Meditation, Mental
Habits, and Creative Imagination
Martine Batchelor
tricycle
We have to be careful not to think that meditation
is about getting rid of thoughts. On the contrary, I would say that
meditation helps us to creatively engage with our thoughts and not
fixate on them. When people say they cannot concentrate, I say,
“No, no, no! You are concentrating—too much on any one
thought!”
It is interesting in meditation to notice all the
different places where our thoughts lead us—what distracts us and
what occupies our minds. It is important to notice these things in
meditation because these will be the same things that occupy our
minds in daily life. As we become more familiar with our thoughts
in meditation, we will see how repetitive our thoughts are. We
often think very similar things over and over again and it is
actually rare to have what I would call a creative, original
thought.
What I recommend is to follow the breath, or let
sounds be the object of your concentration [see here], or try
body-awareness meditation. Then ask yourself, Where did I go? When
I was distracted, what did I do? And then you can see that you have
many different types of thoughts, which generally fall into three
categories: light, intense, and habitual.
Often we try to work with our thoughts only when
they reach a high level of intensity. By then I would say it is too
late, because they are already so strong and so powerful that it is
very hard to work with them. The only thing we can do when we are
really caught in heavy, obsessive thoughts is to realize the
cause—maybe something happened and you are upset. Just be careful
not to feed the intensity. I think that meditation practices can
help here. For example, when coming back to the breath time after
time, if you’re really obsessive then you’ll eventually notice,
“Oh, I’m obsessive.” Then try to come back to the breath just a
little bit, just for a few seconds. Then keep coming back. This may
not remove the intensity of the thoughts completely, but at least
their intensity will diminish, and generally the thoughts won’t
last as long.
As we meditate, we become more aware of the habitual
nature of our thoughts. I think of this level as consisting of the
mental grooves that our thoughts habitually follow. Meditation
helps us break free of these habitual patterns and unleash the
original and creative power of thought.
Daydreaming is an important mental habit to be aware
of. Daydreaming can be very frustrating. If you have a tendency to
daydream in daily life, then you will often compare what you
experience in your life to what happened in your daydream, where
everything went according to plan. Daydreams are seductive. It’s
like a film where we are the actor, the scriptwriter, the director,
the producer. We even sell the popcorn. It can be wonderful, we can
tweak whatever we like and do whatever we want—but then we have to
come back to reality, where things don’t always go our way. I think
we need to know when we are daydreaming— not in order to judge but
to come back to the moment and say, “Oh, I’m lost in a
daydream.”
I remember when I was a nun and was meditating ten
hours a day. Instead of meditating, though, I would daydream about
it! I would daydream about going to a hermitage, practicing very
hard, becoming awakened, and saving everybody. When I realized this
was not meditation, I went back to truly cultivating my practice. I
was then able to restore the mental energy I spent daydreaming to
its original purpose: creative imagination. When I write a book, I
don’t daydream about writing a book. I just think: What about this?
What about that? When I go to write, I become very imaginative and
creative. I bring it all back to creative imagination.
Light mental patterning is natural, and it is the
easiest level to work with. A live brain is active, constantly
firing and thinking of something. We will have aimless trains of
thoughts, weird association of ideas, shopping lists or light
planning. These are interesting in that due to their lightness, we
can play with them more easily and also laugh at them as we
recognize certain motifs and see how unnecessary they are. I can
see a “preparing luggage” loop. Since I recognized this loop, I
only indulge in it near to the time of departure and not for very
long. Having become aware of it, I find it pointless, as I know
that I am quite able to do my luggage quickly and
efficiently.
We need to recognize light mental patterning,
because under certain circumstances we move quickly from light to
habitual to intense and we find ourselves in the grip of an
obsession, which just started as a faint wisp of thought in the
mind. We do not need to be afraid of our mind. We can go on a
journey of discovery and experiment. Then we are able to play with
our mental processes and develop our mental ability in wisdom and
compassion.