5 Reasons Writers Should Practice Mindfulness Meditation

This is an automated transcript of the original recording. It may contain small errors, and anything the episode points listeners toward is no longer active.

Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing Podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. Episode 20, today we're talking about mindfulness meditation, what it is, how to do it, and five reasons that every writer should make it part of their writing life. Welcome back to the podcast, everybody. My name is Brad Reed, and I am so excited that you're here with us today. Thank you so much for being a listener, and as always, a special thank you to the members of the Patreon team that keep us fired up and dedicated to producing great content for you every week.

If you are interested in becoming part of the Patreon team, head on over to patreon. com slash bradreedwrites to check out some of the great rewards you have access to as a team member. So let's go ahead and get into the show. What is mindfulness meditation, and what can it do for us as writers?

So I want to start off by talking about how I learned about mindfulness meditation, because I was actually very reluctant about this whole idea of meditation, honestly. And I think part of it comes from the fact that it's felt a little trendy lately. I'm always a little suspicious of these latest trends of things like this, even though meditation actually goes back, I think, thousands of years. It feels new in a lot of ways here in the West.

So I was a little bit hesitant about mindfulness meditation, and I think a couple of the reasons are that it has kind of an overly religious connotation, or at the very least, kind of a new agey connotation. And after studying it for a while and really putting it into practice for a while, I found that neither of those connotations are really deserved by this idea of mindfulness meditation. So hopefully we can get past those a little bit today if you've had some of the same hesitance to this idea of meditation and especially mindfulness meditation.

So my road into this type of meditation came through a couple of books. Not too surprising for a writer and a reader, I suppose, that we find new things in our lives through books. Mine came from a book that initially I was a little bit, I was going to say afraid of. That word is a little bit too harsh or too strong.

But I was a little concerned about, because the book is called Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright. And on its face, a title like that sounds like this is going to be a religious argument. And I'm at the place in my life right now where I have heard many, many, many religious arguments and am pretty reluctant to follow them too far down the road.

So I was a little nervous about this book, but I kept hearing good things about it. So I picked it up and I gave it a shot. Again, it's called Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright. And the only thing I really did not like about this book was the title because I don't think it is representative of what's actually in this book. What I really loved about this book is that it is not in any way religious or I was going to say spiritual. We'll talk about that a little bit later because meditation has as it is core, a kind of spirituality, but not a religious spirituality.

So what I was surprised about when I picked up this book is how non-religious it actually was. Robert Wright is a more explores this idea from more of a scientific point of view, more of a brain science point of view, which I really, really valued. And it made for the perfect introduction to meditation for me to see the brain science behind meditation in order for me to see the value in meditation.

So that's a book I'd recommend to you. We'll have that in the show notes. If you're interested in picking up a copy of that, you can find those over at the website, bradreedwrites. com.

So that book proved to be the book that I needed to kind of open the door of understanding to what mindfulness meditation was. And then I realized that I needed another book, another resource to actually put this into practice, to give this a shot and see what benefits it held for me. And at that point, I picked up a book called Mindfulness, an eight week plan for finding peace in a frantic world by Mark Williams and Danny Penman. I've got that link to that in the show notes as well, so you could check that out. And what I loved about this is that it was a day by day, eight week plan to teach me how to meditate, how to meditate mindfully. And it comes with a series of different recordings that you listen to, different meditations that you listen to that build one off of another until after this eight weeks you are certainly not experienced.

I mean, there are people that spend a lifetime pursuing this mindfulness meditation. So I don't want to say that I'm an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but this eight weeks was the perfect introduction for me to kind of step my way into this process and begin to see its effects in my own life, both individually and as a writer. I apologize if you hear some raspiness in my voice today. I've been a little bit under the weather the last few days, so I fear that's coming through the microphone a bit, but we'll get through it here together.

So ultimately what I did at the beginning of this year, 2018, is that along with some of my typical resolutions about getting in better health and things like that, I added this mindfulness meditation and my goal was to go every single day of the year without missing doing at least a 10 minute mindfulness meditation. I actually made it the first four and a half months before missing even a single day. And even to this point, I've just missed a handful of days. I could probably count it on one hand, the times that I've missed that.

Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation

So all in all, you know, I'm not a hundred percent. I tend to be a perfectionist, so I'm not happy with my results, but all in all, I've meditated far, far more than days that I have not meditated. So that's kind of my story for my introduction into mindfulness meditation. I want to go into now a little bit about what is mindfulness meditation before we get on to talking about why I believe it's so important for writers to at least experiment with this kind of technique for their writing life.

Understanding Mindfulness Meditation

So what is mindfulness meditation? Part of what I think people misunderstand about it is how simple it is and how because it's so simple, that's what makes it so hard. And it's hard to really explain what I mean by that until you give it a shot over an extended period of time.

So ultimately it's as simple as basically three simple steps. One is it's a focus on breathing, right? And we're going to talk about a little bit more what that means because that was really confusing to me in the beginning. What does it mean to focus on my breath? I couldn't, I couldn't put images to that. I couldn't put a reality to that, what that meant.

So, but ultimately part one is you're just focused on your breathing. And again, we'll talk about what that means in a few minutes. Secondly, you're studying where your mind goes when it wanders.

Now here's where the first misconception about mindfulness meditation happens. That people tend to think that when your mind wanders while you're trying to meditate, that that's failure. And actually your mind wandering is the heart of meditation, at least of mindfulness meditation, because it's a study of the mind. It's a study of where your mind goes when you discover that you can't sit there and just focus on your breathing for minutes after minute. Your brain is going to go somewhere. And this is really just about noticing where your mind wandered to.

And then the third part of the simple mindfulness meditation program is just a very quick exploration of why it went where it went. So three parts, you're going to try to focus on your breathing. And then as soon as your mind wanders somewhere, you notice where it wandered to and think about why for just a moment. And then you bring it back to focusing on your breathing.

So I wanted to talk about a couple of misconceptions. I've already mentioned a few. The biggest one I hear is that it's about clearing your mind. If I could, you know, share with you the most often used reason why people tell me they can't do mindfulness meditation, it's because they say something like, I could never meditate because I can't clear my mind. What exactly? Right.

I want to grab them and scream exactly. Right. That's why you meditate, not to learn to clear your mind, although that can be a side benefit, but only sometimes.

So it's not to clear your mind, but to learn about your mind so that you can get more control over it. So it's not about clearing your mind. The attempt to clear your mind is what brings us to the value of mindfulness meditation. And the other misconception people have, I've already hit on a little bit, is that it's not inherently religious, right? It can feel spiritual in a very kind of, I don't know if generic is the right word, but in kind of a general sense, it is spiritual because you are connecting with yourself on a deeper level, but it's not something that isn't compatible with any religion or a complete lack thereof, right, of religion.

So it's not inherently religious at all, even though some people describe it as spiritual. So if either of those things are holding you back from trying this, I'd encourage you to get past those and give it a shot anyway. So we don't want to think about it as learning to clear our mind and we don't want to think about it as something tied to a specific kind of religion or religious belief.

Steps for Practicing Meditation

So before we really talk about the nuts and bolts of how to do it, I want to mention some of the challenges, especially for writers. Now, writers inherently are storytellers. It is our job to have our You do a mindfulness meditation, and I'm going to break this down into a few steps. Step one would be simply find a comfortable place to sit, or even lay down. When we think of mindfulness meditations, a lot of time we think of these traditional poses that we've seen people do when they're meditating, right? I always think of kind of legs crossed, sitting on a pillow or something like that, thumb and middle fingers connected in a kind of a little O and kind of a Zen pose.

And one of my misconceptions beginning is that I had to be in that pose, right? Now, sometimes those poses actually do help get me in the zone a little bit, but it's not required at all. It's fine just to look like a guy sitting somewhere enjoying the ambiance and atmosphere of wherever you are. I love to meditate on the beaches out here on the Oregon coast, and from somebody looking at me, I may just look like a guy sitting on a rock enjoying the ocean, the sights, the sounds, the smells, right? Nobody would necessarily look at me and say, oh, he's meditating.

So don't get hung up on where or how you look. Just get into a comfortable pose, a pose that shows that you're awake, right? You don't want to necessarily be slouching because it is pretty easy to drift off into a little nap when you're trying to meditate.

