Meditate to be More Creative and Productive
There are too many things to do already, who has time for meditation? And what’s the point anyway?
The term meditation can refer to a variety of different experiences and intentions. One direction might be called Silicon Valley achievement.
This is from the article: In Silicon Valley, Meditation Is No Fad. It Could Make Your Career by Noah Shachtman, Wired, 06.18.13.
Here are some excerpts:
“Chade-Meng Tan is perched on a chair , his lanky body folded into a half-lotus position. “Close your eyes,” he says. His voice is a hypnotic baritone, slow and rhythmic, seductive and gentle. “Allow your attention to rest on your breath: The in-breath, the out-breath, and the spaces in between.”
“We feel our lungs fill and release. As we focus on the smallest details of our respiration, other thoughts — of work, of family, of money — begin to recede, leaving us alone with the rise and fall of our chests. For thousands of years, these techniques have helped put practitioners into meditative states.
“Today is no different. There’s a palpable silence in the room. For a moment, all is still. I take another breath.
“The quiet is broken a few minutes later, when Meng, as he is known, declares the exercise over. We blink, smile at one another, and look around our makeshift zendo — a long, fluorescent-lit presentation room on Google’s corporate campus in Silicon Valley.
“Meng and most of his pupils are Google employees, and this meditation class is part of an internal course called Search Inside Yourself. It’s designed to teach people to manage their emotions, ideally making them better workers in the process.”
Shachtman notes “More than a thousand Googlers have been through Search Inside Yourself training. Another 400 or so are on the waiting list and take classes like Neural Self-Hacking and Managing Your Energy in the meantime.
“Then there is the company’s bimonthly series of “mindful lunches,” conducted in complete silence except for the ringing of prayer bells, which began after the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh visited in 2011. The search giant even recently built a labyrinth for walking meditations.”
Book: Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan, Forewords by Daniel Goleman and Jon Kabat-Zinn.
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What do you think meditation is? Maybe a retreat into nature by yourself to sit in stillness?
That sort of venture into secluded nature can, of course, be one form of renewal and meditation, and there are many others.
But why bother with it? Aren’t we too busy trying to get stuff done? What value can it have?
Here are some answers to that question, including how meditation is being used in companies such as Google for personal growth and achievement.
[The photo at the top is “Meditation” by HaPe Gera. It is also used in my article Cognitive Filtering, Meditation, Creativity, and in Find Inner Peace in Chaos by Stephen Pierce, on another site of mine: The Inner Entrepreneur.]
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Author Orna Ross comments:
“Even if you’ve never formally practiced meditation, you are likely to have experienced the meditative state — perhaps when walking in nature, or during sex…
“Perhaps when relaxing in the bath or when looking into the eyes of a child. Perhaps even in the midst of a busy crowd.
“Moments when the thought traffic that ordinarily stomps through your head ceases and your mind falls into stillness, into mindful being.”
She adds, “Those whose lives are most creative, in most spheres, are those who are courageous enough to bring their conscious awareness to the challenging, miraculous, moment-by-moment art of living.”
From Developing creativity: Orna Ross on meditation. [See link in article to her site and resources.]
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The image above is from an article by Taylor Kreiss of the UPenn Positive Psychology Center.
He notes that in recent years, “researchers have taken a close look at the effects of meditation on creativity, and the results have been promising… open-monitoring meditation primes our minds for idea generation, which is a crucial part of the creative process according to expert Scott Barry Kaufman…”
From Improve Your Creativity With This Science-Backed Guided Meditation! [includes audio files]
Also hear an edition of The Psychology Podcast with Scott Barry Kaufman: “Tim Ferriss on accelerated learning, peak performance and living the good life” — which includes “Tim’s recommendations for getting started with meditation.”
Timothy Ferriss is “a serial entrepreneur, #1 New York Times bestselling author, and angel investor/advisor (Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Uber, and 20+ more).”
