Songwriting Flow = Active Meditation

Songwriting requires a balance of action and reflection — both of which happen to be really good for you.

You might not realise it, but songwriters get in touch with themselves in a way many people don’t. They really listen to themselves — and they learn to translate what they feel into songs.

Meditation generally encourages people to quieten their minds, breath and feel deeply, and become highly attuned to what’s within. Meditators often spend lots of time listening to, or alternatively ignoring, the thoughts and feelings that arise when one stops putting mental effort into things. The benefit of this is of course: peace, ideas and inner knowing.

Meditation is one of history’s favourite ways of relating to what’s within, to generate clarity and ideas, and is still very popular today — but often the practice is missing an important step: Action. Or said another way, a focus exclusively on meditation often fails to translate the knowledge attained during meditation into actions in the world.

Songwriters, like other artists, take listening to themselves a step further: upon encountering their inner landscape of feelings and stories, they act — they sing! — they create songs, and in doing so translate inner knowing into words and music.

Q: Where do original songs come from?

It’s safe to say that improvisation leads to new songs —for every song must be improvised at least once! Improvisation involves a surrender of sorts, a flow state guided by intuition, feelings and ideas that comes from within, and are then expressed without.

At some point during a jam session, in the shower or at any moment really, a songwriter realises, ‘Huh, I have potentially started writing a new song,’ and they have the choice of either ignoring the idea or listening to it — or to go a step further and act on it, explore it, document it and save it for later.

Q: So our mind automatically makes music and all we have to do is listen and jam along?

Ummm… something like that, yes. Just like how each of us improvises the conversations we have every single day, we can learn to improvise melodies — we just have to develop the muscle! Musicians develop this ‘inner radio’ to an amazing degree — some people can improvise entire symphonies in their minds!

Clearly each of us have some kind of innate remixing facility that has absorbed and processed every song we’ve ever paid attention to, and then is capable of hashing out old tunes (earworms) or spinning new melodies and ideas into existence. Subconscious creative facilities ftw. Turns out the key to songwriting is simply paying attention and acting on our ideas.

The human ability to synthesise all knowledge and go on to create an individual style is the heart of artistic practice. It’s also a skillset that potentially everyone can develop, if they choose to allocate the time and effort.

Q: So how do we practice the meditation of great songwriting?

I’m gonna give it to you straight… great songwriting requires both Sense and Sensitivity.

That was easy.

Sounds like a callback to a novel from the 18th century, right? But there’s more in it than that. I’m talking about two fundamental ways of thinking and experiencing that when balanced, allow us to write amazing music.

Finding the balance of Sense and Sensitivity, when struck, becomes a meditation of sorts. Like silent meditation, repeating mantras or walking-around-the-park meditation, the practice of songwriting requires us to be aware of ourselves, and on top of that, it also challenges us to make sense of ourselves.

These two aspects are different skill sets, and often they both need attending to (plus we need to learn songcraft!) before we can create amazing music. Luckily, practice makes permanent — and the more time we spend in the creative loop, the better we get at both observing and understanding ourselves.

Sense

Imagine we’re watching a film with a friend, and at the end the friend asks: “did that make sense to you?”

This kind of sense refers to the coherence of a story, to order and comprehension — even to common sense. Art and creativity, like therapy and deep and meaningful conversations, challenge us to make sense of the mystery of ourselves.

It was written “Know Thyself ”at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi — introspection was seemingly popular with the Ancient Greeks.

To understand ourselves and our existence has in many ways been the major project of Western thought. As Socrates stated, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

To this day, our hope to glean information about ourselves and our world dominates our passionate interests, from films to university courses and backyard projects. We long for something or someone to make Sense of life and help us find some meaning.

Songwriting is a fantastic way to make sense of ourselves. How’s that you ask? Well, it actually starts with Sensitivity — and this is where the mediation begins.