But you do want to find that comfortable pose that suggests you're awake and connected with the world. So step two, you want to spend the first part of your meditation, however long that is, trying to focus on your breathing. Now, I want to put some clothes on that a little bit. What does that look like to focus on your breathing? And I think everybody comes about this a little bit differently. For me, there's three things that I generally can focus on to keep my mind thinking about the breathing that I'm doing.

The first one is to feel the way my chest expands and contracts with each breath, right? Feel the way my muscles move, the way my ribs expand, the way my diaphragm lowers and rises. All of the kind of mechanical movements of breathing is something I can feel, right? Something I can really get my mind to focus on at least for moments at a time. The other thing I like to do is pay attention to the places of quiet between breaths.

So as you're breathing in and then pausing and breathing out and pausing, it's an opportunity to notice those little moments of quiet between those breaths. And I can usually spend some good time kind of living in those moments and noticing those little peaceful moments of non-movement. And finally, the other thing that helps keep my mind focused on the breath is feeling the temperature differences as the air comes in through my nose and then as it leaves my body. I'm always surprised how cool the air is coming in and how quickly my body warms it and sends it back out into the world.

So those are three things that kind of make, I'm struggling for a word here, kind of make real what it means to focus on your breathing because otherwise you're sitting there thinking, okay, I'm breathing, I'm aware of that, but now what, right? So you're looking for those actual physical things in your body that you can focus on. So that's step two, right? First we found a comfortable place and then we're just going to sit down, usually with eyes closed, and we're going to start just feel the way the breath feels coming in and out. And almost immediately, and I don't mean, I don't mean this like within a few minutes, often within a few seconds, almost immediately your mind will start to wander and it'll go crazy, unexpected places.

So step three here is to just try to notice when your mind wanders off and try to stop yourself from running off with it. What you really want to do is just notice that it's beginning to run off. Take a moment to notice where it went and bring it back to your breath.

Now, still even months and months into my meditation practice, there are times where my whole meditation will be me sitting on the beach or in my room or wherever I'm meditating, me focusing my breath for about three seconds and then suddenly my mind is off and running and I follow it and 10 minutes later, all I've done is sit there and think about what I need to do the next day, right? So that isn't necessarily a failure to meditate. It feels like a failure when you're in that moment because it's not what you intended to do.

But the goal is, and the real success of meditation, are those moments, whether that's three seconds in or 30 minutes in, where you stop yourself and you can say, wait a second, I wasn't intending to think about this. I was intending to think about my breath. And bringing your mind back to focus on your breath. That's where the real work of meditation happens. One strategy I find really valuable in this process is to assign a single word to the place my mind went when it ran off.

So if I'm meditating, I'm thinking about my breath and suddenly my mind runs off and I can say, oh, I was worrying there. So in my mind, I'll just kind of annotate, I was worrying, and then come back to the breath. Or I was remembering, right? I'm replaying something from the past. Or maybe I'm planning, right? I'm more looking out for the future.

So I just try to assign a one-word label basically to where my mind went. And what's really cool about this is over time, you begin to notice these patterns. You begin to notice the things, the places that your mind tends to go, right? My mind tends to be a planning mind. I don't spend a lot of time reminiscing or remembering or replaying past events, although many, many people do. I don't actually spend a lot of time worrying about how things will go, but I do spend a lot of time planning, especially planning my stories, right?

I often, the number one thing without a doubt that I get lost in is planning the next chapter or thinking through a problem in my story, which feels productive in the moment, right? It's hard to say, oh, I didn't do anything or I failed at something because maybe I planned this whole chapter and unlocked something. But it wasn't the point of what I was trying to do.

So even in those moments when I'm starting to get this great idea about the next chapter, I try to stop myself and say, no, I'm planning and my intention was to focus on the breath. And so I'll leave that planning alone and I'll come back to my breath. Now this is hard work. This is really hard work. And that flies in the face of what most people think of as meditation, right? They think meditation is supposed to be easy and relaxing and sometimes it is.

And I think the more we do it, the more often it is. But at least in the beginning and still very much for me now, it feels more like a wrestling match than some sort of relaxing timeout. Now I'm sure there are meditation teachers out there with vastly more experience than I have that would tell me that's a sign that I'm still way too hung up on trying to do meditation right, whatever that means.

