We all have interior natter as we stumble through life. Sometimes it’s useful, “look right, left, right, before crossing the street. Fighting over chocolate that the lover didn’t share with you 15 years ago, not so much. Discussing money with your parents who died 10 years ago isn’t going to pay the rent.
Meditation is training to be in this moment, not nattering with ghosts. Not just when you levitate, but when you’re doing dishes or even writing and drawing.
Nattering is often lying, harsh speech, divisive speech, and idle chatter, the categories of wrong speech. They create ill will with others and make you a grumpy ashole when you do it in your head. Much of the speech for the last fifteen years has done nothing but drive all of us nuts. So why do we do it when we talk to ourselves too?
Buddha’s rules for social media, or right speech, kind, useful, timely and true work to make the world a better place. So apply these rules in the ways we talk to ourselves and we can make our own life a little easier. As an artist all of my wrong speech fills up my head as I draw, that’s why I’m writing this series on the 8fold path for artists.
These days I try to pick an object to focus on, like my breath in meditation, but for creating comics. It’s hard to break comics down in this way because they are so complex but right now I’m focusing just on head and character construction.
I natter on about a pattern library as a way to keep my thinking clear, what a failure I am for never writing it up. See harsh speech. But first I have to get thru the 8-Fold path for artists.
Right speech, it’s what you get when you blog.