Into This To Enjoy
How I Brought Meditation’s Pleasure Into My Writing Life
Hi y’all,
One day many years ago, I came home from a week-long meditation retreat and talked to a friend on the phone. “You must feel so peaceful,” she said.
I laughed.
“Peaceful” was not how I would describe myself or the retreat. It’s not even how I would describe meditation. I don’t have anything against peace but I often associate the word with a placid dullness. The quest for inner peace feels like striving for an ideal condition where nothing is ever choppy or difficult. That's unrealistic.
The retreat engaged with practices related to death and dying. It was super intense because people, myself included, find death intense. We’re hardwired to survive and protect the lives of other people, and in the retreat I was confronted with our strong attachment to life.
I wasn’t sure how to describe the retreat or even my meditation practice to my friend. Now I would describe my practice as pleasurable, profoundly content, and exciting.
It’s less about peace and more about just sitting with whatever happens with disarming intimacy. Over and over again, it’s like, Can I be with that? Can I relax with that? I’m pretty sure I can’t! And then you allow a greater awareness to happen to you and whatever was hurting you or driving you crazy becomes something else.
Even the boredom in meditation becomes interesting if you just stick around long enough.
Meditation always reminded me a lot of writing fiction and poetry. They both involve states of absorption and focus. Both work with existential meaning. Both allow you to feel into ordinary life, the sublime, beauty, and work with pain.
But if I was honest with myself, I enjoyed meditation more than writing.
Meditation became so enjoyable that I started to wonder why my writing practice didn’t feel that way. Why can’t I have more of those qualities—deep contentment, pleasure—in other parts of my life? It makes me think of Audre Lorde’s work on the erotic—this quality of connection and enjoyment—when she talks about how once you experience the erotic in one part of your life, you demand it in all parts of your life.
I wanted that level of pleasure in my writing life.
So I paid attention. What was I doing while I was sitting down to meditate that gave me so much pleasure?
When I meditated, I practiced being gentle with myself. My main teacher is, for the most part, very gentle. I saw that his gentleness came from a place of strength and power. Only the bravest people can be truly gentle with you. I found that quality supportive because my habit is to be really, really harsh on myself. But whenever I talked with him, I kind of felt like it was okay to fuck up and make mistakes and ask dumb questions.
I started treating myself the way he treated me, with a gentleness that has a kind of innate spaciousness to it. When writing, it helps me tend to my own harsh inner-critic who feels like they never get it right.
I also thought that if writing and meditation feel so closely related, then I might as well treat my creative process with a bit of religious flare.
I created a brief ritual before writing each day. Writers already have secular rituals. Some of them are pretty ordinary. Toni Morrison liked to drink coffee and watch the sunrise before sitting down to write. Some of them are pretty weird. Frederich Schiller liked to sniff a drawer of rotting apples before writing poetry.
I started to make tea for myself and also tea for all beings who are Buddhas. I then thought of sand mandala offerings, a practice of generosity in various ngöndros (preliminary practices), and I experienced my writing as a sand mandala.
Like a sand mandala, what we make doesn’t last very long. You make something beautiful and then you give it away, and you see that it’s ephemeral and that you don’t need to hold on to it so tightly. Recognizing this makes me feel a sense of greater ease with what I make no matter how long it lasts or is received. The creative process itself, of making something and giving it away, is an act to be enjoyed in this moment and time.
In my tradition, when you make a sand mandala or practice meditating, you make a wish for your practice to benefit all beings because generosity is inherently liberating. That particular wish is important, powerful, and freeing. So every time I started a new draft of my manuscript, I would write a wish for all beings to be free and happy on the first page, and make the wish when I offered tea to the Buddhas.
Centering myself within this sense of greater connection has a very practical side in that I’ve since felt more at ease when I’m writing. It makes me feel more patient and gentle with myself, like how I feel when I meditate. I’m nicer to myself.
Even when writing feels hard and frustrating, that ease and feeling of support is still there because I’ve connected my writing to a larger practice.
I have fewer days when I feel like I’m pulling out teeth with my manuscript. I still get frustrated. But on the hard days when I’m full of self-doubt, I don’t listen to those harsh voices anymore. This has allowed me to be bolder, and more authentic, and more daring, in my work.
