It's a constant in screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin's life, something that happens every day without fail. It's the time he reserves for meditation.I have a good friend who has practiced "sitting meditation" for years. I do it on a semi-regular basis. I think it's a great practice for writing. Rubin sits for an hour per day, but even 20 minutes can be beneficial.Without it, he doubts whether his Oscar-winning script for Ghost would have happened. And now, without meditation's soothing influence, his new challenge of turning that hugely popular 1990 movie into a stage musical might prove too much.
Certainly, it helped him immeasurably when he took on the job of adapting Audrey Niffenegger's best-selling novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, to the big screen.
"I meditate,'' Rubin says simply. "I sit for about an hour every day in a state of real stillness. That stillness is terrifying to most human beings. But when you break through to it, it is a portal to something remarkable.''
Mediation has been described as "being where we are without thinking about it." I think it's that last part which is a stumbling block for many people: How to engage in non-thinking? This is especially so because when we do sit and stop doing, the mind becomes flooded with thoughts. That can lead to trying to will oneself away from thinking, but in my experience, the precise opposite is the trick: Let your thoughts come. Acknowledge them. Then let them go. They are naturally a part of your consciousness, so why fight them? Experience them. Then release them. If you don't stress about it and be mindful of some focus point, I find it's possible to go into whatever that meditative state is, then emerge refreshed.
For more on meditation, you can go to The David Lynch Foundation. Here is a message from David Lynch.
I'll post an interview with Lynch tomorrow that goes into more details about his views on meditation and the creative life.
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2 comments:
I am in my first month of daily meditation "practice" and I'm already experiencing the benefits. The fears that I commented on yesterday are far less powerful than before and I have seen many other differences as well.
Thanks for sharing, Scott!
I dropped a pretty large sum of money to learn the meditation Lynch promotes. They have since lowered the price to about a third of what I paid. They did that about 6 months after I learnt it. The teaching is structured in a way that they keep trying to sell you more things after and while you learn it. Other practices. Advanced meditation (which basically means they give you the permission to do it as much as you like, instead of the 20 minutes twice a day they drum into your head that you cannot go over. My observation has been that it is no different than other forms of meditation. The real benefit is that with this one there is a principal involved. You do it twice a day for x amount of minutes and you do it everyday. You accept a discipline. Other than that, I don't believe the technique or result is any different than typical breathing meditation. I strongly believe the group who promote this practice have set it back by making it about money, when it should be just about the meditation, which is something everyone should be able to do regardless of what they can afford. They make out that it takes four lessons to learn. I learnt it on the first lesson and the next three lessons were spent watching videos of Yogi (I think that's his name) talking. This practice needs to be surgically removed from the bullshit people claiming ownership over it. They are very lucky to have David Lynch in their corner, he remains influential despite doing strange things like eating panties on youtube. WTF is up with that???
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