Latest / The MOOD Podcast / Your Worst Thoughts Arrive Dressed as Your Best Ideas - Moments of Mood, 4.1

Transcript

Your Worst Thoughts Arrive Dressed as Your Best Ideas - Moments of Mood, 4.1 · The MOOD Podcast

• 0:00
  Matt: What if the single best thing you could do for your photography has nothing to do with photography itself?
• 0:07
  Matt: No new camera, no course, no project, no feedback.
• 0:11
  Matt: I'm talking about learning to meditate.
• 0:14
  Matt: And I know how that sounds.
• 0:16
  Matt: Before you think we're going to get all woo-woo here, we're not.
• 0:20
  Matt: I also know it sounds like maybe I'm about to sell you an app or tell you to manifest your best portfolio.
• 0:27
  Matt: So let me just say it straight.
• 0:28
  Matt: I think meditation is the most direct route I have found to becoming a better artist.
• 0:33
  Matt: And I'd go further, the most reliable antidote to low-grade suffering that many of us are photographing our way around instead of actually addressing.
• 0:42
  Matt: Well, I'm not suffering, I hear you say.
• 0:44
  Matt: Well, if you have goals, desires, distraction, noisy minds, fears, worries, regrets, disappointments, grief, uncertainties, loneliness, etc., etc., you definitely are.
• 0:56
  Matt: Most of the people on this planet are suffering daily, and we're all looking for a magic way to be happy, right?
• 1:04
  Matt: The next purchase, the car, the house, the job, the money, the status, the holiday, the drink, the cake, the next camera, whatever it is we subsume ourselves with daily is just a method to avoid suffering.
• 1:17
  Matt: But what if I told you there is a way to wake up from this dreamscape we think is normal life?
• 1:23
  Matt: To live with more equanimity, to make more meaningful art, to have better relationships.
• 1:28
  Matt: The list is endless.
• 1:30
  Matt: Still, there is often reticence for you and many others.
• 1:33
  Matt: I know there was for me.
• 1:35
  Matt: We would rather have quick relief from pain than a cure.
• 1:38
  Matt: A cure is too long, too hard, too expensive.
• 1:41
  Matt: Just get me out of suffering fast, whatever it takes.
• 1:45
  Matt: That's why we live in a world of abundance.
• 1:47
  Matt: It's created and consumed by us.
• 1:50
  Matt: Pills, alcohol, social media, TV, money, greed, status, power, etc.
• 1:54
  Matt: It's all a way to chase relief from suffering, to get the next fix.
• 1:59
  Matt: So where does it end?
• 2:00
  Matt: Well, I can tell you right now, if we continue along the path of constant desire, it doesn't.
• 2:06
  Matt: So in this episode, I want to make the full case.
• 2:09
  Matt: I'll tell you my own history with it, because I came to this after years of trying almost everything else.
• 2:15
  Matt: I'll show you what the research actually says happens to a brain that meditates, to stress, to focus, and the part almost nobody talks about to creativity and to our ability as artists to make something profound and find real soulful meaning in our work.
• 2:33
  Matt: And I'll end with a line from a poet that, for me, ties the whole thing to why any of us picked up a camera in the first place.
• 2:41
  Matt: This is the Mood Podcast.
• 2:50
  Matt: I'm Matt Jacob, and this is the show that helps emerging photographers find their voice so that you can build a cohesive body of work, articulate what it's about, and get it in front of the right people.
• 3:01
  Matt: It's the only photography podcast that is itself a practice.
• 3:05
  Matt: Every week I sit down with a guest or break down a single idea in a commentary like this one called Moments of Mood.
• 3:12
  Matt: Now, let me start with where I was because I don't want this to sound like it comes from someone naturally serene or enlightened.
• 3:20
  Matt: I've tried a lot of things over the years.
• 3:22
  Matt: From a young age, I struggled a lot with deep depression, anxiety, loneliness, and cancer.
• 3:27
  Matt: Different kinds of therapy, different frameworks, different teachers, and I mean this respectfully, some of it genuinely helped, but I never stuck with any of it for more than maybe a year or so.
• 3:39
  Matt: Something would work for a while, life would shift, the thing would fall away, and I'd be back where I started, looking for the next thing and the next approach.
• 3:48
  Matt: I never felt like I had an accessible, immediate, and useful toolkit I could or wanted to turn to at any point, any time, in whatever state I was in.
• 3:57
  Matt: Not something that needed an appointment or a room or a therapist or money, or just a good week.
• 4:04
  Matt: Something that would still be there at three in the morning in a hotel room on the other side of the world, or in the middle of a chute that's falling apart and I don't know where to turn.
