Emptying the mind to fill the page
Writing is my passion; I’m also deeply fascinated by Eastern philosophies, mindfulness and meditation in particular. But the two have seemed like strange bedfellows to me. Which is perhaps why for the longest time I read an awful lot about meditation without actually practicing it.
My reasoning? If I meditated, I’d probably be far less anxious, but with a mind emptied of thoughts, how would I write?
Surely, to get the juices flowing, I’d have to stay very much in my head. Harbour a bit of existential angst to summon the muse. Mull and churn and ruminate — the very ailments mindfulness wishes to cure.
Meditation is about accessing the here and now. To craft stories, writers rehash the past and imagine the future; plots are intricate things that require us to time travel and switch between nostalgia and fantasy.
I worried, in a nutshell, that if I became a zen-like creature, blissed out and uber content, I’d have nothing to write about, no material. Don’t tortured souls make good writers? But earlier this year, I locked myself away to try write a novel and it tipped the scales. I’d gotten so deep inside my own head, so buried by my thoughts, my anxiety became debilitating.
It was time to ditch the books on meditation and get my butt on the cushion. Turns out the advice on writing and the advice on meditation are remarkably similar:
Flex those muscles
Like writing, meditation is a discipline. We’re told to work at it, repetitively, to build and strengthen our muscles. Resistance will be huge and distractions will be many, which is why the only way to do it is to do it. Get your butt in the chair and write, or on the cushion and meditate, day after day after day, however much you suck at it.
The art of subtraction
As a writer, you’ll never hear it said that you need to embellish. Flowery, verbose language is a no-no. The advice is to subtract rather than add. You’re encouraged to take a red pen to your work and be ruthless, to ‘murder your darlings’. Your darlings are the sentences you’re most proud of — the ones you’ve laboured over and honed to perfection. They’re the sneaky ones you need to look out for, as it’s likely your ego got in the way of you speaking your truth. There’s something very Buddhic about this, of letting go of what you’re most attached to (sometimes I’ll have a sentence in my head that I think is so witty and insightful but it just.does.not.fit.in.anywhere. It kills me to delete it).
In much the same way as good writing is stripped back writing, meditation is about getting rid of the clutter. There’s very little that you layer on, it’s all about paring back — your thoughts, your desires, your judgements. Doing this requires letting go of our identities, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. According to Buddhist thought we cling to these identities because they make us feel secure in an uncertain world, which is why it feels counter-intuitive and even scary to let it all go.
(The stuff on ego and identity can get a bit watery and unfathomable, but at its essence, I think its just about not holding on so tightly so we can surrender to the moment, the only place we have any control over).
See things as they are
Writer’s write to make sense of the world, and their prose is laden with their beliefs and assumptions about how life works — it’s what gives stories colour and texture. But the most compelling writing is not that which is angry or highly charged. It’s when the writer is able to step outside themselves and inhabit someone else’s world, compassionately and without judgement.
At its heart, meditation is, I think, about helping us to see things clearly, to see the truth of who we are. Sitting on that cushion with nothing to reach for and nowhere to go, you’re encouraged to see what’s in front of you and to embrace it wholeheartedly, even if it is, as Buddhist nun Pema Chodron would say, ‘smelly’. What you’re experiencing might make you feel stinky and horrid, but you need to crack yourself open a little bit at a time, to find the compassion to be okay with your less shiny bits. So much of Buddhism seems, to me, to be about self-compassion. Learning to be okay with and love our less than perfect selves, so we can be more forgiving of those traits in others. Writing too, is a way to understand others, and with understanding comes compassion.
So, I’m slowly coming round to the idea that I don’t have to be a compulsive thinker to be a writer. In fact, overthinking only leads to a frenzied, overwrought and clouded state of mind (I think delusional is the word?)
The thoughts will alway be there. But the more I experiment with mindfulness, with resting in the moment, the more I start to realise the wonderful interplay between letting go of my thoughts and coming back to them, clearer and slightly less fettered, so I can write.
It becomes like a dance, a back and forth waltz. Tsunami of thoughts—respite from thoughts—clarity and clear-mindedness—more thoughts. Back and forth, over and over, round and round in an endless cycle. Very Buddhic, don’t you think?
