Spirituality in Documentary Filmmaking with Mickey Lemle

Three years ago, I began a meditation practice.

It was something I'd wanted to do, had romanticized about doing, but for one reason or another, aka laziness, I'd never been able to sustain any sort of practice.

But then I heard someone speak to how mindfulness or insight meditation could actually increase creativity in artists.

And as a bonus, it could increase one's daily happiness.

That really caught my attention.

Increase my creativity and make me happier? For the longest time, I've been brought up to believe that one had to experience some kind of melancholy in order to be creative.

But meditation and happiness? I was going to need to reconsider my prior beliefs, or at the very least, revisit the idea of a meditation practice.

It's now been nearly 1,000 days since then, and I've long developed a daily mindful meditation practice.

I participate in seminars and retreats.

I geek out on podcasts about meditation.

I read books, watch films on the subject.

I have a goal to attend a 10-day silent retreat, also known as Vipassana, sometime before my 50th birthday.

I've even begun work on a new doc project whose chief subject is a practitioner of Theravada Buddhism and insight meditation.

And I can honestly say that I feel happier.

Now, I'm not talking mind-blowing bliss here or anything like that, but I am able to process agitation, hurt, anger, frustration in a better, more skillful manner.

And I can say without any hesitation that the increase in overall happiness and sustained meditation has most certainly led to an increase in creativity and productivity.

For the uninitiated, you might be asking how meditation works in this fashion.

Well, creativity doesn't really come from the normal conventions that we learned at school or work or our parents even.

It's not a matter of, you know, pulling up your bootstraps and getting on with it.

We cannot simply try harder or strain for it.

It doesn't come from this sort of thing at all.

It comes more from breaking down the internal barriers that we've built up over time.

and dissolving those barriers in order to get to our deep down and really ultimately our innate creative potential in order that we might best align with it and allow it to flow more freely.

Now that may sound new agey or something that's easy to say, but isn't very science-based or it doesn't really apply to, I don't know, normal life.

So if it's science that you're looking for, then like they say on that amazing YouTube video about B-roll, we've got your science right here.

Three years ago, I began a meditation practice.

It was something I'd wanted to do, had romanticized about doing, but for one reason or another, aka laziness, I'd never been able to sustain any sort of practice.

But then I heard someone speak to how mindfulness or insight meditation could actually increase creativity in artists.

And as a bonus, it could increase one's daily happiness.

That really caught my attention.

Increase my creativity and make me happier? For the longest time, I've been brought up to believe that one had to experience some kind of melancholy in order to be creative.

But meditation and happiness? I was going to need to reconsider my prior beliefs, or at the very least, revisit the idea of a meditation practice.

It's now been nearly 1,000 days since then, and I've long developed a daily mindful meditation practice.

I participate in seminars and retreats.

I geek out on podcasts about meditation.

I read books, watch films on the subject.

I have a goal to attend a 10-day silent retreat, also known as Vipassana, sometime before my 50th birthday.

I've even begun work on a new doc project whose chief subject is a practitioner of Theravada Buddhism and insight meditation.

And I can honestly say that I feel happier.

Now, I'm not talking mind-blowing bliss here or anything like that, but I am able to process agitation, hurt, anger, frustration in a better, more skillful manner.

And I can say without any hesitation that the increase in overall happiness and sustained meditation has most certainly led to an increase in creativity and productivity.

For the uninitiated, you might be asking how meditation works in this fashion.

Well, creativity doesn't really come from the normal conventions that we learned at school or work or our parents even.

It's not a matter of, you know, pulling up your bootstraps and getting on with it.

We cannot simply try harder or strain for it.

It doesn't come from this sort of thing at all.

It comes more from breaking down the internal barriers that we've built up over time.

and dissolving those barriers in order to get to our deep down and really ultimately our innate creative potential in order that we might best align with it and allow it to flow more freely.

Now that may sound new agey or something that's easy to say, but isn't very science-based or it doesn't really apply to, I don't know, normal life.

So if it's science that you're looking for, then like they say on that amazing YouTube video about B-roll, we've got your science right here.