Franca Leeson: Creative Meditation

By Peter Lloyd

Franca Leeson just happens to be one of the most creative people I know. In addition to teaching meditation, Franca is a consulting partner at ThinkX Intellectual Capital and one of the organizers of the Mindcamp Creativity Weekend in Geneva Park, near Toronto. So when I learned that she teaches meditation as a creativity technique, I was determined to find out more.

If anyone else were to suggest to me that meditation could actually help creators create, inventors invent, or innovators innovate, I would probably be inclined to call them a crackpot. Probably because I've examined the sites of a few folks who claim that their meditation technique could make me more creative. I leave as soon as an in-your-face popup interrupts me and tries to sell me a book, app, or cocktail that will change my life.

The meditation Franca teaches develops open awareness and stable attention. These conditions remove barriers to the natural function of your creative mind.

Peter: I look for ways to advance creativity. Tell me about removing barriers.

Franca: One such barrier is patterned thinking, which isn’t really thinking at all, but more akin to playing recorded announcements over and over in one’s head. Or maybe like watching a really biased 24-hour news station. (I’m not mentioning any by name of course.)

Peter: So meditation pushes all that crap out of your head?

Franca: No, it’s impossible to do that for more than a few seconds at a time! What you do in what I call “mindfulness of the breath” is simply return your attention to your breath when you notice yourself following the thoughts.

Peter: You know, I’ve tried to quiet my mind that way, but it keeps making noise!

Franca: It takes practice. You do it maybe a thousand times in a few minutes. But each of those thousand times is a rep. So you’re exercising your mindfulness in the same way you’d exercise your biceps with a free weight. After practicing mindfulness of breath regularly for a few weeks, you’ll get better at avoiding and recovering from automatic patterned non-thinking.

Peter: And where do you go from there?

Franca: The next level up is to practice this mindfulness of the breath while at the same time opening to everything. When you let your awareness open without collapsing down onto this or that, you’re opening to the myriad of creative resources around us all the time: sights, sounds, smells, sensations. This exposes us to all kinds of new possibilities and perspectives.

Peter: So while I center my attention on my breath, I consciously open up my senses. Center and open. Center and open.

Franca: Yes, and whenever you notice your attention has collapsed down onto something—your breath or some other distraction—you re-center if necessary and open again. Think of a waitress carrying a tray of beer across a busy room. If she stops paying attention to the beer, she spills it, but if she stops paying attention to the room, she bumps into something and spills it. Either way, a waste of beer.

Peter: As a musician I know that to play well with others, I have to pay attention to what I’m playing but at the same time listen to what the others are playing. It takes practice to get that down.

Franca: It’s the same with meditation. Try it. Practice meditation a while, and see if it helps.

See also:

What Daily Meditation Can Do for Your Creativity by Mark McGuinness, The 99 Percent

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.

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