By: Devi Nina Bingham
The benefits of meditation
Adherents to meditation claim that it offers mental health, physical, and spiritual benefits, including reducing stress, anxiety, depression, loneliness, and improving mood. It increases cognitive function and memory, helps manage ADHD, reduces Arthritis, Fibromyalgia, and other Inflammatory diseases, and is heart-healthy by lowering blood pressure. People claim it’s even helped them to quit smoking. In fact, there are over 3,000 scientific studies proving the benefits of meditation.
Resilience is key to survival
I’d like to add one more benefit, and that is how meditation can make you a better writer. By better, I mean calmer, more focused and centered, and experiencing less writer’s block. It also improves your resilience.
Resilience is the ability to “bounce back” from rejection and opposition, which is a must-have for every writer who wants to stay a writer. In my writing career, overall, I have experienced more successes than failures. But it’s the litany of small rejections, and the absence of best-selling fame (and a lack of fortune), which add up over the years to result in burn-out.
Writing is usually a thankless job, and it’s a marathon rather than a sprint. You may run 26 miles but finish in the dead of night when the audience has already gone home. If you want to stay in it for the long haul, you’re going to have to find the self-belief to keep going.
One writer’s resilience: Mark Twain
You probably know the name of Mark Twain, the father of American literature. Twain wrote the classic, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. What you may not know is that Twain was a terrible businessman whose publishing and typesetting business went bankrupt. Desperate for a new start, he relocated his family to Europe.
Why is this important? Because it illustrates that even the best writers experience devastating failure. However, Twain went on to write a travel book in 1867, The Innocents Abroad, which earned him fame as a best-selling author.
What did Mark Twain have plenty of, aside from tall tales? He had resiliency.
As Mark Twain said: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”
Hopeful thoughts are resilient thoughts
Unlike Twain, I’m not a best-selling author. However, like Mark Twain, I do have resilience, which is the power to bounce back from adversity, and so do you.
I’ve overcome tragedy in my life, including losing my teen daughter to suicide. What helped me to heal was to write about it, just as Twain used his failures to springboard him forward.
I wrote a book about my journey through grief, Once The Storm Is Over: From Grieving to Healing After the Suicide of My Daughter (Big Table Publishing, 2015). In addition to writing about my pain and my struggle to heal, I meditated. I had meditated in the past, but now I was noticing big improvements in my mood, and ability to focus after I’d meditated.
And I was feeling more hopeful; feeling that I could and would carry on after my daughter’s death. For me, writing and meditation became the healing prescription.
The healing power of writing
Counselors frequently ask their clients to journal as homework, because neuroscience has proven it has the power to heal. In The Healing Power of Writing: A Therapist’s Guide to Using Journaling with Clients, Psychologist Susan Borkin says that journaling is therapeutic for many mental diagnoses, including adjustment disorders, anxiety, depression, grief, low self-esteem, relationship issues, addictions, eating disorders and PTSD.
How meditation can help writers
Heather Robson has made a list of the ways that meditation helps the brain, and therefore, specifically helps writers:
- Overcoming Writer’s Block-By reducing activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, creativity and inspiration can flow unimpeded.
- Reducing Stress and Anxiety-Over time, regular meditation reduces the size of the amygdala, allowing practitioners to deal with stress more effectively.
- Increase Concentration and Focus-Meditation trains the brain to shut out distraction and to focus.
- Healthy Perspective-Imposter Syndrome is feeling that while you may have writing talent, you aren’t a “real” writer. The inner critic, your self-criticism, can squash belief in yourself. Meditation restores right perspective and courage.
- Discipline and Goal-Setting-Meditation enhances self-control due to having more areas of the brain that control these habits.
I know by trial
While neuroscience has confirmed my suspicion that meditation is good for the brain and therefore good for my writing, I know by trial that meditating on a regular basis, for a period of 20 minutes or more, has brought me greater happiness, focus, and hope, and that these qualities have directly contributed to making me a better writer, if not a better human.
About Devi Nina Bingham
Award-winning Author of 10 books including, Messages From Metatron: A Course in Self-Transformation. A Life Coach and Clinical Hypnotherapist of 18 years in Tucson, Arizona, Devi Nina is currently working as an Intuitive Counselor who channels the Archangel Metatron, providing intuitive readings on the air, and for live audiences.
Podcast host in 2022 of the “Messages From Metatron Podcast Study Group” on CView Quantum Network.
Devi Nina earned an AA in Psychology, a BA in Applied Psychology, and an MS in Mental Health Counseling. She has a diploma in Jungian Archetypal Psychology. She’s a Certified Sound Therapist, a Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist, and a Reiki master taught by a Peruvian shaman.
Personally, she is a Hindu who received the honorary name of Devi from her guru in India, but you can call her Nina. She enjoys kayaking, camping, and bodyboarding at the ocean.
Author links (links will open in a new tab)
Messages From Metatron Podcast Study Group
Bibliography
- Live and Dare. 76 Benefits of Mediation and Mindfulness (Scientific Research).
- Nix, Elizabeth (2014). 8 Things You May Not Know About Mark Twain.
- Borkin, Susan. (2014). The Healing Power of Writing: A Therapist’s Guide to Using Journaling with Clients. W. Norton & Company. Psychology.
- Heather Robson (2019). 5 Big Benefits of Meditation For Writers. American Writers & Artists Institute.
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I haven’t tried it but I would like to give it a try for this & various reasons.