Bowing to the Artist Within

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Over many years, I have asked myself, how can I teach a way to find and listen and make art from that truth? I began to devise new workshops based in part on the Eastern philosophies that I had been studying, to experiment with the idea of combining meditation with artmaking. Guided meditation, according to the Vietnamese monk and Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, is an ancient technique from the time of the Buddha. With practice, your imagination becomes a window to your unconscious, to memory and experience. Participants in my workshops are able to do inner work at their own pace. Guided meditation, with its unfolding of the imagination, greets the unconscious. The idea is that your imagination and your unconscious can work together to bring to the surface gifts of wisdom and personal understanding. When applied to artmaking, a raw truth surfaces in the art.

Psychologist James Vargiu sees the connection between the creative and the meditative -- reflective meditation, receptive meditation, contemplation, and discrimination -- are quite parallel in nature to the stages of the creative process. Thus meditators can be seen as being creative workers and creative thinkers can be seen as practicing a definite kind of meditation. Such strong similarities between meditation and creative activity suggest that we are in fact dealing with two approaches to the same path of human development. These approaches although starting from very different points of departure, are in fact dealing with two approaches to the same path. toward the same goal: the development of a new mode of awareness and inner activity."

Tibetan Buddhism fosters a type of meditation called "sitting practice." It's a very simple activity. You sit and sit and you practice the art of being still on your chair or cushion, and you sit some more. And you breathe. The inhalation, the "in" breath, is involuntary and automatic. Following your "out" breaths, you observe the many facets of your mind. You become aware of what Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, one of my meditation teachers, calls the watcher, that part of yourself that watches you and makes reflective comments. The watcher is often the voice of sound judgment and encouragement, but it also can be the voice of the critic within.

Time and time again, I have found that the most direct way to being to center myself and connect with my inner world and the spaciousness of the mind, and to transcend that inner critic, is by sitting still. Many of us never take the time to do this, and even if we do, find it excruciating to sit by ourselves quietly without distraction. If you have never meditated, take five minutes and just sit and follow your breath. Every time a thought arises, as it will almost immediately, just note it without judgment and allow your attention to return to the out breath. As you become aware of the exhalation, let your awareness travel out into space and dissolve as the breath does. Slowly, you will discover your inner chitchat settling down.

With the practice of noting my breath, becoming aware of my breathing, I discovered the spaces between my thoughts. This was a surprise to me because I had believed that constant thinking was an essential part of living. In fact, I thought I would die if I did not think. Yet, as I sat and breathed, I could watch the place where the in breath ended and the out breath began. That moment was the "no thought" moment that gave me a sense of spaciousness, of openness. It was the very moment that was the "crack between the worlds" as described in this Native American prayer. The opening where the artwork "comes out like a great river" as Lenore Tawney described in her process. Watching the ebb and flow of your breath, you learn about your own nature and your thinking/no thinking process, and you learn about the entrance to the creative process.

Sundancer, dance into the light

We give our whole being to open up our sight

That we might see the vision, every landscape unfold

That we might dance through the crack between the worlds.