The Connection Between Meditation and Creativity.
Do we really have to feel bad in order to create?
Let’s dispel a myth: artists don’t necessarily have to suffer.
The romantic myth of the artist who creates only through pain still persists. As if suffering were the only true source of authenticity, and serenity a betrayal of depth. Yet this cliché does not stand up to real-life experience — and even risks becoming harmful.
Many artists, over time, have proven the opposite: it is possible to create from silence, clarity, and calm. Meditation, in particular, does not stifle the creative drive, but refines it, making it clearer. It helps to reduce mental noise, to observe better, to stay in the present, where much of artistic intuition is born.
Meditation, far from being a passing fad or a luxury for the select few, has been a daily practice for many artists, deeply rooted in inner exploration. Some have openly declared it, others have incorporated it without labels, allowing it to filter into their work as silence, rejuvenation, emptiness, contemplation.
David Lynch, visionary and surreal film director, began practicing Transcendental Meditation in 1973. He described the experience as an “internal shower,” capable of eliminating mental noise and leaving room for pure creativity. With meditation, Lynch believed that one could fish from the depths of inner silence for the richest and most mysterious part of the imagination.
“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch small fish, stay on the surface. But if you want big ones, you have to go deep.”
Marina Abramović has often included meditative practices in her performances: walking slowly, immobility, silence. In particular, in the project The Artist is Present, where she sat silently for hours in front of a spectator, an almost ritualistic state of pure presence was achieved. She also devised the “Abramović Method” to train the body and mind to concentrate, inspired by Eastern and spiritual techniques.
Leonard Cohen, poet, singer-songwriter, and Zen monk, lived for years in a monastery on Mount Baldy in California. Zen meditation nourished his writing with a more essential, ironic, and compassionate vision.
His songs are often inner journeys, secular prayers, examples of a mind contemplating the world in all its contradiction.“After years of spiritual practice, I have learned that depression cannot be cured, it can only be observed.”
Franco Battiato was a composer, singer, director, and painter. He was one of the Italian artists most deeply connected to spiritual exploration, without ever separating it from art. His work intertwines meditation, Eastern philosophy, sacred music, experimental electronic music, and silence.
He practiced various forms of meditation and studied both Western and Eastern wisdom traditions (Sufism, Gurdjieff, Tibetan Buddhism), allowing this exploration to emerge in many of his lyrics.
For him, spirituality was not ornamentation, but structure: a key to creating art “from within,” in contact with the invisible. His compositions, often cyclical and mantric, reflect a need for elevation that does not renounce the concreteness of life.“Emptiness is not nothingness, but everything.”
Alejandro Jodorowsky: Director, writer, actor, poet, comic book artist, therapist. Jodorowsky is a total artist and visionary, and his work—from cinema to psychomagic—is imbued with a profound spiritual tension.
He has practiced Zen meditation, tarot, inner alchemy, and awareness rituals, and has always maintained that the artist’s task is to transform their own consciousness before transforming reality.
“An artist should not express their neuroses, but cure them.”
For him, art is medicine, ritual, a sacred act. Creativity does not arise from wounds, but from their transmutation: an inner journey that, through meditation and artistic expression, heals both the creator and the observer.
Creativity is not born out of chaos.
Creativity is not born out of chaos, but out of a free space where it can move.
When the mind becomes quieter, art changes. Not always in a striking or mystical way, but in a profound, often subtle way. In the works of artists who meditate, one senses a different quality of attention: no longer obsession, but presence. No longer the urgency to shout something out, but the desire to listen to what emerges—and translate it.
1. Space and breath
In art born from a meditative mind, space is not just a “void to be filled,” but becomes the protagonist. You can hear the breath. The pauses. The rhythm. Think of the silences in Lynch’s films, the absence that becomes language in Abramović’s performances.
The void ceases to be frightening. It becomes form, meaning, openness.
2. Centrality of gesture
Meditative art pays attention to gesture, to the present. A mark, a brushstroke, a sound become essential. Every action is charged with intention, as if the author were saying: “I am here, now, and that is enough.”
In the Abramović method, for example, the artist must walk slowly, listen to a grain of rice, breathe together with the audience. It is the gesture that becomes the work.
3. Reduction of the ego
Many meditating artists report something in common: art no longer comes “from them,” but “passes through them.” It is a subtle but radical change. Art becomes service, exploration, gift. There is no longer any need to sign one’s pain in large letters: one can disappear and let the work speak for itself.