How to make a five-minute creativity ritual:
Save time by slowing down. No one ever feels like they have enough time to write or make art. I think when we feel that way what we actually mean is that we don’t have the energy to make something, so what we need is really to tap into a greater source of energy. When you take five minutes to do a ritual to connect you with a larger purpose, connection, meaning, you feel more energized and the time you do have to create naturally becomes more satisfying.
Warming up is part of every art. I don’t understand why writers feel that they should be able to just sit down and bust out 1,000 words each day. Musicians tune up their instruments, singers warm up their voices with vocal exercises, athletes stretch before they perform. A short ritual to warm up ultimately makes you more limber and agile in your craft.
For your ritual, spend some time thinking and feeling about what feels meaningful in your belief system. Make a list of whatever makes you feel a sense of greater connection to the world—nature, other works of art, people in history, ancestors, images, poems, songs. Find an image or meaningful object that reminds you of this connection, and keep it by your workspace. Then write a prayer or a wish that both expresses gratitude to whatever you feel like is helping you do your creative work. Close the prayer with an aspiration to touch someone else with your creativity. Read or say this prayer before starting to work.
Are there other ways that you connect your spirituality and meditation to the creative process?
Coming up in April ✨
I’ll be posting a piece on the connection between dance and meditation and ask the question—why are there so many dakinis (female Buddhas) dancing in thangkas at Western Vajrayana Buddhist centers, but not a whole lot of people dancing like dakinis? What can dance and music teach us about the nature of mind? And what’s up with the white Western fascination with sitting meditation and the dismissal of more physical practices? (If you’ve read thinkers like Barbara Ehrenreich or Cedric Robinson, you probably can guess my answer.)
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Classes On Creativity and The Numinous
On Thursday, June 5th, I’ll be teaching an hour-long class creative writing class based off my post, The Answer Is Already Here: Create Your Own Writing Oracle. You'll learn how to use inquiry, collage, and bibliomancy to gather inspiration for new ideas, get "unstuck” on projects, and build more meaningful patterns in your work. You’ll leave the class with a collage, inspiration, a couple of pages, and methods for deeper creative inquiry. This class is offered on a sliding scale of $15-$30 for everyone, and is free for paid subscribers.
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I held a free class,”Writing Into Wonder & Amazement,” with a wonderful group of people a couple of weeks ago over Zoom. It was lovely being steeped in the numinous with others, and participants reported feeling inspired, blissed, open, and “melty” from the writing exercises, which makes me happy 💗 (And I was thrilled that one of the participants, artist and writer, Katarina Wong, wrote a bit about the class in her delightful newsletter, Three Threads.)
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Mini-Salon on May 8th:
The next salon will be held on Thursday, May 8th at 12-12:40pm CST and the topic will be “Why Even Make This: Finding Spiritual and Practical Meaning In The Creative Process.” Paid subscribers get in as a subscription perk and free subscribers can pay what they can with the suggested donation of $15, although we gratefully accept all amounts.
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I draw on my experience as a fiction writer, essayist, and creative writing professor to help writers overcome challenges, improve craft skills, and find meaning in their work. I offer 1:1 personalized writing coaching and also manuscript consultations. You can learn more about my coaching and consulting here and set up a 15-minute free trial phone session. You can also find links to some of my fiction and essays at sarahkokernot.com. If we both think it’s a good fit, we’ll take it from there!
The title of this post was bootlegged from my middle-school mixtape collection and the song “Enjoy” by Björk.
I feel a lot better about meditation not being a peaceful business, now.
Thank you for this and also for your for the link to Audre Lorde’s work on the erotic. I love what she says about how once you experience the erotic in one part of your life, you demand it in all parts of your life. I've found that to be true myself, especially as she defines the erotic as "a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane." A place of joy and power and pleasure that can be associated with anything we undertake, whether writing or making the bed. Meditation is like that too, a peaceful radiance that we can take into our ordinary lives. I don't have a ritual that I use to tap into that or my writing, but there is an egoless state of mind that I am able to slip into that I imagine a ritual like the one you describe helps to access that.