Tabula Rasa

How to Clean the Mental Slate

 

Tabula Rasa: (noun)

 

1.  Latin ‘scraped tablet’, from the Romans’ use of wax-covered tablets which could be written on with a pointed stick and cleared by smoothing over the surface)

2.  A mind without any preconceived ideas

 

In a high-paced world, we often see our creative endeavors as a commodity or an industrial conveyer belt, always set to “on.” The more you produce the better. Unfortunately (or fortunately, as the case may be), our creative muses feel quite differently.

 

The creative muse that resides in us likes time out. She likes to hang out, stare dreamily into space. She likes to read a book, play with a blade of grass and take a good, solid nap. Our inner muse likes to talk to friends, make bad jokes and laugh endlessly. Or swing on a porch chair, drinking iced tea, watching fireflies.

 

So how do you clean your mental slate? Or do you? Maybe you just plow through your day job, come home, inhale dinner. Then you’re off to rehearsal, practicing until midnight. You return home, crash out and start the next day the same way.

 

But is this really an optimal way to maintain your creativity? Creativity is like a garden – it can’t be picked at all the time without some watering, tilling and fertilizing of the soil, pulling out weeds and simply, letting the plants grow

 

How do you make quiet time for yourself in a day and age when it’s not encouraged or even understood?

 

Meditation is a great and simple tool to enhance just about any creative endeavor. Many people, including artists, think of meditation as some allusive process, best left for Buddhist monks on top of a mountain. But meditation is right there, waiting for you at just about any moment. The important thing is to make time for it. How? Start after reading this article. 5 minutes. You can manage 5 minutes, right?

 

Turn off your cell phone, radio, TV, etc. Sit comfortably. Breathe deeply, from the abdominal area. Close your eyes. Now this is the tricky part: clear your mind. Clean your mental slate.

 

This isn’t the simplest thing. We’re so used to mental chatter that we forget there’s another way to be. The idea is to be more in the moment. Don’t admonish yourself if thoughts pop up. Let them arise and just like helium balloons, let them float by. Take note of the balloons then go back to the “clean slate.” 5 minutes. That’s all. Notice how different you feel after that amount of time. It’s like a quick, mental house cleaning.

 

When you do this, you give your mind and body a much-needed rest. It’s replenishing. See how your garden grows.