Writing for Mindfulness: The Foundations of Mindful Writing
Being present, focusing on images, appreciating goodness: these are the foundations of mindful writing. Writing for mindfulness is a skill that any writer can develop, helping you to sharpen your language and keep it succinct.
What are the foundations of mindful writing? Let’s explore what writing for mindfulness means in depth.
What “Mindful Writing” Means
I’m very influenced by the simple instructions of Padmasambhava, the Indian meditation master who established tantric Buddhism in Tibet: “Don’t recall the past, don’t anticipate the future, remain in the present, leave your mind alone.”
That sentiment—leave your mind alone—defines the essence of mindful writing: it’s a process of documenting, rather than reining or controlling, the mind.
Mindfulness: leave your mind alone.
Mindfulness contrasts another approach, that of the academic poets that tend to end up in The New Yorker. These writers polish, polish, polish, so that there’s very little sign of that original graph of the mind moving.
How Mindfulness Combats the Inner Critic
Writing for mindfulness really helps us get out of our own way. It’s a safer way to suspend the inner critic than what was often the tradition, which was to get drunk or high.
Writing for mindfulness really helps us get out of our own way. It’s a safer way to suspend the inner critic.
When there’s a mechanical thing—when you’re sitting down to meditate or to write—you no longer sit down saying, “Gee, I hope I write something really mind-blowing. I’m feeling inspired.”
William Burroughs once said, “When I’m feeling inspired when I’m writing, I throw it away.” I don’t know if he did that, but there’s something to that. The feeling of inspiration really has little to do with what appears on the page. I often don’t know whether I’ve written a good poem until a month later.
Without that sort of excessive criticism, internal or external, I think we find more joy in the writing process—rather than hunting some sort of success, which doesn’t really seem to have much to do with the haiku moments of existence (the real pleasures).
Marc's Upcoming Courses:
Observing What’s Vivid in Prose and Poetry
April 19th, 2023
Learn how to spotlight beauty through fresh, vivid, and surprising language, in this four week mindfulness writing course.
How Mindfulness Can Improve Your Writing
The mindfulness establishes a certain grounded quality, a sort of calm abiding. And in that grounded quality, one is able to observe what’s going on in the mind and to allow spontaneous insight as it arises.
That mindfulness quality is what we see in things like haiku and other popular forms of Asian poetry: the observation of things unadorned, without any sort of editorial about them. They come out, you see them, and it’s like a snapshot or a little movie.
That quality of mindfulness seems to offer a wonderful way to improve one’s poetry writing: if you emphasize image rather than editorial language, you often have greater poetry. Everyone knows you can say “I’m sad,” “the world is messed up,” “I’m really angry at this president,” that sort of thing. But observation through mindfulness—of what’s going on in the body, maybe, or of happening to glance up at a billboard in a moment of thought and there’s a synchronicity—these observations allow one to look for phenomena directly: what’s in the mind and in the world, in a way that doesn’t really need to be glossed, cleaned up, or romanticized, that is quite amazing in and of itself. There’s a long tradition of art having this echo of the sacredness of the world, and we can certainly use more of that.
7 Tenets of Mindful Writing
1. Mindful Writing: When the Mind Wanders, Gently Bring it Back
Of course, the mind wanders, so what do you do with that? The mind wanders on the page, as well. In the case of writing, what happens is you can just cut that part later. You bring the mind back, you just keep writing.
2. Mindful Writing: First Thought, Best Thought
You may have heard of the phrase “First thought, best thought.” This came up in a conversation between Tibetan lama Chogyam Trungpa and his student, poet Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg later clarified. “First thought, no thought, then see what comes up.” In other words, there are gaps between thoughts, and rather than sit like a cat ready to pounce, “Is this the first thought? Is THIS? How about this one?”
Instead, we just observe and learn to start writing down which rises into our heads. And why do that? Because inspiration is uncontrollable: it rises when it rises. It seems to have something to do with spontaneity. The tighter we are, the more we try to generate something “important,” and the less likely anything on the page is very good.
And that sensibility connects Trungpa and Ginsberg, and before them Kerouac, Joyce, and really all the way back to Shakespeare—who, according to Ben Jonson, “never blotted a line”—and is very much a part of this idea of writing for mindfulness, which is a graph of the mind moving. It’s a Beat approach that is spontaneous, raw, and conversational.
Mindfulness: a graph of the mind moving.
Ginsberg emphasized, “Keep all the first drafts.” That doesn’t mean that the first draft is always good, by any means—I think there has to be some craft or discipline—but a lot of us write over our first draft. We polish, and then polish that, and polish that, and we lose what we initially wrote down. We have no way of going back and seeing what the original was, which, in many ways, might have said it better.
Our Upcoming Poetry Writing Courses
Poetry Workshop: Bring Your Poems to Life
with Rosemary Tantra Bensko
March 29th, 2023
Join us for this workshop on creating powerful poems—poems that are clear and organized, fresh and moving, full of life.
30 Poems in 30 Days
with Ollie Schminkey
April 1st, 2023
This National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo), build community and get feedback on your work while writing a poem every day.
Death Riding Shotgun: How Awareness of Our Mortality Impacts Poetry
with Lisa C. Taylor
April 5th, 2023
How can your own mortality inform your work? In this 6-week course, you'll use death to inspire and motivate your poetry writing.