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Many creative people find that some form of meditation can help nurture their creative work and other aspects of their life.
One example: actor Jessica Chastain has commented on preparing for her role in “The Tree of Life”:
“Emotionally and spiritually, I had to figure out what it meant to play the embodiment of grace. And how do I capture that?
“Okay, so I start studying paintings of the Madonna at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I start listening to music that inspires feelings of love inside me, I start reading books about cultivating joy and cultivating gratitude. I start meditating.” [Quote from imdb.com]
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Another reason to meditate: A UCLA news story notes:
“Eileen Luders, an assistant professor at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, and colleagues, have found that long-term meditators have larger amounts of gyrification (‘folding’ of the cortex, which may allow the brain to process information faster) than people who do not meditate.”
From Evidence builds that meditation strengthens the brain, UCLA researchers say.
A Scientific American article adds:
“Meditation can sharpen attention, strengthen memory and improve other mental abilities. Scientific American editor Ferris Jabr examines the changes in brain structure behind some of these benefits.”
From post: Taking a Closer Look at How Meditation Improves Our Brains by Eric R. Olson, Scientific American.
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Meditation Tech
Ken Wilber is a writer, philosopher and public speaker, with 25 books translated into some 30 foreign languages.
[Roger Walsh M.D., Ph.D., a professor of Psychiatry, Philosophy, and Anthropology at UC Irvine’s College of Medicine, declared “Ken Wilber is one of the greatest philosophers of this century and arguably the greatest theoretical psychologist of all time.”]
Wilber explains: “three cycles per second is a brain wave pattern known as delta and delta is the brain wave pattern that the brain gets into with deep dreamless sleep. It’s the same pattern that it gets into in deep formless states of meditation.
“And so using something like binaural beat technology, you can get into deep formless states of meditation in a matter of five or 10 minutes. It will take meditators just working on their own, usually several months to be able to learn how to do that.”
He notes there are “several companies that sell programs including Holosync and iAwake.”
From conversation between Ken Wilber and Vishen Lakhiani in the Consciousness Engineering series by Mindvalley Academy.
Mindvalley publishes the audio meditation program Omharmonics based on binaural beats technology, but “with enhancements.”
Meditation to relieve depression
In her Psych Central post Rewiring Your Brain through Mindfulness, Candida Fink, MD (a psychiatrist who specializes in several areas including mood and anxiety disorders) refers to studies indicating that meditation improves emotional regulation.
Vasavi Kumar (author of the personal development course “S.O.U.R.C.E of Your Success”) writes of her experience with the OmHarmonics program:
“As someone who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder for 10 years, I have never been able to quiet my mind. Ever.
“And then, I downloaded OmHarmonics. WOW. What a shift. I was able to go from extreme mania to a state of absolute peace and quietness.
“I absolutely recommend OmHarmonics to anyone who has challenges with simply BEING. This is what you have been looking for. THANK YOU!”
Mindvalley publishes a free OmHarmonics demo and Meditation Kit.
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Better Performance
“My morning meditation is like taking a shower for my brain.”
Emily Fletcher is also a participant in the Consciousness Engineering program by Mindvalley Academy; her conversation with Vishen Lakhiani is titled Meditation For Better Performance. The website summarizes:
“Emily Fletcher is one of the world’s leading experts in Meditation. She has been invited to teach at Google, Harvard Business School, Summit Series, Viacom, Awesomeness Fest & Relativity Media. Emily…was inspired to share this practice with others after experiencing the profound physical and mental benefits it provided her during her career on Broadway, which included roles in Chicago, The Producers, A Chorus Line and many others.”
In her conversation, Fletcher says, “I do my morning meditation and then it’s like taking a shower for my brain. And I immediately feel ahead of the game and I feel charged and ready for the day. I know it’s cliché because I am a meditation teacher but it is what gets me out of bed in the morning.
“That, and I would say selfishly, I love waking up to emails from my students and clients telling me that, “I wrote this book.” “I stopped drinking.” “I lost ten pounds.” All because they’ve learned this simple stress relieving technique.”
