Writing and Meditation; Writing as Meditation

I didn’t set out to post about the relationship between writing and meditation this week, but somehow I ended up doing it anyway—twice. Perhaps it’s because I’m working so diligently on my own meditation practice these days, trying to refresh and strengthen it. The way meditation can aid my writing—and the way writing can be a form of meditation—have been on my mind a lot.

On this Great Stuff for Writers Friday, I would like to share some of the excellent posts I have come across in my own attemps to fortify both my writing and my meditation.

Meditation and the Art of Writing
This post by writer/entrepreneur Farnoosh Brock is one of the best short pieces on the relationship between writing and meditation I have found. Calling meditation, “a non-negotiable element of my writing process,” Brock discusses how meditation can improve your writing by enabling you to tap into what you uniquely have to offer the world. She lists several specific benefits meditation has for writers and suggests a process for using meditation in your writing practice. I put this post in my “must remember to reread often” file.

Writing as Meditation
This article was posted on Huffingtonpost.com nearly five years ago. It hasn’t lost a bit of its relevance or usefulness to writers. Penned by Susan Smalley, a professor at U.C.L.A., it explores not how meditation can aid writing, but how writing is a way of meditating.

Writing and Meditation
This post by Mary Pipher comes from her book, Writing to Change the World. It is a short, pithy, and superb description of the relationship between the act of writing and the process of meditation.

Zazen and Earworms
I include this post from the EightLimbedLife blog here because it deals with a problem I am plagued by. If you’re not familiar with the term “earworm”—newly added to some dictionaries—it refers to those catchy, annoying tunes that get stuck in your head. This post is about what to do when they interrupt your meditation, but it could apply equally to dealing with intruding thoughts when you’re writing. Eightlimbedlife’s suggestion—to merely notice and dismiss them—is the best thing I can do when those little critters come around.

The Practice of Self Reflection
The post by Buddhist teacher Dzigar Kongrul Rinpoche talks about the conflict between our search for contentment and goodness in our lives and the continual confusion we experience as human beings. It is about reconciling “what we see in the mirror” to our search for enlightenment. Self-reflection—as opposed to self-absorption—is the key, according to this post. It is especially relevant to writers’ lives as well as to the material we write about.

Liberation Here and Now
The post on the BuddhismNow blog, an excerpt from Ayya Khema’s book Be an Island: The Buddhist Practice of Inner Peace, is not specifically aimed at writers, but it is such an excellent discussion I wanted to include it here.

The central point of the post is this: the notions of “liberation” and “enlightenment” seem to most of us to be unattainable. They are something for yogis and Zen monks, for people who practice many hours every day, renouncing family and livelihood. For “spiritual giants,” as Khema puts it. But Khema shows that liberation is attainable even by us ordinary folk, and she points the way in this post. Khema’s writing isn’t easy—she goes far beyond the facile notions espoused by various New Age “gurus”—but it is utterly worthwhile.

Check out some of these posts. I’d love to know whether you find them useful, so leave and comment and let me know!