Wednesday, August 29, 2018
If your creativity has taken a downward turn, it’s time to try something different: mindfulness meditation. Today Emmanuel Nataf (), co-founder of Reedsy, explains the benefits of mindfulness and provides three meditations to help you start a mindfulness practice that boosts your creativity and productivity.
Mindfulness—usually via meditation—has become a hot topic in recent years and for a good reason. It’s been scientifically proven to significantly
reduce anxiety and improve stress reactivity. Research also found that meditation can help suppress distracting information, thus enhancing focus and performance.
Writers who practice mindfulness, therefore, benefit from less stress and distraction and increased focus and performance. But they also experience increased
creativity. Several studies have shown that meditation has a direct effect on your creativity, problem-solving, and cognitive flexibility.
Sometimes equated to conscious awareness, according to Mindful.org, “Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.”
As every author knows, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by our lives and world events and let negative thoughts
keep us from accessing our full creative abilities. But that hinders our creativity and attempts to write.
Writers who practice mindfulness benefit from increased focus and performance. Click To Tweet
Try following these three simple meditation exercises may help you come up with new
story ideas, break through the dam restricting your thoughts, and let your creativity flow.
The Five Senses Exercise
Inspiration can be found all around us, but we are often so focused on the world we already know that we are oblivious to it. Intentionally or not, we end up not
minding the gaps, seeing them from different perspectives. This exercise is geared to help you change that.
Sit in a comfortable place. It doesn’t need to be completely quiet and can be in your house, a park, your car, or any other place you choose. Now, pay attention to yourself and your surroundings. Notices all your senses. How do you react to each sensation? Take note of each thing you focus on.
Focus on Things You Can See
Try to see beyond the everyday things. Notice things that would have gone unnoticed on casual perusal. What is unique about them? Why did they get overlooked before?
Focus on What You Can Feel
Take notice of the things that you are touching. Again, try to focus on things you may not usually take note of, such as the feeling of your clothes on your body or how the sun feels on your skin. Is there a breeze flowing? Is it starting to rain? How does that feel?
Focus on What You Can Hear
Close your eyes and focus on the sounds around you. Is there someone mowing the lawn in the background? Or children and pets playing? What do you hear?
Focus on What You Can Smell
Closing your eyes once again, focus on the smells around you. Is there someone cooking good food nearby? Was the grass recently mowed?
Focus on What You Can Taste
For this part of the exercise, you can either eat something, drink something, or just focus on what your mouth tastes like at this moment. How would you describe it?
Alternatively, you can try this exercise with a single food. Take an item, such an apple, and describe it with each of your senses. Don’t rush through it. Relax, look at the item from new perspectives, write down the new things you notice, and make a note of your reactions.
Later, try this writing exercise: Write a story from the perspective of someone who has just regained the use of one or more of their senses. Use the setting where you performed this exercise and your observations. What would be the most impactful feeling?
Take a step back and focus on what is always present but never truly noticed. Click To Tweet
The Autopilot Exercise
Throughout the day, we perform a significant number of activities — most of which we are so familiar with that we perform them on autopilot. For this exercise, pick one of those activities. It can be something as simple as brushing your teeth or a little more complicated, such as cooking your favorite meal. Try to step out of autopilot mode and
bring awareness to everything that you are doing — down to the way you breathe and the movements of your hands.
Take note of the things around you. What you are using? What you are looking at? Pay attention to the colors, the shapes, the textures. Describe everything you perceive.
Later, try this writing exercise: Write a story that describes an everyday activity through the eyes of someone who is performing it for the first time. What would that person focus on? What would be the easiest part? What would be the most difficult one?
Mindful Listening
All day long our ears pick up sounds. For this exercise, pick a song from a genre you usually don’t listen to. If you want to make this choice even more objectively, randomly choose a song or listen to a random radio station.
Get into a comfortable position and listen carefully to the song, letting it draw you in. Take notice of how it makes you feel. Separate each sound you hear and then notice how they function as a unit or how the instruments and vocals fit together. Explore every aspect of the song without letting your personal tastes get in the way. Be as objective as you can.
Let the music flow through you and describe what and how it makes you feel. What images come to mind when listening to the track?
Later, try this writing exercise: Write a story from the perspective of an adult who has just discovered what music is. What are their first impressions? How do they react to what they are listening to?
Combining mindfulness techniques and writing exercises can improve your creative process.Click To Tweet
Seeing things from new perspectives may inspire you. Try to take a step back from your day-to-day activities and focus on what is always present but never truly noticed. Combining such mindfulness techniques and
writing exercises can move your creative process to the next level.
Do you practice mindfulness? If so, tell me in a comment below how it has affected your creativity and writing.About the Author
Emmanuel Nataf is the founder and CEO of
Reedsy, a marketplace that connects authors and publishers with the world’s best editors, designers, and marketers. Emmanuel dedicates most of his time to building Reedsy’s product and is interested in how technology can transform cultural industries.
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3 Mindfulness Techniques to Open Your Creative Floodgates appeared first on
Write Nonfiction NOW!.
Nina Amir, the bestselling author of How to Blog a Book and The Author Training Manual, is a speaker, a blogger, and an author, book, blog-to-book, and high-performance coach. Known as the Inspiration to Creation Coach, she helps creative people combine their passion and purpose so they move from idea to inspired action and positively and meaningfully impact the world as writers, bloggers, authorpreneurs, and blogpreneurs. Some of Nina’s clients have sold 300,000+ copies of their books, landed deals with major publishing houses and created thriving businesses around their books. She is the founder of National Nonfiction Writing Month, National Book Blogging Month, and the Nonfiction Writers’ University. As a hybrid author she has published 19 books and had as many as four books on the Amazon Top 100 list at the same time. Her most recent book is called Creative Visualization for Writers, and tomorrow her 19th book will be released, The Write Nonfiction NOW! Guide to Creativity and Flow. Find all her books at booksbyninaamir.com or find out more about her at ninaamir.com.