The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life

All creatures experience the universe through the senses. And at every moment, a different universe is being created by each being. A spider, for example, feels the universe through its legs, which touch the key strands of its web. It knows when it’s raining, or when food is available. It doesn’t think to itself, “That’s not a fly on the web. That’

Music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music. T.S. ELIOT

In terms of spiritual practice, seeing with the whole body and mind is to “reach the summit of the mystic peak.” This may seem like a profound achievement, but in Zen, this is not the endpoint.

“Whole body and mind seeing,” as Master Dogen refers to it, is the total merging of subject and object, of seer and seen, of self and other.

what is the self that is expressed in self-expression? Zen’s answer would be that when the self disappears, the brush paints by itself, the dance dances itself, the poem writes itself. There is no longer a gap between artist, subject, audience, and life.This is not an accident or a chance occurrence. It is rather the result of personal training, sp

If working samadhi is present in your life, in your being, then it will be present in your art. Art always reflects the artist. If you’re agitated, your art will be agitated. If your art is grounded in the still point, the self will be out of the way and your art will reflect its subject directly.

When thoughts finally disappear, the thinker disappears. Thought and thinker are interdependent, mutually arising. No thought, no thinker is called the “falling away of body and mind.” This is absolute samadhi, single-pointedness of mind. In single-pointedness there is no observer. There’s no awareness of time, self, or other. However, we can’t ope

Single-pointed concentration develops our intuition. We become more directly aware of the world. We notice in ways that are not clearly understood, but are very accurate. When the totality of our mind is focused on a single point, its power becomes staggering. Building concentration is just like any other kind of discipline. If we want to build mus

In Zen practice, we touch the still point through single-pointedness of mind, which we gradually build by working on our concentration. First, we count the breath: inhale, one; exhale, two, and so on. When we reach ten, we start back at one. When we notice the mind wandering, we see the thought, acknowledge it, let it go, and start back at one. Lit