But that's a reality for me, right? Sometimes this is like a mental wrestling match. You know, I think it could be argued that the more your mind wanders, the more effective your meditation actually is. I mean, the goal is after all to learn how your mind works and simply where it goes when it kind of diverts to that autopilot mode.

Okay, so our last step here for a meditation is once I've spent a little bit of time focusing on my breathing and I've caught myself a few times or maybe a few hundred times, it feels like from my mind wandering and said, nope, I was worrying there. Nope. I was planning there and coming back to that breath. I have a choice that I can make here and you'd have the same choice because there's actually a bunch of different techniques you can use when you're doing mindfulness meditation.

So I just want to share a few with you, and then if these work for you, you could go out and explore some other techniques. So the first one that I like to do is a kind of body scan. And that's where I will then spend some time focusing on every part of my body in detail, usually in succession, right?

So I'll start with my feet, sometimes as detailed as my toes. And I'll just start thinking about my toes. I'm not about them, but I'll start connecting with them. What do they feel like right now? What information are they sending to me up from their little place in my shoes or sitting in the sand, right? What textures are they feeling?

What little twinges of pain or vibrations or anything like that are they sending to my brain? And then I'll move up the body, right? What about my feet? What about my ankles, my lower legs, my knees, my thighs, so far, you know, and so forth, all the way up through my entire body. And what this does is it really grounds you in the moment that you're in. And it helps you again.

And again, your mind is going to wander through these too, right? You might be on your thighs and suddenly you realize, oh my gosh, I totally switched. My mind wandered. And I was worrying about this conversation I had yesterday. Just do the same thing, right? Oh, nope, I was worrying.

Now I'm coming back. Where was I? Oh yeah, I was on my thighs. And now I notice the way the fabric feels against my skin, right? The way the chair supports my legs, whatever that is, right?

So it's kind of the same process. We're just switching from the breath to something different. And in this first case, it's noticing what information the body is sending us. One of the other meditations I love to procrastination. And here's what I mean by that. The more you do this kind of meditation, the more you begin to see the inner workings of your brain, the more you start to understand how your brain makes its decisions, often without your even being aware that it's making decisions.

It happens on autopilot. And it becomes easier and easier to see those moments of procrastination and take back control from your kind of automatic pilot brain that underneath your level of consciousness are just deciding, making these decisions that, oh, I need to make a cup of coffee now. Or, oh, I forgot that thing at the store. I'm just going to run and go do that real quick. Or, oh, the, the, the office is a little messy, so I need to clean that up first. Right.

All of these are decisions that are being made and often not nearly as consciously as we think that we're making them. So when we discover the way our mind wanders, when we can become to be aware of it, then we catch ourselves in those moments and we can identify that moment as procrastinating. Right.

So just like earlier, we identified moments as worrying or planning. Now we can say, oh, that's procrastinating. And there's something in that identification that gives you some control back and gets you down sitting in front of your computer or sitting down with a pen and getting some writing done.

Benefits of Mindfulness for Writers

So I love that. It's dramatically changed my own level of procrastination. The second reason, number two of five, is actually related to a quote from one of my previous writing professors. His name is Alan Heathcock. He was interviewed on this show before, has a new book coming out soon, I think, which I'm going to be excited to share with you once that is released.

But he told me one of the most important things that he taught me is that you are never not a writer. And what he meant by that is as we're going through our day, even if we have day jobs, even if we're at a PTA meeting or sitting in church on a Sunday or wherever it is, we're always a writer. We're always noticing these details. We're noticing the way people speak. We're noticing the way that people move. We're noticing the quality of the light as it spreads across a linoleum floor in the morning.

Right. We're noticing these details. And this mindfulness meditation will make you a master at noticing detail, because that's the essence of it. Right. I'm sure you can picture how doing that sound meditation and doing that on a consistent basis makes you so much better at noticing those little nuances of detail that you would have missed before. And that's such a key part of writing is living in those details.

So let's move on to number three, number three of five. It gives you an insight into how your mind works. And that is also an insight into how all minds work.

