The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life

Rating:
Summary: This Book is Amazing
Review: This book has helped me tap into creative resources I was not sure that I had. I think it speaks to all of us, artists or not, about how to live a more geniune life. As a Buddhist practitioner, this book is chock full of teachings and is not "dharma-lite." I recommend it to beginning practitioners and advanced practitioners alike.

Rating:
Summary: Change your life.
Review: This book is a change of pace of artistic method. Precise and evocative, it's more like a cool drink of water on a quiet country afternoon, than the usual, breathless books on creativity that push you to produce, produce, produce. Here the focus is not on squeezing your mind for ideas, but on the quiet observation of oneself and life, and the exact origin of those mysteries we call inspiration, block, connection, as well as exercises to encourage us to trust our inspirations and see through the places we are blocked. It's about trusting yourself rather than about pushing for ideas.

All the pushing--it's as if to say that you can be creative and not necessarily have it change the rest of your life. There is the problem of the artist or writer who drinks or uses drugs, perhaps to avoid confronting the need for change. This book is holistic: "...make a choice about what's important, and... let go of all the rest," Loori says (p. 154) in the section about simplicity. When you think about all the pressures that keep us from our creative selves, all the things we think we need that cost time and money, create worries that disturb our minds and block our creative output or influence our work for the worse, when the real problem requires that we go deeper and identify the changes we need to make, even begin to make them with Loori's gentle and persuasive support. You will sense him there, offering himself as guide, and offering his experiences of raising a family, changing career from scientist to photographer to Zen master, founding a monastery where thousands of people have gone for retreats on Zen and Zen arts.

A work of art itself, The Zen of Creativity also has beautiful black and white illustrations that are used as examples. If you are willing to slow down and take a close look at your mind and at your artistic process, then I think you will really enjoy this book.