One of the testimonials on her site:
“I used to go through life gripping everything so tightly, I also had terrible stage fright. Since learning Ziva meditation, everything shifted. I rarely have performance anxiety anymore. Even during The Sound of Music performing live for millions of people, I wasn’t nervous.” Laura Benanti, TONY award winner and actor inTV series including “Nashville” and “The Good Wife.”
Learn more about the training program at Fletcher’s site: Ziva Mind — ‘do less. accomplish more’
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Mindfulness as a powerful strategy for entrepreneurs
In her Forbes article Become A Mindful Leader: Slow Down To Move Faster, Jan Bruce writes:
“Actress Goldie Hawn led a panel at Davos on why mindfulness matters; director David Lynch has an entire foundation dedicated to bringing meditation and mindfulness practices to veterans and other trauma survivors; public schools from California to Maine are teaching basic principles of mindfulness to their students.
“And, of course, there’s the Search Inside Yourself program at Google, established in 2007 to teach employees core elements of a mindfulness practice: train your attention, develop self-knowledge and self-mastery, and create useful mental habits.
“For business leaders, encouraging mindfulness is more than just being tuned in; it’s a strategy to improve personal and company-wide performance and productivity, both of which support overall organizational resilience.
“To be clear, mindfulness isn’t about not checking Twitter for a day. Evgeny Morozov of the New Republic writes critically of the simplistic trend to think of mindfulness as a disconnection from social technology in order recharge and regain productivity.
“While he sees a rather grand purpose in mindfulness — re-evaluating the purpose of all this technology on a cultural level — entrepreneurs have a specific, meaningful stake in mindfulness, too.
“Consider mindfulness a powerful lifelong strategy for entrepreneurs. As paradoxical as it sounds, you’ve got to slow down sometimes in order to move at the speed your demands and ambitions require.”
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In her Huffington Post article David Lynch’s Secrets For Tapping Into Your Deepest Creativity, Carolyn Gregoire says that in his book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, David Lynch likens ideas to fish:
“If you want to catch a little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.”
She also notes that Lynch is “an outspoken devotee of Transcendental Meditation, which he’s practiced daily for over 40 years and brings to underserved populations through his work with the David Lynch Foundation.
“And the award-winning director says that meditation is his greatest secret to creative success.”
“Transcendental meditation is for [all] human beings, and it transforms life for the good, no matter who you are or what your situation is,” Lynch said in a Rolling Stone interview.
“It’s a mental technique that allows [you] to dive deep within to the deepest level of life, which underlies all matter and mind. At the border of intellect, you transcend and experience that unbounded level of life: all positive, pure consciousness with qualities of intelligence, creativity, happiness, love, energy, and peace.”
[Photos of Lynch above are from my article Multitalented Creative People.
More to meditation practice
In his article What Daily Meditation Can Do for Your Creativity, Mark McGuinness comments:
“It’s important to note that there’s a lot more to meditation practice than simply ‘boosting your creativity.’
“If I were to promote meditation as some kind of creative thinking technique, the monks would be rightly appalled — or amused.
“So the benefits I’m going to describe, while very real, are really side effects of meditation — if you approach meditation looking to “get” any of these things, you’ll probably be disappointed.
“On the other hand, if you just practice it for its own sake, you may be pleasantly surprised to discover yourself experiencing some or all of the following: Focus…Patience…Calmness.”
“Qualities such as focus, calmness, clarity, and insight are as important to your creative process as glamour and stimulation.”
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I use the Holosync program (mainly as an aid to relaxation and deeper napping), plus the Omharmonics program, and sometimes brief guided meditations by Irene Langeveld, who helps people “Thrive with your sensitivity” — one of her posts with a video: Earth Meditation — a guided meditation to connect with the energy of the Earth.
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A version of this article was originally published on one of my sites: The Creative Mind.
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