BEHAVIOUR 07 OF 10 . TUNING-IN

Do I have to meditate to be more creative?

No. What helps is the open kind of attention, where you let whatever comes, come. The narrow, controlled kind does not do the same job. And if formal practice does not suit you, find your own way in, because the state is the point, not the method.

What it looks like when it’s missing

A day with no gap in it anywhere.

Not a busy day. A day with no seam. Meetings touching meetings, and every gap between them filled with a phone, because a gap now feels like waste rather than like room.

The person living that day is not short of time. They are short of unfilled attention, which is the only place their own thoughts can turn up. And they will tell you they are not very creative any more, and they will be describing their calendar rather than themselves.

Where this came from

Years ago I went on a ten day Vipassana retreat with my friend Kate. I had been reading about meditation and its curative powers, and this sounded like the real thing. Ten days in the country.

She told me on the drive that it was quiet. I said no problem, I had brought headphones.

Quiet turned out to mean silent. Twenty four hours a day, ten days, no talking and no eye contact. We were to imagine we were each alone in a cave. Up at half four to meditate before breakfast, and on through until eight at night.

I lasted about five days.

What broke me was a man at the front. A Vipassana veteran, bearded, hairy, with the bluest, most lit-up eyes I have ever seen on a person. Mid afternoon, the graveyard slot, dead silence, everybody deep in it. And from somewhere near the front came a noise I can only describe as a sneeze crossed with a roar crossed with being sick.

Blue eyes turned around and looked directly at the man responsible. And his face asked, without a single word, whether this person had just thrown up his nut roast lunch down his back.

I went. Head in the blanket, shoulders going. Then I could hear other people going. Then the whole room was going, and the giggles turned into proper laughter, a collective release from unrelenting effort.

The leader suggested that those of us unable to control ourselves should kindly leave, so as not to disturb the others.

So I went outside, lay down on the grass in the sun, and laughed until my stomach ached. Every time I got myself together I could hear somebody else still going, and I was off again. I stood up eventually and caught Kate’s eye, and that set us both off for another round.

Then the leader came round to each of us in turn and asked what the problem was.

I said, what problem. He said I could not control myself, and that control was central to the practice.

And that was the end of me and that particular school of meditation.

What I did not notice for years

I went to that retreat to learn to tune in, and I spent five days failing at it.

The moment I actually got there was flat on my back on the grass, helpless, in the sun. It had been so long since I had laughed like that. I wrote at the time that it felt like remembering some deep need to let go.

I was not being undisciplined. I was in the wrong practice for what I needed.

What the evidence says

The type of practice decides what you get. Colzato, Ozturk and Hommel (Frontiers in Psychology, 2012) compared two kinds of meditation. Open monitoring, where you let whatever arises arise and simply notice it. And focused attention, where you concentrate on one thing and keep bringing yourself back to it.

Open monitoring significantly improved divergent thinking: more flexibility, more fluency, more originality. Focused attention did not produce a meaningful improvement on the convergent task it was expected to help.

Which is worth sitting with if you have ever been told that the point of meditation is control. For ideas, it is not. It is the opposite. The practice that helps is the one where you stop steering.

And the laughing was not a failure of the practice. It was closer to the practice. Isen, Daubman and Nowicki (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1987) induced positive affect in people by showing them a five minute comedy reel, then set them Duncker’s candle problem. Seventy five per cent of the comedy group solved it, against twenty per cent of the group who watched a neutral film. On a separate word association task the positive affect group scored 5.00 against 3.04.

Not arousal. Exercise did not do it. Not negative emotion either. Specifically the light, warm, amused state.

So an hour of laughing on the grass in the sun was, for creative purposes, a rather good afternoon.

What to do on Monday

Fifteen minutes a day with no input. No phone, no podcast, no radio. That is the whole practice and it is harder than it sounds.

It does not have to be sitting. Walk, swim, drive without the radio on, stand in the garden. Use the anchor from your creative style if you have one: a specific track, a specific route, a specific view. The requirement is not stillness. It is that nothing is coming in, so that something can come up.

And here is the only test that matters. Not whether you did it right, not whether your mind wandered, because wandering is the mechanism rather than the fault. Just this: over a fortnight, are new thoughts turning up?

If they are, that is your practice. Whatever it looks like, and whatever anybody in an orange robe would say about it.

Tuning-in is behaviour seven of ten, and it sits with +1 and Letting Go in Module 4, Deepening Your Inner Creativity.

Sources

  1. Colzato, L. S., Ozturk, A., & Hommel, B. (2012). Meditate to create: the impact of focused-attention and open-monitoring training on convergent and divergent thinking. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 116. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00116
  2. Isen, A. M., Daubman, K. A., & Nowicki, G. P. (1987). Positive affect facilitates creative problem solving. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(6), 1122-1131. Candle task: 75 per cent solved after the comedy reel against 20 per cent after the neutral film. Remote Associates: 5.00 against 3.04. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.52.6.1122
  3. BIF source: the Vipassana passage in Tension of Opposites (TOO_WattPad_AUG2025). Creative styles and anchors from BIF People Behaviours 1. Curiosity.