So if you struggle to create authentic feeling characters, seeing the inner workings of your own mind offers an incredible window into the minds of your characters. This is part of what we're talking about when we talk about having flat characters that always act and believe and do things that are predictable and in keeping with their characters. When real people are kind of distracted messes of thought. Right. You're going to learn that more and more as you meditate. How distracted we are almost all the time and how the thoughts that we have, which lead to the actions we take, rarely make that much sense.

Right. So when we begin to see that in our own minds, we can begin to imbue our characters with some of that human essence of unpredictability and of kind of automatic pilot and of doing and saying things that they themselves don't expect to do or say. So love this one. I love the way it helps me bring my characters more to life.

So let's move on to number four, number four of five. It's going to help you shut up that negative voice in your head that is constantly working to undermine you. Now, this is something I actually talk to my high school students about at the beginning of the year, more to do with things like taking tests and things like that, but also about their personal lives. Right. We all have and none of us like to talk about it, but we all have this constant negative voice in our heads that is whispering these terrible things to us. Right.

It's telling us that we're not good enough, that we're we're not good looking enough, that we're not talented enough, that we shouldn't really be doing this, that we'll never be successful at this. We all have that voice back there. And it's really easy to think that that voice is coming from a true place in ourselves. Right. That it's some part of us telling us a truth about ourselves.

But what mindfulness meditation does is that it teaches us how our mind actually works and it begins to make us aware that thoughts of any kind, but especially these kinds of thoughts, are not coming from a true place within ourselves. They're just kind of randomly generated nonsense that's competing for control of your conscious mind. Right. It's almost like a bomb thrower. Right. In the in an argument kind of sense.

Right. To get the attention of the brain. It throws out this bomb that says you're terrible. Well, we have to pay attention to that. Right.

So it's got control of our conscious mind. So it's through this this process of mindfulness meditation that we begin to recognize that self-deprecating voice as a lying voice. Right. And that is so freeing. That's so empowering to be able to to stop that downward spiral of negativity and say, no, wait a second. That's just like that random thought I had the other day when I was meditating that didn't make any sense.

It didn't come from anywhere. So I can ignore that. Right. And I can move on.

So really, really powerful effect of mindfulness meditation. And finally, our fifth one, although even now as I'm as I'm going through this, I'm thinking of others, but those will have to find their way into another show. Fifth, it's going to help you recognize when the story is writing you rather than you writing your story. And this requires a little bit of a recap from a concept that I think we talked about on one of the early episodes. And it actually comes from when I was primarily writing music and song lyrics. And this is something that a mentor of mine told me when I was actually sitting down to write a song with him.

And as we were writing, I found the perfect rhyme. Right. I was struggling to find this rhyme and I found this perfect rhyme, the meter fit, the tone fit and everything.

But it took my story, the story I was trying to tell in the song in a new direction entirely. Right. I had an idea where I wanted the song to go, but this rhyme was so beautiful. I just had to use it. And my writing and mentor partner said, no, wait a second, that song is writing you now. Like, what do you mean?

Right. I'm definitely writing the song. He says, no, you let you let something unexpected come in and change the direction that you were heading in.

Now, sometimes that's good. Right. If we stop and evaluate it and decide that's a better direction.

But a lot of times, in fact, most of the times, that thing is not good. Right. It's not serving the story that you were trying to tell.

So it's kind of a little shiny object that you want to go run after and lose the thread of your story. So that's what I'm talking about here, that mindfulness meditation helps you recognize those moments when the story begins writing you rather than you writing your story. So writing is kind of like capturing our thinking on paper. It feels like a form of meditation to me sometimes when I'm writing because it's going direct from brain to paper. And in the same way, sometimes it gets clouded with the same kind of random thinking and ideas that gets us off track in our lives. Right.

Our writing takes on some of that same quality of a random thought kind of distracting us from where we were going. Only instead of just ending up as a thought in our meditation, this ends up on our page. Right. This ends up in our story and can take it in a new direction that we didn't intend it to go.

So learning to notice how the brain hijacks itself with these thoughts can help us spot those places in our writing where our thinking kind of got away from us. And it helps us to learn to write more intentionally. So those are the five we're going to cover today. Five reasons writers should practice mindfulness meditation. One last thing that must be said before we leave our topic for today. Mindfulness meditation is not a one and done experiment.

