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Meditation & Creativity

So I thought we could do a little guided meditation again and just hook up that area um looking at meditation in this sense as reconnecting to that ground of open space just without any agenda at all just like the sand box you're just in there you have your your body, your mind things arise they twelve for a minute you might have your usual six habitual thoughts taking over ten minutes and they they fall away. You might feel anxiety about that ground, you know, feel like women, you know, what's going on here, you know, uh, you might feel relieved by but just to use the meditation practices way of connecting to space so in certain art forms, you know, I don't know if any of you study calligraphy it all and then you start it quickly so the space is very important in calligraphy and it's also true for painting. I think it is true for music it's too, for writing, you start with an open page, you know, and, uh, our job is not to just quickly fill that up a cz much as we can as fast as we ca...

n, you know, that's that's sort of the neurotic approach to creativity, we better fill that paige up, you know, so if we abide in the space a little bit just the way we do it in meditating uh and then trust trust the creative energy in calligraphy in particular, you know, you you make contact and you just let the stroke of through and you let it go. So this process of leaving some space, hoping space, letting inspiration come through in the form of first thought and and then following it through and then letting you go and of course, that doesn't leave a lot of room for its only after the fact that we go hey, I'm david and I did that that's kind of afterthought really isn't it from the point of view, the creative process, you need to relate their process to relate to the business side of it, unfortunately, because otherwise they'll send the cheque to somebody, so you put your name on it, you know? And if you need some kind of gratification or whatever, but the process itself is really what we're talking about right now, so I thought we could just do a little sitting together everybody at home if you if you miss this segment all kind of review the premise of the sitting meditation and now we're sort of looking at meditation some we could do right in the middle of everyday life, right right in our seat, for example, you could be at your, uh, computer right and you could be working on your design work and maybe you feel like uh you know, mind is very thick and busy with stuff and now you go okay, I'm just gonna leave a little space so you just put everything down right? You take a good seat we talked about you can do this at home if you're doing it crossed legged on a cushion or now you could just sit on the chair that you're on it's better don't go anywhere else if you're on your chair and maybe just put your computer on to sleep for a minute, relax for a minute um and uh take a good posture your feet should be flat on the floor and try not leaning against the back of your chair you can't sit up it's better, so this is again um kind of a warrior's posture brave, powerful posture sense perceptions is open and soft and, uh, we're going to simply use the breath as a way of coming back, but once we do that, don't don't try too hard to stay focused on the breath just relax, relax into the feeling of being here right now so indicate there were starting a session and not continue to guide us through it, so for starters, you can just hear the sound of the bell ringing into king that's a way of settling your mind you might want to feel your even with your good posture all your muscles relaxing just let the tension kind of come away from your body let it go into the ground if you have physical sensations that's fine just noticed them if you have sensory perceptions just noticed them try to manipulate them and the party of mind that sort of geared up and you know trying to find something to do on duh just let it go just really relax sometimes if you're doing this you could just exhale say the word ah you can always tell if people khun they are not just uh try everybody uh yeah that was a good jury uh you'll notice that things come up I kind of want you know some energy new wants to keep being busy forget what it all means putting it together and really just let that go so you can also just feel the space around you there space above you space in front of you space behind you space below you and even in your body there space just feel the kind of spacious quality of your body your breath and when you you know feel restless or you know want to pursue some kind of activity just noticed that and then while you're doing this you could just kind of let that go just relax more bucks deeper you may find yourself a little smile coming onto your face it's okay if you like, you can work with that ah sound when you exhale you can sort of quietly say that to yourself each time you exhale and then just feel ah kill yourself dissolving into space another dimension another way to meditate colleges relaxing but our ordinary notional relaxing is we have to like, lie down or turn it off for something that we're relaxing just right where we are and it's really dropping the agenda part of life very good access because sooner or later our agenda won't serve us anymore we won't need it so at least for a moment or two each day he's just kind of feel that kind of spaciousness that's outside of your agenda and you can jump in let's hear what you got then this first thought I think uh gonna write a symphony now you know whatever you got so I hope the people at home are able to stay with us here there's a certain atmosphere you could say in the studio at this point of, uh, cut ese useful onda all we're saying is you can tap into that through through the meditation peace um and our creativity actually is going to come out of that space um because if our mind is too busy and sort of we were too much of a perfectionist that he ends up choking down the pipeline and so we're this is kind of a reset a reset idea just reset it. The no sale button it's the original idea of a vacation you know, except usually when we go in the kitchen we're too busy, you know, it was it was still using the same logic of like, okay, now do the vacation thing. So, um that's the notion of sandbox and, you know, meditation is a spacious space restore er but dave, often we have to create with an agenda a timeline on the budget uh, now we're back, right? Okay, so when you look at meditation is sort of a a little bit of a retreat, even for a minute or two minutes you just retreat, but you know, you're going to go