• 4:14
  Matt: Or just on an ordinary Tuesday when the mind is being unkind.
• 4:18
  Matt: Meditation turned out to be that tool eventually.
• 4:21
  Matt: And I want to be careful with how I say this because it isn't magic and it wasn't instant.
• 4:26
  Matt: But it is the only practice I found where the whole point is that you can do it anywhere, with nothing, with no one in any condition, including the bad ones, especially the bad ones.
• 4:39
  Matt: The test I'd offer you is simple to say and surprisingly revealing to try.
• 4:44
  Matt: Can you sit in a room alone with no phone, no book, no task, nothing, and be genuinely okay?
• 4:51
  Matt: Not gritting your teeth, not waiting for it to end, not distracted and identified with a stream and barrage of thoughts, but aware, settled, even happy.
• 5:01
  Matt: I'll go even further.
• 5:02
  Matt: Can you count 10 breaths and follow each inhalation and exhalation with full 100% focus without breaking your attention for the 10 breaths?
• 5:12
  Matt: I guarantee most people can't.
• 5:14
  Matt: For me, that was a serious red flag.
• 5:17
  Matt: And for most of my life, I couldn't do either of those examples.
• 5:20
  Matt: The mind would spin up its usual noise, the plans, the replays, the worry, and I would be dragged around by it like I was on a leash.
• 5:29
  Matt: And even worse, I wasn't even aware that it was happening.
• 5:32
  Matt: What meditation trains more than anything else is the ability to notice that leash and sometimes to simply not be pulled by it.
• 5:41
  Matt: That's the freedom.
• 5:42
  Matt: That's the cure.
• 5:43
  Matt: Everything else is downstream from that.
• 5:46
  Matt: Now, the version of meditation I'm talking about matters because there's a lot of crap out there.
• 5:53
  Matt: There's a lot of versions of meditation out there.
• 5:55
  Matt: And the one that changed things for me is the approach that someone like Sam Harris teaches.
• 6:00
  Matt: And if you want the deep end, his wake-up app and book are where I definitely point you first.
• 6:06
  Matt: Yes, I'm an affiliate, but it's not a sponsor, and I have no real commercial tie to it, other than the fact it literally changed my life, photography as well, more than ever.
• 6:16
  Matt: What I value in his framing is the honesty of it.
• 6:20
  Matt: He's very clear that meditation isn't primarily a relaxation technique.
• 6:24
  Matt: And he has this warning I think about a lot, that if you only use it to produce pleasant states to de-stress inside the same old life, it becomes, in his words, a better trap than most.
• 6:37
  Matt: Just another way of staying comfortable rather than becoming clear.
• 6:42
  Matt: The real purpose, as he puts it, is insight into the nature of your own mind.
• 6:47
  Matt: Noticing that you are not your thoughts, that thoughts arise all by themselves, do their dance, and pass, and that there is an awareness underneath all of it that was never actually disturbed.
• 6:59
  Matt: You don't have to take any of that on faith, and you don't need a single metaphysical belief to test it.
• 7:06
  Matt: You sit, you pay attention, and you look.
• 7:10
  Matt: And here's why I'm telling you this on a photography podcast.
• 7:15
  Matt: That skill, watching experience arise without being swept away by it, is the same skill as seeing.
• 7:22
  Matt: It's literally the same muscle.
• 7:24
  Matt: Photography asks you to be present to what is actually in front of you, not to your commentary about it, not to your plans for it, not to the imagined audience for it.
• 7:35
  Matt: That can come later.
• 7:37
  Matt: And most of us, me included, for years, walk around inside a running narration so loud we barely see or notice anything at all.
• 7:46
  Matt: I also want to be really clear about something else here, because this is where meditation gets really, really misunderstood.
• 7:54
  Matt: And I don't want you walking away with the wrong idea.
• 7:57
  Matt: This is not about ignoring your thoughts or stopping them or emptying your mind or treating ideas as the enemy.
• 8:04
  Matt: If we ignored all our thoughts, we'd sit at home and do nothing.
• 8:09
  Matt: And some of your thoughts are the best thing you have.
• 8:13
  Matt: The idea for the project, the instinct to turn left instead of right, the sudden sense that the light is about to do something special.
• 8:21
  Matt: Those are thoughts too, and you want them.
• 8:24
  Matt: The skill is telling the difference.
• 8:27
  Matt: Because alongside these useful thoughts runs a constant stream of the other kind.
• 8:33
  Matt: The second guessing, the imagined audience, the replay of yesterday's mistake or conversation, or the worry about whether any of this is good enough at all.
• 8:44
  Matt: And that stream doesn't announce itself as noise, it arrives dressed exactly like the useful stuff.
