This article is a revised version of a presentation I made at the Shambhala Center in Amsterdam February 2, 2012. Since 2020, my perspective on and practice of the dharma has become more closely aligned with secular Buddhism. Yet, these reflections on the relationship between meditation and creation still feel valid for me today.

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I haven't counted the times I felt panic rising while preparing this presentation, but it has happened. Panic is an inseparable part of the writing process. And panic is also part of creating visual art; in short, it is part of every creative process, where you look for open space and then make yourself available to what is happening. And don't think that this knowledge will make things easier for you. If only that were true...

When writing, there are the moments when you encounter ‘yourself’ working on an assignment, in complete solitude. Over and over again.

• What is this supposed to be about and is that what it is about?
• Can I deliver on what I have promised?
• Will I make it?

Touching and releasing these kinds of insecure feelings is what happens in the writing process and is apparently part of the birth process of a spiritual child.

It is usually not easy for an old-fashioned writer/journalist to write directly about their own experience. Journalists are especially good at projecting their own story on to others, or into the events they describe, although they are often not even aware of it. That is why it is very interesting to use my own story here as a framework to investigate the process of writing and meditation. What does the creative process have to do with meditation? Where do these two complex and changing paths meet? And do they perhaps sometimes get in each other's way?

To find my first encounter with meditation, I delved into some old diaries... an overwhelming experience. At that time I used my diary, as I put it, ‘like toiletpaper’ to write down everything that came to my mind. It also helped me keep an eye on the direction of my life and therefore provided something to hold on to. Everything under control. But in the meantime, quite a few uncontrollable events, thoughts and feelings went by... a real diarrhea...

At the time I started meditating in 1996, I was leading a busy life -- I was 42 and working as a city reporter in Amsterdam, writing poetry and also working as a journalist/activist in psychiatry. A long relationship had just ended. Loss in love was about the worst thing that could happen to me, and not just me of course.

Like my two older sisters and the entire baby boom generation after the Second World War, I learned to ‘be strong’ in my youth. It took me half a lifetime to be able to admit feelings of sadness and powerlessness. The assassinations of John Kennedy and later Martin Luther King in 1968 made a deep impression in our Amsterdam home. Especially since my beloved mother passed away a year later. King’s nonviolent struggle has inspired me ever since.

After graduating from the School of Journalism, I joined the peace movement as a journalist/activist and nonviolent resilience trainer. I had been practicing all kinds of martial arts since I was 19. I accidentally ended up in the Japanese Kyokushinkai tradition of grandmaster and karateka Jan Kallenbach. Later I started practicing other forms: aikido, tai chi and chikung. But no matter what I trained, the inner turmoil remained, so I knew even at age 30 that I probably wouldn't be able to escape 'sitting meditation’.

It wasn't until I was forty that the time came. I noted in my diary: ‘The meditation really grabbed me. I read the book The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chögyam Trungpa with beautiful lectures. I meditate. And think. Life becomes wonderful and grounded at the same time.’ And immediately afterwards: ‘That stupid carpenter doesn't seem to be coming again, it's almost half past seven already.’

Shortly afterwards I heard the Tibetan teacher Khandro Rinpoche speak: I was very moved by her directness, simplicity and passion. ‘A flood of truth and knowledge.’ And a year later, in September 1997, I wrote down an important motivation to continue with meditation: ‘My salvation now is that I am no longer afraid of sadness, this has been strengthened and supported over the past year by the warrior training, which I will soon begin again.’

During my first years of meditation I cried a lot on the pillow. The relaxation that I experienced in meditation brought this almost automatically. At first I hardly dared to sit down, but later I became more and more familiar with my own vulnerable feelings and emotions. Thanks to the technique of touching and letting go, I was no longer overwhelmed by the sadness that I had been living with for years. And I experienced more and more the fleeting nature of emotions in that vast space that we can connect with and that is always there for us.

I noticed that I could just be there without having to do anything and became more and more friends with what we call ‘ourself’. The reality of the flow of life is that it is ever changing. I started to discover all kinds of patterns in that flow, which belonged to my survival shield, my ‘cocoon’. And I worked through the deepest pain points, helped by one of the first psychiatrists to use mindfulness techniques.