back in, so I like to think of it it's like the minute between the three rounds, the three minutes of a round of boxing life is like a boxing there's people coming at us, they're taking swings sometimes they look really formidable, but they ring the bell it's like, okay, everybody goes to the corner, meditate for a while, your teacher is going to work on your you know, your cuts and getting you back in and then the bell rings again, you go back in so that rhythm meditation is not I don't think it meant to be one hundred percent all you ever do sooner or later even the greatest masters like spend years in caves and things like that to come out they work with people so it's the idea of resetting and settling and then re entering the action um and thinking of that maybe that ground you talked about as the source of the creative process altogether um but now we've hit the panic button all this one is a red button on the desk thing what you've been doing for five ways in five minutes you know you could have been you could've been doing this you could be doing that you could've been making money you could be making sales calls and if our boss comes in and sees that if were a sales person and they which I've been by the way and they come in they see you boss is gonna panic a freak out a person's not not selling they're not doing their job but it could be even even just a brief thing like that. You know, uh it's just amazing at least in my personal experience what how that can shift your energy around you know and make it more efficient in the long, long one so when we mix creativity and business there's a price to pay literally and figuratively and we'll definitely beginning into this mostly in the business sections of how really how that thing hits the ground running with with timelines, budgets, agendas um but that's not remember that's not what we're talking about right now this is the creativity section so um I think it's important to bring up to this point I don't have a good conversation about it I've been in a situation for a long time of kind of advising people trying to get into the music business um my mother who was actually one of the first significant uh business women in the new york theater was the first woman who ever won a tony award and uh, theater she wrote she had a good sense of humor she wrote a book called breaking out of show business that was that was the title of it and uh but if we're trying to break in you know, I think you look at people I hate to say this but you can tell fairly quickly whether this should be a professional hobby and we look we're the only ones who can decide you know, there's been lots of famous great singer songwriters who was sweeping the floor in the studio in nashville before they were doing that and somebody else could say you don't have a chance, you know, so that's not what we're saying but um are we in this for the happier we're trying to do it for real? You know? You can't keep complaining and whining I'm not getting you know if you're an actor you have to go on auditions you know nobody's calling me well of course they're not calling you I don't do that you know so that's kind of the hard news adult part of this thing you want to be a creative we're all in support of you if you want to just paint gray blobs on two blue canvasses for the rest of your life and have your mother and your friends look at and tell you how beautiful that is that's one thing but if you want to create a business avenue for that we have to make a fundamental decision is this my hobby or my my profession and it's brutal this part of it this is brutal this is like hard edge of reality but it's good to look at it that way because I've seen countless people waiting around for what's going to happen and then it's there twenty years later they're still making demos you know uh in this song or anything it's like oh yeah I just made a new demo well the last time you told me it was twenty years ago you know so who knows it could be it could be they make it for another twenty years and then the after forty years of a hit you know you don't know so again if you have the gumption you keep going but we should decide inside of us what our intentions and if you say like you know you want to be independent uh filmmaker at some point you gotta take the risk that associated with that and you know, even I have I have for example, to seize my own music business expertise um in new york there are amazing singers that seeing commercials they're called jingle singers you know? And every once in a while one of them breaks out they they actually ended up making millions of dollars a year so they're doing their creative thing and being successful with that but then they go I want to be a pop star so here's an example of one of them luther vandross was like making millions of dollars a year is a jingle saying any broke through but other of them they go they uh put a band together they put a show together they go out, they pay the band two thousand bucks to play they give the best musicians and uh eight people come how much? How long can do that for? Because guess what? You gonna do that for a year and you got a book yourself in every venue in in the world on dh really just keep going at it. So even though that person a professional singer they're not a professional artist slash you know, quote unquote so we have to decide at some point really um and in a way stop kidding ourselves about our intention about doing this as a as a professional outing and if not, I think the important thing is no harm done no problem on ly respect, you know, but if we keep hitting a wall and we don't know who to blame for it, I would just suggest looking first at our own intention to release manifest this and take the knocks on the heart of the hard learning to really manifested so um, it's um it's tricky this particular once we have decided to be professional and this is sort of I think going to come up our main conversation really as we go forward is how do we pull that off? How do we actually get that going on? What tools can we use? Interestingly enough, was suggesting meditation is a tool I don't know if anybody's ever done that before, I guess these days we are, but it's didn't used to be nobody would say that. Well, why don't you meditate? Because maybe that'll help your career? Uh, so, um, we have to relate to this notion of having a boss having a client, having an agenda, having a timeline on a budget and, uh, those things and we've got to stop whining altogether zero dialling winding down to zero if it's not happening there's only one place to look why it's not happening, so we'll get into that a whole lot more as we go