How Meditation Helps Poetry

This article is for: Everyone!

We all search for ways to write better, be more creative, and feel more confident about our writing.

And I hope that you’ve found a few of them in the Creativity and Drafting sections of The Poetry Place!

If you’ve looked at some of my other articles, you’ll probably have noticed that most of the tools I suggest do involve actual writing—for example, freewriting, clustering, and listing.

This is because in general I find that “Writing comes from Writing”: The more we write, the more we can write!

But there is one very powerful supportive practice that doesn’t involve writing—or doing much of anything, in fact! At least, not in the sense of physical action. That practice is Meditation.

So in this article I go over:

6 Ways that Meditation can help you be a better, happier, and more productive poet.

First: What is meditation?

Meditation can mean a lot of different approaches and techniques.

These go all the way from deliberately directing your thoughts, as in a visualization, to trying to empty the mind of all thoughts!

So, to make clear what I mean:

**Meditation, to me, is about combined concentration and awareness.**

Concentration means any practice where you deliberately focus your mind on one thing, and work on excluding all distracted thoughts and other stimuli.
Awareness means that, as you concentrate on this thing, you try to be alert to what your mind and body are experiencing.

It’s important to have both of these together, since when separated they don’t always work.

Yes, you can focus hard on a TV show, giving you concentration; but it’s not meditation, because you’re almost certainly not remaining aware of your thoughts and/or body as you watch.

Similarly, in a highly anxious state, you may well be very aware of your feelings and thoughts, but it’s likely that these are flitting about all over the place, rather than being concentrated and focused. So that’s not meditation either.

Here are a few examples that are meditation:

In mindfulness of breathing, you “watch” the process of your breath entering and leaving your body—and nothing else. While doing this you try to disengage yourself from thoughts and rest in just the physical awareness of your body.
In guided meditation, you follow instructions given by someone else—maybe on an app. The instructions may ask you to visualize (i.e. imagine) certain things, from a made-up scene to internal parts of your body.
In mantra meditation, you repeat a set phrase over and over, focusing on the sounds you’re making.

But there are many others, any of which may give you benefits—and all of which you can easily learn about with a quick internet search.

But what does meditation do to help your poetry?

Given that I’m a poetry teacher, not a meditation teacher, let’s get back to writing.

Why and how does practicing concentration and awareness help you write better poems?

Fair question! After all, sitting rock-still for 10-12 minutes while feeling the breath passing in and out of your nostrils doesn’t look much like writing a poem, does it?

The answer is that success in poetry involves skilled use of all levels of the mind—and meditation is training for the mind!

So let’s break down how that works.

1. Meditation boosts focus

Buddhist monks spend hours of every day in meditation, and they are world-class at concentrating. I have watched them sit for literally hours, keeping their minds on their breathing, and ignoring the aches, boredom, and frustration that assailed me!

They can do this, and I can’t, because practiced meditators can control exactly what they pay attention to, and for how long, and in what way.

Similarly, writing poetry is an intense act that requires all your attention. You can’t do it well, or at all, if you’re also thinking about what’s for dinner, last night’s argument, or money worries.

So, the more you can focus, the better you can write poems—and meditation can definitely help you do this!

2. Meditation calms the mind

The main reason most non-religious folks meditate is because meditation promotes calmness and a sense of well-being.

And in a stressful world, that’s reason enough.

This is also useful for poets and poetry.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried writing a poem while feeling anxious or despairing, but—as you might guess—it doesn’t work very well!

Feeling that life is basically OK, and so are you, is a very helpful place from which to start writing.

So if meditation helps you feel that way, then it’s already worth it.

3. Meditation can ease writing fears and blocks

But there’s more to it than that:

Meditation can specifically help you take down the fears and negative self-talk that lead to writer’s block.

This isn’t only because meditation promotes positive feelings in general. There’s also another aspect to meditation that kicks in here, which is that during meditation, you learn to detach from your thoughts and feelings, not react to them.

When a feeling arises in meditation—such as, the feeling of an itchy nose—you have to treat it differently. In real life, you would scratch your nose. In meditation, you’re not allowed to! So you have to become aware of the feeling, and let it sit there, instead of acting on it.

What happens next is kind of miraculous. You might think that the feeling will get bigger and bigger—IF I DON’T SCRATCH MY NOSE NOW I’M GOING TO DIE! But in fact, provided you just watch the feeling, you’ll see it morph, weaken, and disappear. Or if it doesn’t go away, you’ll at least realize that there’s no need for you to take action based on the feeling—you will not truly suffer any harm from not scratching your nose!

Having had this experience in meditation, you can then apply it to real life—including, for example, to the insecurities and doubts that might assail you when you sit down to write.

So when thoughts like “I can’t write, I’m no good, I can’t do poetry” come into your head, it’s much easier to recognize them as just thoughts, not truth—and not react them.

Throughout my life I have always had those negative voices attacking me every time I started to write. But since adopting meditation as part of my routine before writing, those feelings have either gone away, or lost their power over me.

So if you’re a fellow-sufferer, try meditation.

