Creating the Music of Your Life Through the Art of Mindfulness

 

I have always loved music. I remember as a young child taking my boom box out onto the driveway, popping in my favorite cassette tape (i.e. Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation), and dancing and singing along like no one was watching. Usually no one was, but even if a car drove by I’d keep going. Because I was embodying mindfulness: I was paying attention, on purpose, to the present moment. In this case, the present moment was the music. And the music was in me. 

Around that same time, when I was in early elementary school, my mom signed me up for a children’s musical theater company called Imaginating Dramatics. The name was purposely spelled “Imaginating” instead of “Imagining” in honor of a girl who coined the phrase to mean the art of creating from one’s imagination. And that’s what I did there—created from my imagination. 

It was in that theater company that I learned the art of improvisation—unrehearsed acting. My favorite game to play at class was “Freeze Frame.” Two kids would get on stage, we’d assign them a scene or characters to play, and they would just start. There was no preparation. They’d just have to wing it. After a couple minutes, someone from the audience (usually me, since it was my favorite game) would yell “Freeze”, and the kids on stage would stop right where they were, frozen in their hand movements and facial expressions. The “freezer” would then go take the place of one of the kids and create an entirely new scene and character, and the other kid on stage would have to go with the flow and follow the lead of the new person. It was hilarious, joyful, and liberating. There were no rules. There was no “right” way to be. There was just the creative process, and I was mindfully present to it. 

Looking back now, I can see that I was engaging in the above experiences with what Buddhism calls ‘A Beginner’s Mind.’ Janet Slom, in her book An Artful Path to Mindfulness: MBSR-Based Activities for Using Creativity to Reduce Stress & Embrace the Present Moment, talks about the transformational act of approaching life with a beginner’s mind, and how we can choose to take this action with every moment. She writes,

“Each moment is an opportunity to begin again and see things with the neutral eyes of a child rather than seeing habitually through the perspective learned over time. It is a state of playful engagement, driven by firsthand experience through our senses and our body, rather than thinking about the experience” (Slom, p. 36).

Slom’s book, based Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction” course, is a 9-week guide to practicing the art of creative mindfulness. But I view it more like a permission slip. 

It reminds me that I have permission to create with no end product in mind, like I did as a child when I was just dancing to dance, just singing to sing, and just acting to act. For the pure enjoyment of it, in the moment. 

It reminds me that I can make the choice, with each breath I take, “to paint a stroke of reactivity, fighting and resisting, or to choose to create music, singing and dancing with the joy of being fully alive, awake, and open” (Slom, p. 37). It’s such as simple choice, but it’s not always easy. So we must practice it, just as we would practice any other skill. 

Slom likens creative mindfulness practice to training for a marathon: “Just as we do cardio and endurance training to prepare for a marathon, practicing mindfulness is training for the marathon of life, building our creative muscles and aligning our core rhythm, intuition, values, intention, and vision as we embrace our truth from within” (p. 37). 

An Artful Path to Mindfulness is therefore a guide, a permission slip, and a training manual. But it’s also a time machine. It transports me back to the innocent, pure state of mind I embodied as a child. When I was gentle with myself, when I trusted my intuition, and when I allowed myself to play, to dream, and to express from the core of my being. 

Today, I invite you to paint, to write, to play, or to dance on your driveway. 

Practice being who you might have forgotten you already are: 

a creative, worthy, beautiful soul.