Being a Zen writer means that you are able to tap into creative flow, write with ease, and connect with a sense of creative freedom. Many writers compare their insides to other writers’ outsides and make the assumption that writing is easy for everyone else, even though it feels difficult for them.
Meditate Create
Most writers have some sort of regular habits or practices that help them to get to their desks and begin writing. If you’ve read my previous posts, you know that writing used to be a struggle for me. I used to get distracted by a number of things between the time that I decided to walk to my writing desk and the time that I actually sat down to write – get another cup of tea, let the dog out to potty, answer the phone, clean the house…
After creating my own approach to mindful writing practice, I’ve since been able to arrive at my desk with ease, and I start and finish writing with ease most of the time. The struggle is rare. I spent a lot of time and effort studying how the creative mind works and coming up with ways to tap into my creative flow. Now, I, too, consider myself to be a Zen writer. I love writing, and it pretty much flows with ease most of the time. I owe this all to my meditation and writing meditation practices. I’ve learned how to override the Default Mode Network of my brain (read more about that in my post on “The Neuroscience of Writing Well with Writing Meditation”) and engage my creative brain so that I can more easily connect with my creative flow.
3 Steps to Becoming a Zen Writer and Connecting to Your Zen Creativity
- Develop a regular mindfulness meditation practice. Being a Zen writer begins with some sort of regular mindfulness meditation practice. (You can learn more about how to practice mindfulness meditation in my posts “What is Mindfulness” and “How to Meditate.”) Start small, even if it’s two minutes a day. Increasing your awareness will help you to know when you’re becoming tense, anxious, and stressed in your creative process, encountering creative blocks, or sabotaging your own creativity. Once you learn to recognize the habitual patterns of thinking or behaving that keep you from living the kind of creative life you want, you can begin to release those patterns, be a Zen writer, and access the Zen creativity that connects you to creative freedom.
Regular meditation and writing meditation practice can help you to cultivate a calm body, open heart, and steady mind that supports the creative process, whether you’re a writer, artist, or other creative type.
- Develop a regular mindful writing practice. This is the most useful route I’ve found to creative flow. This practice can help you to learn to apply the principles of mindfulness meditation to your writing and to all of your life. As you do this, you’ll become skillful at approaching all of your writing with an attitude of non-judgment, kindness, and friendliness. You can still objectively evaluate, edit, and improve your writing and other creative or artistic endeavors, you’ll just be doing it with kindness rather than harshness. All of that harsh criticism that some people want to hurl toward writers, artists, and other creatives can serve to shut down creativity rather than opening it up. It’s possible to offer kind and objective critiques of your own and others’ work in a way that facilitates greater creative flow. Mindful writing practice can help you learn how to do that.
- Make peace with your inner critic. A regular meditation and mindful writing practice can help you to begin to, once and for all, make peace with your inner critic. Try to imagine all that you could write or create if it weren’t for the constant barrage of your inner critic! Dealing with a harsh inner critic is one of the biggest challenges that writers, artists, and other creatives face. As you grow in your practice of mindful writing, you’ll become skillful at meeting whatever your inner critic has to say with nonreactivity and friendliness and then choosing to place your attention back on the writing. You’ll learn how trying to silence your inner critic, as most people advise, can make it grow stronger. We create suffering when we get entangled in wanting things to be other than we are, and we create peace when we accept things as they are and then decide what wise action should be taken.
Resolve patterns of getting stuck in creative block or sabotaging your own work and become the creative person that you long to be. Practice treating yourself with kindness and compassion.
Have you tried mindful writing practice? If so, what benefits are you noticing? If not, what’s stopping you? You really don’t have anything to lose by trying it, and you have a whole lot of creative freedom to gain if you do try it.