How I Learned to Be a Mindful Writer (and Why it Matters)

Mindfulness changed my writing and it might change yours too

Every morning I get up around six o’clock AM and meditate for twenty minutes. The house is quiet. Even the dog is willing to give me a little peace before the bustle of the day.

Not every meditation session is positive, but every session is good. I can’t force my brain into a certain state. The best I can do is nothing. And allow the thoughts to come and go as-needed.

I meditate to train myself to live more for today and less for next year.

This is a lifelong journey, with a slow conditioning period. I’ve got a long way to go before I’d consider myself extremely present. I don’t even know if extreme presence is a thing I can develop. But I’m trying. I meditate every day for twenty minutes, twice a day — morning and night.

I’m quite the introvert.

I spend a large part of my day living in my head. Some days it’s very hard to be present and I’m working to change that. As a writer, living in my head is both curse and asset. I need my thoughts to develop content, but I’ve got to be present to deliver those thoughts on paper.

In comes the mindful writer.

I don’t know why, but I never expected there to be a correlation between mindfulness and writing. I never had much of a problem with coming up with daily ideas, but the execution side has been an issue lately. I have trouble finishing my work.

But once I sat on a regular basis things changed. The mental fog lifted and I found my actions more deliberate. Where before my life was a little cloudy. Most of the time I was always thinking about something else, even if a person was speaking to me.

After meditating regularly I’m now able to focus better — to appreciate the moment before me, instead of some moment years into the future.

I revisited all the other behaviors mindfulness may benefit. And pleasantly discovered writing is one of them. Once I had meditated consistently for a few weeks, I noticed a gradual change. Not only do I have more energy earlier in the day (when before I was sluggish in the morning), but I also have more focus for writing.

Thanks to mindfulness I now have the ability to write when I’m at peak mental clarity, and to keep writing longer, without distraction.

I used only exist in the morning. I’d go through the routines. Make the coffee and my son’s lunch. Let the dog pee. Stumble around the kitchen until I shook-off the cobwebs.

Now I wake up and sit for twenty minutes.

Then I start my day with a vengeance. This small moment of peace and mental-sorting has helped me the rest of the day. I appreciate the smaller moments. I have a better concept of how long writing projects will take to finish.

When we practice mindfulness we learn to accept our thoughts, but not make judgments on them. I used to try and avoid the thoughts I didn’t like, but they’d only return with a vengeance. Now, these negative thoughts stop to visit, but mindfulness helped me drop the judgement. And now I’ve got more space in my mind for writing.

The best part of mindfulness is the variety.

I can practice walking meditation if I want to go outside. I can practice three-breath (or one-breath) meditation if I’m stressed or pressed for time. I can use a mantra, focus on an object, play mental movies, or focus on my breathing.

Meditation pre-dates all major religions… and science.

There are thousands of years-worth of successful practitioners behind this simple, mental tooth-brushing. When I’m done, even with a session where I felt scatterbrained, that was what my mind needed. There was clarity at the end.

The less I try and force my meditation to go a certain way, the more I feel the benefits when I’m done. And the more this practice works its way into the rest of my day.

As creatives we need our mental faculties more than anyone. Literally everything we create comes from our heads, so there’s not a lot of room for foggy thinking if you want to make a living from your work.

If I don’t finish the writing I start, my readers don’t benefit, and I don’t have anything to sell.

Mindfulness changed my focus, causing me to be distracted less and productive more. I thought it would be hard to develop the daily habit. It’s been on my list for years, with little success.

But once I realized the benefits I look forward to meditating.

It’s no longer something I feel like I should do, but something I want to do. And my writing is the beneficiary. The habit has been easy to maintain. I track my results in my phone (as I do with many habits) and the progress has grown nicely.

I tell myself I’m the type of person who meditates.

If I want to be that person (just as I’m the type of writer who writes every day) I’ve got to match my behavior to my mouth. So I meditate. I get up a little earlier and go to bed a little earlier. Not a lot at either end. I’d love to wake up at 4:30 AM, but I’m not there.

This process works for me.

August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. A self-proclaimed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indie authors how to write books that sell and how to sell more of those books once they’re written. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.

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