Mindfulness, Self, Writing
Why Meditation is a Key Part of My Writing Practice
Practical tips for staying focused so that you can write
I’m a writer because I just can’t help it. When a burst of inspiration comes, every cell of my being yearns to shout it from the rooftops. Writing it down is the next best thing. Turning that inspiration into words is like making love to it, caressing each part of it, naming it in order to know it.
As every writer knows, there is ecstasy in the writing that comes from inspiration. Weaving words can take us into flow states, where time stops and the day’s problems drop away, leaving us feeling clear and alive. It’s the best!
When we are metaphorically singing to our muse, returning her love with our words, we don’t have to worry about attention. Inspiration calls our attention out naturally. We couldn’t look away if we tried.
But, anyone who wants writing to be more than a hobby knows that we must be able to engage our craft even when we’re not writing from that flow state. Doing so takes discipline and practice. Such practice — strengthening the muscle of our attention — can benefit all areas of our life, not just our capacity as writers.
Weaving words can take us into flow states, where time stops and the day’s problems drop away, leaving us feeling clear and alive.
There has never been an assault as vigorous on the human capacity for attention as what we’ve seen in the 21st century. Social Media, gaming, self-improvement apps and more, our smartphones alone are a panoply of distraction. Best summarized in psychologist’s Nir Eyal’s books Hooked and Indistractable, the design principles behind smartphone apps are based on the addiction mechanisms used by the gambling industry, and in 2019 the IT sector was valued at $4 trillion globally. Your attention is a hot commodity. That’s why companies pay a pretty penny for it.
Attention is a muscle and in the 21st century, ours is out of shape.
Attention is a muscle and in the 21st century, ours is out of shape. If you want to be able to focus, you need to learn how to start exercising your “attention muscle” just like you would any other, so that it will be strong enough to do what you want it to do. You don’t expect to be able to lift heavy things if you don’t work your biceps, and you shouldn’t expect to be able to sustain your attention for more than a few minutes if you don’t strengthen your ability to focus.
As writers, we need to be able to cultivate sustained attention in order to craft something worthwhile. Good writing requires slow and steady work, drafting and redrafting, clarifying and polishing. For that reason, a meditation practice is essential for us.
Though it can sound ‘new-agey’, in truth, simple meditation is really quite the opposite. Meditation is the act of paying attention to something — it can be anything — for the duration of time you’ve decided you’re going to pay attention to it. Simple as that. When we practice meditation, we practice paying attention.
When we practice meditation, we practice paying attention.
In recent years, study after study has demonstrated that meditation, or the practice of returning your attention again and again to a predetermined point of focus, impacts the physical structure of the brain, regulates hormone levels in the body, and increases feelings of well-being, like “calm,” “joy” and “equanimity.” Most important for our purposes though, is that meditation has been shown to markedly improve a practitioner’s ability to focus. It is the antidote to the 21st century’s offensive against our ability to pay attention.
How Do I Do It?
Meditation is not easy, but it’s very simple.
The best method to exercise your “attention muscle” is with a basic meditation practice. While the myriad guided meditations out there for relaxation or enlightenment or levitation, etc. are cool, they are not the best fit for our purposes.
In that the art of writing is dependent on our being able to hold onto an idea, image, vision, or story so that we can move it from the mind to the page, we need to practice the art of sustained attention.
In order to do that:
- Select a time duration for your meditation practice. I recommend starting with 10 minutes. If 10 feels overwhelming, do 5, or even 1. But do it.
- Select a focal point, known in meditation jargon as your “anchor.” Your anchor cannot be your thoughts, as you will quickly find that they are transient. The most common anchor across world wisdom traditions is the breath, but the feeling of your feet on the floor or your bum on the chair also works. Really, almost anything can be your anchor. The key is to pick one, and stick with it.
- The simple but not easy challenge of meditation is to hold your focus on your anchor for your selected duration of time. Simple as that.
- However…as soon as you start meditating, you will discover, your focus would prefer not to remain on your anchor. This noticing is where meditation really begins!
- The workout that meditation offers for your “attention muscle” is the willful action you will take to return your attention to your anchor each time you notice that it’s wandered away. Be kind to yourself as you do, and if you can’t help but call yourself names, well, then that’s good information for you to have as well.
- You can find more detailed instructions in the article below.
How Will I Know If It’s Working?
It only takes one or two tries at meditation to discover that it’s really hard. If you’re a writer, I promise that the urge to write down the onslaught of great ideas that suddenly arise, or at least, to obsessively hold the best one in mind until your timer expires, will be overwhelming.
Believe it or not, those ideas are not our goal in this practice. Our goal is to strengthen the muscle of attention. When we’re meditating, we’re working out, and the payoff is much sweeter than those ideas that begin to arise once you start paying attention. You have the rest of the day for listing topics for your next novel. By investing these 10 or 20 minutes in strengthening your ability to focus, you will leverage your writing-time 100-fold.
The payoff of a consistent daily meditation practice is the ability to see an idea through from conception to publication, by engaging in extended stretches of focused writing. Spending 10 (or ideally 20) minutes returning your focus again and again to your anchor can translate into an improved ability to hold with your writing, to live and breathe your subject without turning aside from it, so that you can write it fully.
The journals of those great writers who lived before the information age, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Virginia Woolf, report that they regularly wrote for long, focused stretches. Sustained attention is an essential skill for our craft.
Disciplining yourself to meditation for 20 minutes/day, even if it’s boring, or hard, or so much less interesting than scrolling on social media, is an investment in your craft and in your overall well-being. As the science shows, it reduces cortisol levels and increases energy.
It is a doorway to a world of goodness.
So, what are you waiting for? Step inside.
