Lost Your Creative Spark? Meditation Might Just Be Your Solution
By Kevin Nelson /Writing requires a little bit more than passion.
You, as an author, need to be motivated and inspired. More than that, you need to keep motivation and inspiration at a sustainable level for a long time. Your every piece of writing is the result of the combination of these three things: passion, motivation, and inspiration, and if you lack something, your writing suffers. You even may not notice that something is wrong, but over time, you feel that the product of your writing and the process itself make you feel disappointed. You feel tired and have no desire to start working again. What happened? Perhaps, this is just fatigue and you need to have some rest, but maybe, you lost your inspiration and this problem is more severe and requires more time to get fixed.
This post offers a background to inspiration and what motivates us, as well as some helpful meditation solutions for you to try out next time you're feeling a lak of drive!
Why IS Inspiration So Important for a Writer?
You may be a passionate writer who adores the process itself but if you aren't inspired by the work, you cannot write at a sufficient level. Inspiration is really the most important tool to continue generate brilliant ideas and stay creative. However, life is often too complicated to be relaxed and keep inspiration at the high level, so we all lose it from time to time. If you notice that you've encountered the problem with inspiration, you need to find some ways to restore it.
Why is inspiration so important for a writer? Do you know that feeling when you need to write something, but you cannot make yourself sit in front of the laptop and start working? Another situation is when you have already opened a new file, prepared for writing, but you have no idea what to write. And the scariest thing is that none of the ideas you have will work. You're stuck, and cannot start writing something new and cannot continue your old work.
Sometimes, lack of inspiration affects other spheres of your life. If you can determine the root of the problem, you can better understand what exactly is wrong.
Ways of Restoring the Inspiration
Psychologists provide multiple descusions to restore inspiration and return it to a higher level. Of course, to get better results, you need to try different methods and implement those which really affect your life. We all are different and the ways that we choose to get inspired will also be different.
Among the most common ways of restoring the inspiration are the following ones:
1) reading and free writing (perhaps, the most popular recommendation for all writers)
2) spending time with nature (a method suitable for everyone. You can choose by yourself where exactly you want to spend your free time: near the ocean or in the woods)
3) everyday regular sports activity
4) routine work
5) meditation
The latest method, namely, meditation is our point of interest. The matter is that meditation is probably one of the best methods to change your life for good and make the inspiration an integral part of it.
How Meditation Affects Inspiration
We can lose inspiration when we get nervous or when some problem affects our lives more than we expected. If we are nervous, cannot calm ourselves down, and think about problems only, writing ideas can disappear as well as the desire to write. However, most of the problems that exist right now do not deserve such sacrifices. Meditation helps us understand that and build confidence that everything will be all right and there is no need to waste your time and personal resources on these problems.
Meditation helps to concentrate on the things that really matter. Some effects of meditation that everyone will appreciate include:
- clearing of mind
- improvement of blood circulation
- finding peace in any place
- restoring concentration
- dealing with fears and doubts
- unleashing of creativity and inspiration
How to Meditate
Of course, mediation requires from you, some time and your deep desire to comprehend this practice and introduce it to your life. Most people think that meditation is just sitting in a quiet room for 15 minutes. Some of them have some suspicions that additionally you need to make some manipulations with your thoughts but actually, they do not understand what exactly to do. In fact, there are several ways to meditate, and we would like to introduce you some of them.
Breathing
Breathing techniques are perhaps the easiest way to meditate. They help to relax and normalize blood pressure. Also, they have a positive effect on your mental health. The matter is that when you have some problems, you think about them over and over again, and sometimes, you cannot stop doing that. Even when you sleep, you continue to think about them. When you practice breathing techniques, you give yourself some time to forget about the problems or at least to stop thinking about them. You count your inhales and exhales and nothing really matters to you.
Working with Thoughts
The next level of meditation is working with your thoughts. With breathing techniques, you are totally concentrated on the process of exhaling and inhaling, and you actually do not think about anything. When you work with your thoughts, you start to concentrate on what you think and you indicate the right direction for your thoughts.
Mantras
Repetition of mantras is actually the top form of meditation. Each mantra has its meaning and it affects people differently. Before you start to practice this form of meditation, you need to make sure that you have already mastered breathing techniques and work with thoughts, as both of them are incorporated into the mantra repetition.
You can meditate whenever you have time. For some people, the best time for meditation is early in the morning when no one can disturb them. Other people prefer to meditate at night or in the evening. Find your perfect time for meditation and try to meditate at one and the same time for several days. The process should take at least 5 minutes but it is better to make a meditation session last for about 20 minutes. If it does not work for the first time, just keep on trying. You just need some time to settle your mind and get used to a new activity and learn how to take the most out of it.
About the Author
Kevin Nelson started his career as a research analyst and has changed his sphere of activity to writing services and content marketing. Currently, Kevin works as a part-time writer at the BreezeWriting. Apart from writing, he spends a lot of time reading psychology and management literature searching for the keystones of motivation ideas. Feel free to connect with him on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin.