We had the Sunday Introduction to Meditation Class at Yoga Bliss today. We continued working with the four foundations of mindfulness inspired by the teachings in B. Alan Wallace’s Minding Closely: The Four Applications of Mindfulness. Alan suggests that this style of meditation can be useful in enhancing creativity and everyday problem solving. It’s difficult to find innovative solutions or creative insights when you’re stuck in habitual ways of thinking. He writes:
By dropping the problem, we don’t forget that a solution is needed. When the mind melts into fluidity . . . [one experiences] a deep spacious mode of awareness in which connections are formed more easily. A solution often comes to mind in a spark of insight.
We centered practice around the experience of being still, awake and relaxed. We created a spaciousness in which all experience could flow through awareness. It was like opening a window through which pure being could emerge. As in yoga we were in a posture of allowing.
We talked about freeing our minds – especially from the conditioning of cultural practices that we’ve never questioned. If we are lucky, our minds do their jobs. They identify, categorize, help us discern what is me or mine. They constantly spin the narratives that maintain our identities. But do their stories tell the deeper truths that give meaning to our lives? Do those deeper truths emerge from something that is bigger than “I, me, mine?” One student described this bigger something as “shared mind.” Author and yoga instructor, Anne Cushman, describes the dimensions of consciousness in her discussion of creativity:
Apparently, there’s an intimate but cliff-edge relationship between two different parts of my own psyche, archetypal characters who still have some issues to work out. One is the yogic practitioner—devoted to using the tools of posture and breath and meditation to awaken to a reality that lies beyond words, that’s larger than the stories we humans endlessly recite about who we are, who we have been, and who we might become. The other is the storyteller—devoted to putting things into words, to spinning real and imaginary tales designed to entrance an audience with the very dramas that spiritual practice is determined to transcend. . . .
[The] vital question, which artists on a spiritual path often wrestle with: What is the relationship between the creative process—wild, naked, unpredictable, uncontrollable, sometimes inappropriate—and the more restrained conventions of formal spiritual practice?
I really resonate with Anne’s description of process: wild, naked, unpredictable, uncontrollable, sometimes inappropriate. I sense this elemental being when sitting by the river, when sounding and moving in ways that just feel good. How is it for you?