth passage, I could find no real evidence as to how we receive and experience light bulb moments on request.  What I did was meditate, go into that quiet space  and allowed what I think of as “universal wisdom” to guide me.

What came amazed and astounded even me. It came in as a full vision, in a split second, and it seemed — and still seems to me —  to make absolute intuitive sense. I did not “make it up” in the conventional sense. It arrived as a perfect example of the process it describes.

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Creative Living, Creative Practice Shortlink

What Is Meditation? By Orna Ross.

Inspiration Meditation by Orna Ross

Inspiration Meditation by Orna Ross. A Go Creative! Book.

Picasso once said: “A painting speaks for itself.  What is the use of giving explanations?”  The same is true of meditation. Like art, meditation is a doorway between our inner and outer worlds; between “reality”, the seemingly solid world that we can see, hear, smell, taste and touch and an elusive “something else” beneath, between and beyond what those five senses can grasp.

And, like art, meditation is its own explanation. The danger in analysing is that intellectual explanations can detract from our understanding of it.

Perhaps a description might offer us a better way in.  In the passage below, Jo Devereux, the narrator of my second novel, Before The Fall, is having a meditative experience . Jo has spent recent months immersed in a tangled family history of insanity and murder.  Now as she walks along a wild Irish beach, mired in misery and confusion, she is surprised to find another part of her mind interjecting into her troubles:

Stop it, I order myself. Stop thinking.  Feel the sun on your eyes and the breeze on your skin. Pull yourself out of your head, down into your body, the body that can’t be in tomorrow or yesterday but only here, where it is.  

Somehow, to my own surprise, I do it.  In the very middle of my trouble, I manage to let it go.  

And as I do, I feel a shift in perception that recomposes the scene before me, making everything in my sights seem more completely itself. The expanse of glistening sands, the knobbled fingers of rock jutting into the ocean, the sunlight pirouetting on the waves — each is more full of its own living presence than it was a moment ago.  Yet somehow, simultaneously, more connected to me. 

I kick off my shoes, I slip out of my clothes, I walk into the sea. My skin is porous, no longer a boundary. Joy surges: I am melting into the water and all the world.  The same molecules dance in me and in everything. 

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Inspiration Meditation Shortlink

The Subversive (and Decorative) Art of Yarnbombing

yarnbombing

“Yarn bombing, yarnbombing, yarnstorming, guerrilla knitting, urban knitting or graffiti knitting is a type of graffiti or street art that employs colorful displays of knitted or crocheted yarn or fibre rather than paint or chalk.While yarn installations – called yarn bombs or yarnstorms – may last for years, they are considered non-permanent, and, unlike other forms of graffiti, can be easily removed if necessary. Nonetheless, the practice is still technically illegal in some jurisdictions, though it is not often prosecuted vigorously” Source: Wikipedia

Take a look at some great images from a feature done by Time titled The Fine Art of Yarnbombing

Creative Practice Shortlink

F-R-E-E-Writing Book Coming Soon

Freewriting book

Coming Soon: F-R-E-E-Writing: The Next Title in the ‘Go Creative!’ Series

Books, Creative Process, FREEWriting Shortlink

Love Poem

Richard Brautigan. Love Poem.

San Francisco: Communications Co., 1967.

Marvin Tatum Collection of Contemporary Literature

From: University of Virginia Library

Creative Practice Shortlink

Creative Can Do – Boosting Self-Belief

“Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right,” said Henry Ford. Or, as my old Irish auntie used to grumble, “You get what you put in for.”

It would be hard to find a philosopher, sage, counsellor or coach who’d disagree.

It’s no secret that self-belief is the central pillar of success — but it’s easy to forget. Or to underestimate its importance in the creative process.

To give your self-belief a boost at any time, do this F-R-E-E-Writing Exercise. Set a clock for 15 minutes, allowing 3 minutes each for the following five questions.

  • What do you believe in?
  • Do you believe enough to convince others?
  • Do you believe enough to succeed?
  • How are your success and your belief intrinsically linked?
  • How might you strengthen your belief?

F-R-E-E-Writing is a much more creative way to where you want to go than setting goals or plans.

Regular free F-R-E-E-Writing (where you F-R-E-E-write for a set time or number of pages, putting down whatever comes to mind will), over time, really boost your belief.

As if by accident, you’ll find your horizons expanding — and yourself soaring right over them.

Creative Living, Creative Practice Shortlink

How To Excel

In the early 1990s, three psychologists visited Universitat der Kunste, the esteemed arts academy in West Berlin, to study a cohort of elite  violin students and see what made them so very good.

As a control group, they selected students from the education department training to be music teachers. Though this group were also serious about the violin, their playing ability was more average.

What the researchers wanted to understand was why. Was there a shared behaviour among the members of each group that made the excellent players better? Were they more dedicated, for example? Did they practice for longer? Or was it something innate to the individuals, with no statistical variation?

The researchers did a series of in-depth interviews with both groups and gave them diaries to carefully log how they spent their time, in college, while socialising and at home.

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Creative Living, Creative Practice Shortlink

Getting The Creative Habit

“Being creative is a full-time job with its own daily patterns. That’s why writers, for example, like to establish routines for themselves.

The most productive  ones get started early in the morning, when the world is quiet, the phones aren’t ringing, and their minds are rested, alert, and not yet polluted by other people’s words.

“They might set a goal for themselves — write fifteen hundred words, or stay at their desk until noon — but the real secret is that they do this every day.

In other words, they are disciplined. Over time, as the daily routines become second nature, discipline morphs into habit. [...]

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Creative Living, Creative Practice Shortlink