• 8:50
  Matt: Most people don't know how much their thoughts are structuring their experience.
• 8:56
  Matt: That's the real problem.
• 8:58
  Matt: Not the thinking itself, the not knowing.
• 9:01
  Matt: Meditation is how you learn to see it happening, not by switching thinking off, but by getting enough distance to watch a thought arrive and ask, is this serving the work or is it just pulling me away from what's in front of me?
• 9:15
  Matt: You keep the idea, you follow the instinct, you just stop being dragged around by everything else that's wearing an idea's clothing.
• 9:24
  Matt: Awareness of your thoughts, not the absence of them.
• 9:28
  Matt: That's the whole distinction.
• 9:29
  Matt: And it changes what happens when you're standing somewhere with a camera in hand or with images in front of you.
• 9:36
  Matt: But let me step out of my own experience for a minute because this isn't just testimony anymore.
• 9:43
  Matt: The science here has become genuinely hard to dismiss.
• 9:47
  Matt: There are hundreds of studies with overwhelming evidence to support all of the purported benefits of meditation that are less experiential focused.
• 9:57
  Matt: And one that caught my attention when I first started being interested in all this stuff was a study by two Harvard psychologists, Matt Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, who used an app to ping thousands of people through their days, asking what they were doing and how happy they were.
• 10:15
  Matt: And it found that our minds wander almost half the time we're awake.
• 10:20
  Matt: And that a wandering mind is, in their words, an unhappy mind.
• 10:24
  Matt: And I'm not talking about mind wandering in the romantic sense, like daydreaming and imagination.
• 10:31
  Matt: I'm talking about getting wrapped up in the distracted versions of what ifs, what might, regrets, etc., and those aforementioned effects.
• 10:39
  Matt: Let's just sit with this for a minute.
• 10:42
  Matt: That a wandering mind is an unhappy mind, regardless of the activity.
• 10:47
  Matt: Because what this means is that the ambient dissatisfaction most of us carry isn't mostly about our circumstances.
• 10:57
  Matt: It's more about where our attention is.
• 11:00
  Matt: Then there's the brain research, right?
• 11:02
  Matt: Eight-week meditation programs have been shown to measurably change the brain in terms of neuroplasticity and increasing gray matter density in regions tied to learning, memory, and emotional regulation.
• 11:15
  Matt: Many other studies have found that meditators showed changed brain activity and a stronger immune response.
• 11:23
  Matt: Attention research shows meditation training measurably improves focus and the ability to sustain it.
• 11:30
  Matt: It's got to be useful, right?
• 11:31
  Matt: And the one that matters most for us, studies on creativity have found that certain kinds of meditation, the more open, receptive kind, where you sit and observe whatever arises, thoughts, sounds, sensations, without latching onto or chasing any of it, directly improve divergent thinking, the mental mode where new ideas come from.
• 11:54
  Matt: Which makes complete sense once you practice meditation because ideas don't arrive when the mind is gripping.
• 12:01
  Matt: They arrive in the space just after it lets go.
• 12:05
  Matt: So when I say meditation will make you a better photographer, I'm not just being mystical or anecdotal.
• 12:12
  Matt: I'm also not just talking about a calmer nervous system or steadier hands on a camera or difficult shoot, though you get those two.
• 12:20
  Matt: I'm talking about the things that actually build a voice.
• 12:24
  Matt: Knowing yourself well enough to understand what you truly care about and why.
• 12:30
  Matt: So the decisions in your work stop being borrowed and start being yours.
• 12:35
  Matt: Noticing the pull towards status, the imagined career, the plans built for other people's approval, and being able to set that down long enough to see what's actually in front of you.
• 12:47
  Matt: Being more present, which sounds soft until you realize it means just noticing more in finer detail, the light, the gesture, the half second on someone's face that everyone else in the room might have missed.
• 13:00
  Matt: And giving the people you photograph or the people that you photograph with better attention, real attention, which they can feel and which changes what they give back to the lens or to you.
• 13:12
  Matt: Every one of those is a photographic skill.
• 13:15
  Matt: And there's many more.
• 13:16
  Matt: We just never call them that because we've been taught the craft lives in the camera and our technique.
• 13:23
  Matt: Most of it lives in the noticing.
• 13:26
  Matt: But the research, honestly, is the small half of the argument for me because this whole podcast exists to help everyone find their photographic voice.
• 13:35
  Matt: And I want to explain why I think meditation is the most direct route to it.
• 13:39
  Matt: More direct than any course that I could sell you.
• 13:43
  Matt: Arts and literature explore what it feels like to be human.
