Tag: Meditation

08
Nov

Big Fish: Taking You To The Depths Of Mindfulness

bigfishRecently, we talked about How Meditation Makes You a Mindful Multitasker, but the benefits of mindful meditation go even beyond improving our ability to juggle our work, it’s also a cognitive workout. We spend so much time focusing on improving our bodies that it’s easy to forget about giving our brains a little strength training as well. In a recent article in The Atlantic titled “How Meditation Works,” Dr. Katherine MacLean, a psychologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine stated that when “you strip it of its religio-historical context, mindfulness meditation is essentially cognitive fitness with a humanist face.” Studies have shown that just like other forms of exercise, the more you do it, the more of a lasting impact it has.

Filmmaker David Lynch is a firm believer in this concept and has even published his thoughts on meditation and creativity in the collection Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. In it, he describes the creative benefits he’s received from practicing meditation and how it’s influenced his style as an artist by keeping his mind nimble and helping him dig deeper into his creative conscious.

According to Lynch: Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful. The more your consciousness – your awareness – is expanded, the deeper you go toward this source, and the bigger the fish you can catch.

Just as we wouldn’t expect our bodies to be capable of running a marathon without plenty of training, if you want to be able to fully flex your creative muscle, you need to build up core strength in your mind, and mindful meditation is a great way to start.

Image Credit: Abstract Screams Of A Dying Fish Painting by Ginette Callaway

 

25
Oct

How Meditation Makes You A Mindful Multitasker

Being unproductive? Free yourself!

Being unproductive? Free yourself!

Om, that feeling of complete calm and quiet is something we’re all greatly missing in our daily lives, which is especially true when we’ve got a busy work and personal life schedule. Stress can manifest itself in many ways mentally and physically. It impacts our ability to be creative and think clearly, the way we relate to others, the quality of our sleep, and our overall well-being.

Latest neuroscience research shows that giving yourself time to relax and meditate help you better make creative decisions and even multitask. According to a paper titled “The Effects of Mindfulness Meditation Training on Multitasking in a High-Stress Information Environment,” released by professors at the University of Washington, meditation training can help people working with information stay on tasks longer with fewer distractions and also improves memory and reduces stress, which is something we could all use a little more of.

We share IDEO founder and Stanford professor David Kelley’s ideas in his most recent book Creative Confidence. We too believe that for clients to think creatively, it takes a lot of taking a step back, breathing and letting yourself assess the situation before judging or using analysis, the basic principles of meditation. That’s not just beneficial on the client side; anyone in our creative community could take a page from that. Too many times when we’re faced with a situation that has us over-taxed, emotionally, physically or mentally, we’re in such a hurry to power through it to get to the other side that we don’t often stop and really let ourselves really think on it.

So even with all of those multitasking apps aimed at improving productivity at our fingertips, the best solution might actually come from within.