This increased familiarity with emotions has helped me enormously in my work. In 2002 I started working on a book about the history of the Dutch patient movement in psychiatry. The portraits were based on in-depth interviews in which sometimes very painful things were discussed. My training allowed me to ‘listen deeply’ and stay in the saddle. While listening to and composing the stories, I cried a lot and felt powerless. I sometimes hit the wall with my materials. It was extremely difficult to ‘lift’ those heavy and sometimes horrible stories into the light and give them an acceptable form.

I was able to endure the loneliness of writing that book through my meditation, which repeatedly gave access to that space that the Shambhala Buddhist tradition calls fundamental goodness, an unshakable trust that I had rediscovered through my meditation training. As if it had never actually been gone.

All artists know this fundamental goodness, as well as the despair of having been swept away from it. Unless we've gone on some ego trip, which of course does happen. That is why connection with a (meditation) school and other (art and/or meditation) practitioners is important. It keeps you grounded and prevents you from getting lost in the narrow depths of an ego trip.

I recently read a convincing interview with the successful ‘young’ Dutch filmmaker Sunny Bergman who insightfully reflects on the feelings that being successful evokes in her. She is a meditation practitioner, she says, and that is clearly noticeable throughout the interview. Her vision on filmmaking really appeals to me. She says:

By looking for the embarrassing in myself, by looking at my own doubts and dilemmas, I want to evoke recognition in others. That is my biggest goal, that people get new thoughts. That they start thinking about their own lives.

To me she is the next generation. At her age I was doing the same thing, also struggling against the grain, but it looked different to me at the time. As a beginning journalist in the early eighties I wanted to offer a counterbalance to the issues of the day and tell hopeful stories, let human voices be heard against the daily grind and the stream of negativity from the media.

At the School of Journalism in Utrecht, which I ended up at a bit late and by chance at the age of 24, the interview lessons were my favorite. That's where you learned to listen. And listening is the most important thing that you can contribute to society! From the Zen tradition, the concept of ‘deep listening’ is closely linked to the practice of non-aggression.

Over the course of my life, I understood, also thanks to my Shambhala Buddhist training, that you will first have to listen deeply to yourself, learn to understand and accept your own mind before you can really mean something to others. The more understanding and kindness you can show for your own neurotic state of mind, the more you will understand and help others. So, I finally discovered that my activism was rooted in a deep personal anger, which kept driving my actions.

Non-aggression, according to the tradition holder of Shambhala, Chögyam Trungpa, is the essence of art. As a Buddhist teacher and artist, he developed a distinct vision on making dharma art. How you, as an artist, can train your mind to perceive as openly as possible.

You don't have to be a Buddhist to make dharma art. Above all, it is about celebrating the everyday beauty around us. With our sensory perceptions, we can manifest that beauty in a very direct and poetic way according to the principle of first thought, best thought. From that state of being, which Trungpa calls ground zero, in which nothing has yet formed...

The Dutch writer/actress Saskia Goldschmidt, who made her debut Obliged to Happiness, Portrait of a Family (2011) writes: ‘I notice that meditating helps me a lot in the writing process. Not only to focus, but also because it allows me to be open without judgment to the characters that arise within me and that I bring to life in writing.’ The same openness that is also so helpful in more journalistic work, where you can approach people and/or situations openly.

I would like to end with some quotes from Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, artist, meditation master and author of many books on ‘Dharma-art':

1/
Some artists choose to showcase their neuroses and that is often successful because it connects with the neuroses of others, but as an artist you should not blindly choose the easiest path.

2/
Dharma art means: fundamental integrity to keep society healthy. That doesn't happen if you indulge your aggression. Aggression makes you closed to reality, instead you are preoccupied with emotions that run away with you. Aggression leads to competition: how does it make me better, to frustration and excitement, when someone is so excited it cuts off all possibilities.

3/
In the absence of aggression you feel rich and resourceful and infinitely inspired. That leads to joy, that you have contact with things and can appreciate them.