© Olena Mykhaylova
Mindfulness is a meditative practice that has its roots in Eastern traditions and involves creating self-awareness. You can practice mindfulness by focusing your attention on your respiration. You observe your breathing going in and out. As you do, your mind will begin to wonder and you will have certain thoughts and experience emotions. When this happens, with mindfulness, you bring your attention back to your breathing.
There are a number of ways that practicing mindfulness can be helpful for your writing. Read on to find out more.
Increased Focus
Just 20 minutes of meditation a day, in a quiet place and doing this for a few weeks, can do wonders to increase your focus. By being more focused, when you sit down to write you’ll be able to devote your time completely to your writing.
Better Creativity
When you practice mindfulness, you develop the ability to live in the present moment and you’ll experience less agitation by your wandering thoughts. This of course makes perfect sense. After all, you can’t focus totally on your breathing and have thoughts at the same time.
By living in the present moment, your mind will be clearer and when inspiration for your writing does pop into your mind, it will be through your unconscious from where true creativity emerges.
Less Anxiety
Another major benefit of mindfulness is that any anxiety about your writing will lessen or even diminish, completely. Again this happens through present moment living. Just consider how invaluable this could be if you’re worried about a delay in getting your eBook published and up for sale, or if you’re concerned about a tight freelancing writing assignment.
Create Better Characters
Mindfulness meditation practice enables you to experience the human condition, authentically. You learn to observe human emotions, such as excitement, terror, frustration, happiness etc. objectively as the ‘observer’ of what is happening inside you.
You begin to understand which triggers, whether in your outside environment, or other thoughts in your mind, create the emotions you experience in the first place. By breaking down your own human experience in this way, you can create better characters in your stories and novels, and demonstrate their personalities fully, along with how they interact and respond to other characters and settings, and also why they do so.
Write for Longer
As already explained above, mindfulness can do wonders for your focus. In addition, it can also help you to write for longer periods of time, because your mind will be calmer and less cluttered. Don’t be surprised if after 6 weeks of regular meditation, the amount you can write throughout the day doubles!
Help You to Let Go
Yes, you’re a writer and writing is your passion! However, it’s healthy to create a balance in your life, and make time for other things like family, friends, travel, and so on.
Practicing mindfulness helps you to do this. If you’re writing too much without much consideration for anything else, then by observing your thoughts about the need to be writing constantly, arising, and passing way, you’ll learn to detach from them, and let go when you need to.
[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://writingtipsoasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/hv1.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Hiten Vyas is the Founder and Managing Editor of eBooks India. He is also a prolific eBook writer with over 25 titles to his name.[/author_info] [/author]
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