Sensitivity

The creative process begins with sensitivity. It is from the unconscious depths of our sensory networks that our creative energy rises on geysers of inspiration — should we be present and receptive to them. In the language of meditation: first we observe the feelings and thoughts that arise, remain unattached to the outcome, and allow our Sensitivity to deepen.

The root of all our knowledge and experience in the world is through our senses, external and internal. Our sight, hearing, touch and taste are our sensory links with the world, and we can’t turn them off.

We can, however, choose to ignore them, to filter them out and focus our attention elsewhere. This is a common survival trait in the modern age — after all, who has time to meditate and tune into ourselves? Until a psychologist advises us to download a meditation app, few people prioritise this act of observation and sensitising — which is a damn pity because there is a wealth of ideas, feelings and creative impulses that lurk in the depths of our own inner radio (automatic/unconscious creativity).

Those who choose to tune into these subterranean radio stations tend to find some remarkable material floating around down there.

People who’ve completed 10-day Vipassana retreats tend to talk about the overwhelming volume of voices, feelings and thoughts that cascade through their minds as soon as they stop and tune in, followed by moments of incredible clarity, even transcendent understanding and more.

The wealth of our imagination is endless, like a bottomless treasure chest. When anyone stops to pay attention to what’s going on within, they become the recipients of our native creativity — and can then start to create from that deep, personally true place.

The gift of such Sensitivity, often associated with the artist and even femininity, is that we start to peel back the layers and get the raw material of our deepest essence.

And once we have this material — we can begin to make sense of ourselves.

The Meditative Act — Sense & Sensitivity

There are many wonderful forms of meditation out there, however songwriting has to be one of my favourites. It’s much simpler than people think, too.

1. Put out a general intention to write songs.
2. If any ideas seem song-worthy, engage with them, write them down.
3. Spend time jamming with your instruments (eg voice).
4. Take note of any evocative or interesting ideas, save them for later.
5. Spend time crafting and finishing the songs, practicing detachment.
6. Share your songs with your friends and fans —live performance can be a kind of meditation too!

How easy is that? Plus, you can practice it as often as you like, and you’ll have something to show at the end of it. Plus — if you grow and change over time, you’ll need to write more songs to reflect the changes, so you’ll always have something new to write about.

The creative process requires us to activate our Sensitivity and tune into what’s going on within, and then to activate our intellect and make Sense of it.

This co-ordination of feeling and thinking is a special act of meditation. It requires that we balance our intellect and our sensuality, that we actually tune into the raw matter of our unconscious mind and then take the time to present it in an orderly fashion.

We’re reaching into the chaos of our ineffable selves and coming out the other side with something and saying ‘Look what I learned!’ In this way, songwriting is but one method of translating the raw material of emotional existence into an orderly, elegant artistic expression, literally transforming the ugly truth into something beautiful.

The artist is a scientist of sorts, gathering raw data and subsequently presenting the key findings. However, our inner world can never have the same kind of objectivity that scientific inquiry does in the external world.

Hence we find authors such as Carl Jung who claimed to be nothing of an artist — instead a scientist — yet he created words for our language such as archetype, introvert, extrovert and synchronicity— not to mention the beautifully illustrated Red Book, composed from the edge of sanity or in other words from his extremely creative imagination.

It may be that common sense isn’t actually that common, because our sense is unique to each of us based upon our own creative imagination and the subtle tastes of our creative minds.

And isn’t that quite a beautiful thing? It frees us up to concentrate on our own sense of what’s right and wrong, what’s real or not and what’s worthy of attention in this age of ecological and spiritual crisis.

Songwriting and all acts of artistic expressions allow us to come out the other end with a finished product that represents our developed understanding and accomplishment in this world.

And if that isn’t a positive outcome for meditation, I don’t know what is.

MORE ABOUT JOE: He specialises in real, heart-felt music. With 12 years experience writing songs for guitar and piano, he produces vast quantities of his own work and teaches other to do the same at Songcraft.
His next EP ‘Still I Want You’ will be released on June 1.