From Writing Circle to Poems in 8 Contemporary Forms (Mondays and Fridays)
with Susan Vespoli
April 5th, 2023
From the sonnet to the villanelle, turn your journal entries into formal poetry in this 8 week writing circle workshop.
Writing with Consistency and Courage
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April 8th, 2023
What makes a successful writer? It's not talent, craft, or even the right connections—it's consistency and courage.
A Writerly Life: Develop a Writing Routine that Works for You
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April 19th, 2023
What does a writer's life look like? Build a productive writing habit in this course for writers of all backgrounds.
Observing What’s Vivid in Prose and Poetry
with Marc Olmsted
April 19th, 2023
Learn how to spotlight beauty through fresh, vivid, and surprising language, in this four week mindfulness writing course.
The Joy of Poetry: A Beginner-Friendly Workshop
with Joy Roulier Sawyer
May 24th, 2023
Have you wanted to get into poetry, but don't know where to start? Learn the craft from the Joy of poetry herself in this welcoming workshop.
Get It Done: Create the Scaffolding to Start (and Finish) a Writing Project
with Eman Quotah
June 4th, 2023
Get your butt in the chair, your mind roaming freely, and your creative juices flowing in this motivational, all-genres writing class.
In Bloom: Nature Writing Workshop
with Dana De Greff
June 7th, 2023
Want to write about nature like Robert Frost, Henry David Thoreau, or Annie Dillard? Join us for this six-week nature writing course.
Putting It All Together: Completing Your First Poetry Manuscript
with Caitlin Scarano
June 7th, 2023
How do you put together a poetry book? From choosing a theme to ordering your poems, you'll end this course with a ready-to-publish manuscript.
Opening the Door to Poetry
with Jude Nutter
June 14th, 2023
How do we use poetry to express life's marvelous complexity? Learn how to control language beyond the "ordinary" and discover the many possibilities of poetry.
The Craft of Poetry
with Jonathan J.G. McClure
June 21st, 2023
Poetry is alive and well. Contemporary poets can be touching, terrifying, and laugh-out-loud funny. Join us for an exploration of writing and reading poems.
Poems of All Sizes: Haiku, Tanka, and Japanese Poetic Forms
with Miho Kinnas
September 14th, 2023
Explore the history and poetics of Japanese poetry forms, and write haiku, tanka, renga, haiga, and linked verse poetry.
3. Mindful Writing: Being Here, Now and Beyond
So the point of being present is not just to enjoy the moment. There is a constant strobing of thoughts. The awareness of that strobing and the gaps between those flashing thoughts slowly introduces the insight that we are more a process than a solid fixed entity, more a verb than a noun, to paraphrase Buckminster Fuller. This seems akin to being “in the zone” that runners or musicians sometimes describe.
4. Mindful Writing: Snapshot Poetics
Snapshot poetics is a phrase of Ginsberg’s. This mindfulness quality is what we see in things like haiku and other popular forms of Asian poetry: the observation of things unadorned, without any sort of editorial about them. They come, you see them, and it’s like a snapshot or a little movie. In mindful writing the same can be done with our interior mental world—our memories and dreams.
5. Mindful Writing: No Ideas But In Things
This is a phrase of William Carlos Williams. The quality of mindfulness seems to offer a wonderful way to improve one’s poetry writing: if you emphasize image rather than editorial language, you often have greater poetry. Everyone knows you can say “I’m sad,” “the world is messed up,” “I’m really angry at this president,” that sort of thing.
But observation through mindfulness—of what’s going on in the body, maybe, or of happening to glance up at a billboard in a moment of thought and there’s a synchronicity—these observations allow one to look for phenomena directly: what’s in the mind and in the world, in a way that doesn’t really need to be glossed, cleaned up, or romanticized, that is quite amazing in and of itself. There’s a long tradition of art having this echo of the sacredness of the world, and we can certainly use more of that. That sacredness is appreciation without grasping tightly, whether one believes in God or not.
Mindfulness: appreciation without grasping tightly.
6. Mindful Writing: Basic Goodness
From that sort of appreciation, a kind of empathy rises, and a generosity, warmth. I think that comes pretty quickly in anyone’s experience of sitting meditation—the idea that there’s some worth that’s not based on one’s appearance, wealth, success or lack of it: just a basic goodness, as Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche said. We can write from that without ignoring what comes up, the fact that existence is very bittersweet, that the world is often a “shit show.”
It’s okay to write about one’s depression, loneliness, anger, but if we’ve begun to make friends with that, there’s the possibility of being more authentic. Walt Whitman called that “candor.” We can give voice to the voiceless, assuring others they’re not alone.
7. Mindful Writing: Sacred View / Empathetic Conduct
Ultimately, basic calm abiding allows for the development of sacred view and empathetic conduct. I think the best writing contains both these qualities. Take Shakespeare. Everybody knows Shakespeare’s great, and a lot of it has to do with this incredible recognition of the human condition—without judgement, really.
Go Deeper in Mindful Writing
There’s much more to say about the foundations of writing mindfully. For an in-depth video interview exploring mindful writing, see below:
Explore Mindful Writing at Writers.com
Mindful writing can be practiced anywhere, but if you’re looking to learn more about the practice, take a look at my course Writing Mindfulness: Sensual World/Poetry Mind.