• 13:47
  Matt: Photography gives form to experience, revealing patterns of emotion and perception that are often difficult to see directly.
• 13:56
  Matt: A photograph takes something that only ever happened inside one person and makes it something a stranger can stand in front of and recognize.
• 14:07
  Matt: The strange mathematics of it is that the more precisely the work belongs to your noticed experience, the more people find their own inside it.
• 14:17
  Matt: What's most yours turns out to be the most connected with.
• 14:21
  Matt: Your voice, the thing you're desperately hunting through presets and projects and other people's feedback, is just a pattern of perception that is difficult to see directly, really difficult.
• 14:35
  Matt: It's how you already experience the world.
• 14:38
  Matt: It cannot be built, it can only be noticed, and it's always evolving.
• 14:42
  Matt: And noticing is the entire discipline of meditation.
• 14:45
  Matt: Every sit is a rehearsal in catching what your attention actually does, what it's drawn to, what it flinches from, what it loves.
• 14:54
  Matt: Do that daily, and you start to see your own patterns everywhere, including in your archive.
• 15:01
  Matt: The photographs you are always taking without knowing quite why start to make a little bit more sense.
• 15:07
  Matt: And that's not a metaphor.
• 15:09
  Matt: That's just what happens when the water clears.
• 15:12
  Matt: And Mary Oliver, one of my favorite poets, put the whole thing in six words I really should have tattooed in amongst the rest.
• 15:21
  Matt: Attention is the beginning of devotion.
• 15:25
  Matt: That's the landing point of everything I'm saying today.
• 15:28
  Matt: Photography was never really about images, it's a practice of attention, which means it's a practice of devotion to the world, to the people in front of you, to your own fleeting experience and moments of just being here.
• 15:43
  Matt: Meditation is simply that same devotion with the camera put down.
• 15:48
  Matt: And when you pick the camera back up, you see differently.
• 15:52
  Matt: One more thing here before we finished, because if this lands with you, the practice side of it, sitting with your own work, learning what your attention is actually drawn to, that's the entire spirit of my community, The Mood Insiders.
• 16:07
  Matt: It's where the scoreboard is off and it's built around exactly this photography as a contemplative practice rather than a performance.
• 16:16
  Matt: We even have guided meditations in there for improving creativity.
• 16:21
  Matt: Anyway, the links below, and I hope to see you in there.
• 16:24
  Matt: Now, I owe you the caveat because I said I'd be straight with you.
• 16:29
  Matt: Meditation is simple, but it's not easy.
• 16:31
  Matt: The first weeks, months are mostly discovering how chaotic your mind actually is, which is unflattering and weirdly is progress.
• 16:40
  Matt: It's also not a replacement for professional help when that's what's needed.
• 16:44
  Matt: I've used both and they do different jobs, and it will not on its own make your photographs good.
• 16:51
  Matt: It won't compose for you, it won't notice light, it won't edit for you.
• 16:55
  Matt: What it does is quieter and bigger than that.
• 16:57
  Matt: It returns your attention to you.
• 17:00
  Matt: What you point it at is still your work and your life.
• 17:04
  Matt: So if you haven't meditated before but are thinking about doing it, I highly encourage it.
• 17:10
  Matt: Maybe you can just try a few minutes every day, sit somewhere and just pay attention to maybe your breath.
• 17:16
  Matt: And when the mind wanders, which it of course will hundreds of times, just notice that and come back to the breath.
• 17:22
  Matt: That's it.
• 17:23
  Matt: That's the whole instruction.
• 17:24
  Matt: But if you want real guidance and deep guidance, Sam Harris's Waking Up course is the one I genuinely recommend.
• 17:30
  Matt: And of course, these days, there are thousands of others.
• 17:34
  Matt: But for me, waking up is different.
• 17:36
  Matt: It's more practical and rational for daily life in daily moments, not just for a solitary 10 or 20 minutes when you wake up.
• 17:44
  Matt: If you've been meditating for a while, though, try something different and really intentionally apply it to your photography practice.
• 17:53
  Matt: That's what this is all about.
• 17:54
  Matt: Whatever you're doing with camera or not, just stand there for a minute and look.
• 18:00
  Matt: The way you've been practicing, notice what your attention goes to on its own.
• 18:06
  Matt: Follow that because that pull, the one that was there before any thought about what would perform or what a photographer like you should shoot, and that kind of stories that you tell yourself, that's the beginning of your voice.
• 18:20
  Matt: Attention is the beginning of devotion.
• 18:22
  Matt: And devotion, frame after frame, year after year, is the only thing that was ever going to make the work unmistakably yours.
• 18:30
  Matt: Enjoy, best of luck, and of course, happy shooting.