Meditation Techniques
for Artists and Musicians

If you can sing divine songs

Most soulfully,

You are bound to get the same result

As from your sublime meditation.

Meditate before playing. If we pray and meditate and then start playing music, naturally we shall express what we have received from our prayer and meditation. Before we play, if we can meditate for even two or three minutes and acquire an iota of peace or bliss, then this peace and bliss will definitely enter into our music, into our instrument, into our voice. Then our music will automatically become spiritual and divine.

Offer your life-breath to your instrument. While you are breathing in and breathing out, try to feel that you are offering your life-breath to the instrument keys that you will use. Your life-breath is something very precious, and you are offering your life’s most precious thing to your instrument.

Meditate on softness in your voice. To bring forward the spiritual qualities of your voice, meditate on softness. A flower will give you softness, or you can meditate on anything that is very delicate. But do not think of anything sharp. A spontaneous flow comes from softness; it does not come from sharpness. If you can meditate on something that is very, very soft, it will make your voice sweeter.

Otherwise, you can meditate on your soul for a few seconds before you sing. But if you try mentally to bring forward your voice, even if you succeed, it will not last for more than a few seconds.

Soulful singing. To sing soulfully, try to visualise a beautiful garden inside your heart. If you see a beautiful garden, then soulfulness automatically will come. Or feel that you are seated alone at the foot of a tree, facing a river. That also will help you.

Imagine the audience as yourself. Take all the members of the audience as one person, and feel that this person is yourself. If you see many people watching you, naturally you become nervous. But if you take all of them as yourself, then you will not be nervous.

You are the instrument. Before you start painting, just think of yourself as an instrument. You hold your brush and you know that it is your instrument. In the same way you can look at your hand, arms, wrist or fingers and repeat a few times, “This is not mine, this is Yours, O Supreme.” Look at your fingers and say, “These fingers are not mine. These fingers are of the Supreme and for the Supreme. This wrist, this palm is not mine; it is the Supreme’s for the Supreme.” The paint, the canvas, you, anything that you are going to use, you have to look at individually and say, “This is not mine; it is the Supreme’s. If it is His, then it is His responsibility.”

See with the eye of your heart. You have to not use your mind at all. If you use your mind, all kinds of fear can enter. Even if the mind feels that your painting is beautiful, five minutes later the mind may say, “Oh, it is not beautiful.” So never see anything with your mind’s eye. See everything with your heart’s eye. Then you will see that everything is beautiful.

Become one with the brush and the paint. If you use the heart, you become one with your painting and you will never be afraid of it. But also, you have to become one with the brush and the paint for they are the instruments that you are using. So become one with the painting and one with the instruments—the brush and the canvas. Then one instrument is becoming another instrument, and the real Doer is the Supreme. If you can do this, then there can be no fear, no doubt and no sense of failure.

See the seed-essence first. To see the inner beauty of something you want to paint or draw, first meditate for at least five minutes and try to see the essence of the thing you want to paint. Feel that there is a seed inside you, and then try to feel the seed germinating and growing into a plant. Then feel that this tiny plant is growing into a huge tree and this tree is your painting. First see the essence and then see the total substance. First make your creation as small as possible, then make it as vast as possible. Try to see the microcosm and the macrocosm together. Then try to see a bridge between the two, connecting the smallest and the largest, or try to connect them with your aspiration. As soon as you see the connection, you are bound to see the beauty from its origin to its culmination in your painting.

First see life in your creation, then see light in your creation. Or you can do it the other way. First you can see light in your creation, then you can see life in your creation. While you are imagining the seed, try to feel at that time that you are meditating on light; and when you are seeing the tree, feel that you are meditating on life. Or do it the other way. Whether you take the tree, the culmination, as life or light, or the seed within you as life or light, automatically you will bring forward beauty in your painting. That is because, before it has come into the physical world, in the inner world you have already given life and light to it. When you give life or light to something that you are going to create, you are bound to see beauty in it.

Paint something spiritual. To bring purity into your consciousness while you are painting, you have to paint spiritual things, and then you have to identify your consciousness with the divine qualities of these things. “Art for art’s sake,” from the spiritual point of view, is wrong. Suppose you have drawn a ballpoint pen. Everybody will say, “Yes, it is a wonderful ballpoint pen that he has drawn.” But what inspiration or aspiration have you gained from this? None! The drawing has not elevated your consciousness even an inch. But if you draw a beautiful white flower, then immediately your eyes will appreciate the beauty and divinity of the flower. And even while you are drawing the flower, you are receiving purity from it.

Divinity is inside the pen and it is also inside the flower. But the divinity that is inside the flower is much more fulfilling and much more fully manifested. So when you draw a flower, your consciousness will be elevated. And when your consciousness is elevated, at that time purity has entered into you.

Suppose you draw a tree. A tree stands patiently and protects everybody from the rain and sun, and it offers its fruits to the whole world. The inner essence of a tree is patience and sacrifice. These qualities may not yet be manifested in you, but they have already been manifested in the tree. So when you draw a tree, try to enter into the divine qualities of the tree and identify with them. Then the divine qualities that it possesses will be yours.

If you draw a spiritual Master and enter into the consciousness of that Master, you will be flooded with inner purity. For two or three hours you will be drawing him and meditating on him, so naturally his consciousness will enter into you. After drawing spiritual Masters, Indian artists have achieved lifelong purity based on their inner identification with these Masters. This is what you can do, too.

Feel the consciousness of your subject. When-ever you draw something spiritual, try to feel the significance of what you are drawing. When you are drawing a river, if you see it flowing just as thousands of other rivers in the world are flowing, then it is useless. Water symbolizes consciousness. So you have to see the river as a flow of consciousness going to its source, the infinite ocean. You have to feel that the river is movement—not restless movement but dynamic movement. The river is the finite, and it is entering into the ocean, which is infinite. Similarly, while you are drawing you have to feel that you are also entering into the Source. Then, since you know that water represents consciousness, try to feel while drawing that consciousness is entering into you and that you are expanding your consciousness.

The significance of colours. Colours signify different things. The colour silver, for instance, has a special significance, which is applicable to every field. Silver means purity. When you see this colour during meditation, you have to know that you have achieved tremendous progress in your life in terms of purity. When you see the colour silver, at that time you have to feel that your mind is becoming pure, your vital is becoming pure, your body-consciousness is becoming pure. This also applies when you see the colour silver in art.

The sincere seeker can concentrate and meditate on these colour plates [in Sri Chinmoy’s book Colour Kingdom, which gives the spiritual quality associated with many different colours] in order to bring to the fore the qualities which the colours embody. The colour which will help you bring forward a quality which you lack now is the right colour for you to concentrate on. You yourself have to make the choice. The colour that gives you the greatest joy, or immediate joy, or the colour which you feel you have an affinity for, is the one that naturally you will choose. If you put a few of the colours in front of you, and one of the colours pulls you like a magnet, then that is the colour for you—for your realisation and manifestation.

You see different colours during different meditations because each colour has a significance of its own. Your inner being wants to be fed every time with different food. As there is earthly food, even so there is Heavenly food. This food is colour, light and so forth. Every day you do not eat the same food. Here the inner being wants to be fed by a particular food. It chooses the colour like a variation in food. It is up to you to appreciate a variety of colours or to appreciate the same colour over and over again. It is up to you how you want to satisfy yourself.