4. More essential colors, shapes, and sounds
Often, in the artistic journey after or during a contemplative practice, there is a noticeable tendency toward essentiality. Less baroque, more naked. Less scream, more echo. It is not a rule, but it is recurrent: meditation lightens, removes the superfluous. And in subtraction, one often finds something more true.
5. Different themes: silence, nature, time, listening
The repertoire expands: themes such as slowness, nature, emptiness, breath, and the cycle of things enter. Not necessarily spiritual, but more rooted in the experience of being, less in the obsession with doing. Contemplation becomes content, not just method.
Benefits for creators (without getting all mystical).
You don’t need to dress in white, recite Sanskrit mantras, or climb the Himalayas to enjoy the benefits of meditation. You don’t even need to believe in anything esoteric. Just sit, breathe, and listen. Or sign up for a certified course to learn how to do it if you really don’t know where to start.
For those who make art—or want to—meditation can become as valuable a mental exercise as sketching, reading, or observing.
1. Less mental noise, more space for ideas
Creators know how much internal chatter can be an obstacle: “It’s not good enough,” “It’s useless,” “Someone else has already done it better.” Meditation doesn’t eliminate the inner voice, but it teaches you not to believe it right away. To let it pass like a cloud. In doing so, mental space opens up. And when space opens up… ideas come in.
2. It helps you escape perfectionism
Many artists get stuck trying to create something perfect. But meditation teaches the imperfection of the present moment: nothing is fixed, everything flows, and that’s okay. This can translate into more fluid creativity, less judgmental, more process-oriented than result-oriented.
3. It makes your actions more present and mindful
Whether you’re drawing, writing, or playing music, meditation helps you bring your full attention to what you’re doing. You enter a state that psychologists call “flow”: total concentration, time suspended, action flowing effortlessly. It’s a state close to meditation, and it can become more accessible if you train your mind to stay there.
4. It reduces performance anxiety
Whether you are a professional artist or a Sunday creative, anxiety can poison the creative process. “I have to do something extraordinary.” But meditation also means accepting the moment as it is: even boring, uncertain, frustrating. And from there, strangely enough, something authentic can emerge. Even beautiful.
5. Strengthens intuition
In a calm state of mind, intuition has more space to emerge. Ideas should not be pursued with force, but gathered when they arrive, like ripe fruit. Meditation teaches fertile waiting: one that does not force, but welcomes.
It’s time to change the narrative: art does not (only) rhyme with pain.
The cliché of the suffering artist still persists, like a catchphrase that is repeated without much thought. But at what cost? How much does it cost us today to continue believing that creativity must necessarily involve torment?
In this distorted view, happiness becomes suspect, serenity trivial, and those who are well… perhaps have nothing to say. As if pain had a copyright on depth.
Yet it is precisely this narrative that often prevents so many people from expressing themselves. Because if you’re doing well, you feel guilty. And if you’re doing badly, you think you should at least produce something “great.” It’s a trap.
Claiming the possibility of creating from a state of centering, of peace, even of joy, does not mean trivializing art. It means liberating it. It means recognizing that depth does not come only from wounds, but also from contemplation, wonder, silence, and listening.
Perhaps the most revolutionary art today is that which knows how to stand tall without shouting.
Changing this narrative is also urgent because the mental health of artists is too often sacrificed on the altar of ‘genius’. Instead, meditating, slowing down, taking care of one’s balance is not a luxury, but a form of creative lucidity.
Meditation does not extinguish inspiration. It aligns it. It grounds it. It protects it from dispersion, cynicism, and rushing.
It is time to put a simple truth back at the center: art does not have to hurt to be true.
Of course, not everyone has to or wants to meditate. There is no single way to create, nor is there a single form of awareness. But in a time that accelerates, distracts us, and pushes us to perform continuously, stopping for a moment can be a subversive act.
Meditating—whatever form it takes for you: sitting in silence, walking alone in a park, listening to your breath while drawing—is not escaping from the world, but returning to it more whole.
It is listening to the deep part of yourself that does not just want to produce, but to feel. And perhaps, from there, the work you have been waiting for will emerge. The one that does not shout, but remains.
Above all, be wary of those who tell you that to be an artist you must necessarily suffer. Or who do not take seriously those who use irony and lightness when they create.
You can also create from a state of balance. You can be light without being superficial. You can feel good and still make art.
In fact, perhaps it is precisely when you feel good that you can truly open the door.
“I don’t know how to describe the first sensation; it’s like being in an elevator when suddenly the cables are cut; you start to fall, but instead of crashing to the ground, you begin to float in the void. In that movement, anxieties and tensions melt away, and a world of pure awareness opens up.”
David Lynch