4. Meditation strengthens your Negative Capability

I have a pair of articles on Negative Capability, here and here. But briefly, Negative Capability means the ability to stay with your doubts and questions about a poem, giving yourself the time and space to make better choices and better poems, rather than hurriedly choosing the first idea you get.

When you observe your feelings and impulses in meditation, but don’t act on them, you are basically using the same “muscles” that you need for Negative Capability.

You learn to watch your options, and be OK with not immediately choosing any of them, which is what you need for Negative Capability.

So experiencing this in meditation makes it easier to feel doubts and keep writing anyway, which makes for better poems. (Again see my other articles for a fuller discussion.)

5. Meditation increases your openness to ideas

When you’re writing, you ideally want to be accepting of any ideas or inspirations.

The more you accept what your creative unconscious gives you, the more it will give you.

That then means you can choose the best ideas from an abundance of ideas, rather than having to work with just a few.

Something that’s really vital in that process is not judging the ideas that your creativity gives you.

If you start classifying some ideas “bad,” then your creative unconscious gets miffed and sends you fewer of them!.

Well, guess what—that aspect of meditation about observing feelings and not acting on them is also training you to let go of judgement.

When you realize that an itchy nose isn’t really unbearable, you can stop seeing it as “bad” and accept it!

In these ways, you can learn to take ideas as they come, letting them be whatever they are, and just being thankful for them all—whether you end up using them or not.

Over time, this will hugely increase the quality and the frequency of your ideas.

(For more on this, see this article.)

6. Meditation helps you get to your deep thoughts

Finally, meditation helps you get deeper and deeper into your creative mind.

As you focus, calm down, ignore your fears, let go of judgement, and accept all your ideas, you should find that you can fish down further into the mysterious waters of your unconscious than ever before. With the ruffled waters of your conscious mind stilled, you can see the ocean bottom!

In fact, at its best, freewriting should be like a form of meditation: totally focused in the present moment, lacking any judgement of what comes out, and catching your most remote thoughts and whispers.

Thus, at the raw ideas stage, meditation and writing merge and blur, as you become totally aware of all you’re thinking, and write it down without judgement or worry.

And that will make for astonishing ideas, and amazing poems out of them.

Next Steps

This exercise is a visualization meditation that I have found extremely helpful for building creative confidence and switching off negative thoughts.

It takes about 20 minutes, and I do it before I start my writing for the day.

Sit somewhere where you can be comfortable and relaxed, and where nothing will disturb you for a while.
Close your eyes, and turn your attention to how you feel in your body. You’re going to do what’s called a “full body sweep,” where you move your attention gently over every part of your body in turn.
Starting with the top of your head, and moving slowly down from there, notice how every part of your body in turn feels at this moment. Don’t judge these feelings or try to change them—just observe them. And try to savor the feeling of being fully aware of yourself, knowing how all parts of you are doing—head, neck, shoulders, arms, hands, chest, back, stomach, legs, feet.
Remember your insides too! Feel your heart thumping, your lungs expanding and collapsing, your diaphragm, your stomach.
When you’ve swept through everywhere, pause for a moment to feel your whole body all at once, just sitting there.
Next, become aware of the space around you. Feel the room you’re in, then the building, then the land around it. Let your awareness spread further and further outwards, until you hold in your awareness the whole street, the town, the area. Let your vision lift into the air and rise up and up, until you can see your region, your country, your continent.
And don’t stop there—let your awareness grow to encompass the whole planet: polar ice caps, oceans, the various continents.
Then voyage through space, until you float in front of the Sun—take in how huge it is.
Then zoom out again, until you feel the vast distances between stars. Keep going through the Milky Way, until you feel the presence of billions of stars around you.
Zoom out from the Milky Way, until it too looks no bigger than a single star. At this point, feel the immensity of the universe around you, and how that infinite space is also a place of infinite creativity. Really try to experience the presence of unimaginable amounts of energy and potential all around you.
As you do so, feel yourself as a part of the infinite creative power of the universe—feel it flow into you and through you, endlessly.
Now imagine how it feels in your body and mind to write freely, copiously, confidently, joyfully. Imagine pouring out the creative power of the cosmos as words. You don’t care whether other people think the writing is “good” or not—you’re just swept away by the pleasure of creating, creating easily, creating plentifully. You are full of ideas and fully committed to those ideas as you create them. You’re not judging the words—you don’t expect them to be genius and you don’t fear they are trash. You just write them, and love the process of writing them, and are amazed at where they came from, and feel yourself overflowing with that creative energy.
After a while, let that vision of yourself go. Become aware once more of where you are, hanging out in the middle of the universe. Then gradually return to the Earth, repeating your journey in reverse, going back through the Milky Way, past the Sun, to Earth, to your continent, country, region, town, street, house, room, body.
Open your eyes, and just for a moment, remember how it felt to have the whole creative power of the cosmos flowing through you and around you. Then you’re done!

At the end of this, you certainly could start to write, but I don’t think you have to, if it feels like a stretch. I do find it flows naturally into a writing session though.

If you do this visualization often enough, I think you will start to build your awareness of your creative power, so that it comes more easily whenever you want it.