Long-Term Practice and Commitment

Right. You're not going to this is something you don't try one day and go, I didn't really work for me. I guess I guess that's not my thing. Just like so many things in life, the benefits of it come from a sustained, consistent focus on it. That's why they call it a practice. Right.

Mindfulness meditation practice. It's something you do consistently and the benefits only really reveal themselves over time. You'll have moments of great clarity and great reward every once in a while.

But the real culminating value of this is done over time. So I always relate this back to the example of my daughter learning to play the clarinet. Now, if you've ever been around anybody learning to play the clarinet, it is a painful process. Right. Day one, if they can make sound on it at all, sounds like somebody strangling a chicken. And day two doesn't sound any different.

Day three doesn't sound any different. Day four, day five, day six, you're beginning to think, oh, my goodness, I'm now I'm going to live with a strangling chicken in my house forever. But one day you kind of notice, wait a second, that sounds a little like Mary had a little lamb. Still kind of Our wise word today is from Jon Kabat-Zinn. I hope I'm saying that right. He's an American professor emeritus of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

So first time we haven't really looked at a writer for our wise word, although he is somewhat of a writer. He wrote the foreword to the book I mentioned earlier, that mindfulness and eight week plan for finding peace in a frantic world. And here's what Jon Kabat-Zinn has to say. The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake.

It means knowing what you are doing. Jon Kabat-Zinn. And isn't that what we're always trying to do as writers, capture those moments?

Challenge: Noticing Time Exercise

So learning to capture those moments in our own lives in vivid and nuanced detail can only serve to help us do that more effectively in our writing. If you have a favorite quote about writing, I would love to share it with the show's listeners here on the podcast. Head over to bradreedwrites. com and click on the talk to us link to find out how you can do that. You could even leave us a voicemail message there and hear your voice on a future podcast episode. Our challenge this week is to do a sort of modified mindfulness meditation.

I'd like you to find a place as similar to a setting for a scene of your current work in progress as you can and spend some time there. Now you're not going to be writing while you're there. This is just what I'm going to call noticing time, even though it kind of mimics a meditation.

Now this is going to be easier for some of us than others. If you're writing a scene in a coffee shop, for example, then this is a pretty easy challenge. You can find a coffee shop pretty easily.

But, you know, if you're writing a space opera, on the other hand, it's going to be harder to find a place that feels like the control room of a massive space cruiser. But I'm going to ask you, can you come close, right? Can you find a place that has at least some similar elements to the setting that you're wanting to write about?

So anyway, once you've found your place, I want you to go there and spend at least 10 minutes delving as deeply into the details of that place as you can. So do things like close your eyes for a while and begin to notice the sounds behind the other sounds. What is there that you've never really noticed before in the sounds? What rhythms or musical qualities might be there? Then you could spend some time just noticing the smells, right? All of them.

You're gonna notice one or two right off, but let yourself get more detail. What other smells are lurking there that aren't quite so apparent? Notice the detail of the small smells. And I do want you to spend some time with your eyes open. And when you do, I want you to try to see the place as though it's a place you've never been before. What textures do you notice, right?

Is there cloth? Is there fabric in the room? What texture does that have? Is there wood? What other materials are there? What textures do you see?

What colors do you notice? And not just the dominant ones. What little pops of color suddenly stand out to you once you're looking at this detail? What movement do you see happening? And also think about the sense of touch, right? How do things feel?

What is the texture of the seat that you're sitting on right now? How does the floor feel under your feet? How does the air move across your skin in this place?

So once you're done, and not until you're done, because it's really easy to get caught up and let our minds run off and start writing these details down. I don't want you to do that. I want you to stay deeply immersed in this place, noticing details.

But once you're done with that, then it is important to jot down some notes about the things that you noticed. You are sure to find some compelling details that can bring your setting to life in a way that wouldn't have been possible before. So that's going to do it for us this week. Until next time, please leave us a review over on iTunes and share the show with your writer friends and writing groups. It's a great way to support the show and helps ensure that we can keep producing them every week for you.

So until next time, remember the best way to improve your craft is by writing. That's what I'm off to go do. And I hope you're off to do the same.

Let's get some words on paper this week and we'll meet up again next week for another episode of the Inside Creative Writing Podcast. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing Podcast with your host, writer and educator Brad Reid. We'll be back next week.