Beginners Mind

Trying something new can make you feel vulnerable, exposed, amateurish and I don’t know about you, but as I get a little older this feeling can become more disconcerting than when I was younger. As a child or teen, or even in our 20’s there is the expectation that when we get to a certain age we will finally be an “expert” or a master at something. For many people this does happen, maybe not in the areas we imagined when we were younger, but over time we gain experience and perspective and become at least competent in our field of work or hobbies.

So what happens when we start something new when we are a bit older or even need to shift gears radically when we are still mid career? Why does that become more difficult as we get older for many people and what can we do to have a more flexible mindset for learning new things?

In my case I have been struggling to wrap my mind around an art medium that does not come very intuitively to me because the other mediums I was using, acrylic and oil and cold wax are opaque and watercolor is transparent and the process for creating paintings is really different. For many months I just fooled around with watercolor without really committing to learning the medium because the learning curve felt much more steep.

That said, I find myself pulling out my old books on Zen Buddhism for guidance and inspiration. One of my favorites is an old copy of Shunryu Suzuki’s “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”. This book was compiled from a series of informal talks given by Suzuki at a meditation center in California during the 60’s. Over the years different parts of the book have spoken to me but more recently I have been moved by some of the reflections on repetition, and non-attachment.

While Suzuki is describing a way of cultivating awareness in order to allow an enlightened consciousness to emerge through a consistent meditation practice, I think this way of seeing and thinking can be very helpful to cultivating a thriving art practice. In the chapter about repetition, meditation practice is compared to baking bread, that in order to make good bread you must bake it over and over again. The focus not on the flour or the oven but on watching the baking very carefully and without judgment. I interpret this in terms of art making as focusing on the process and having a positive, persistent and accepting mindset with whatever you make.

To be totally honest this is hard for me. It’s hard to accept some of the things I make especially now that I am working in a medium and in a way that is kind of difficult for me right now. What I can see in my mind is very different than what ends up on the paper and this is totally normal when starting out. I just want the awkward phase to hurry up and be over already so I can feel like I know more than I do instead of accepting where I am and just keep painting anyway.

The concept of attachment vs non-attachment is like many Buddhist teachings a very subtle and deep teaching while looking deceptively simple. In the chapter on attachment and non-attachment Suzuki quotes one of his teachers saying:

“ Although everything has Buddha nature, we love flowers and we do not care for weeds.”, later he quotes him again,

“ A flower falls even though we love it; and a weed grows even though we do not love it.”

You can interpret Buddha nature how you like, I interpret this as God or nature or as Paul Tillich would say the “ ground of being”. It’s everything all around us including us and the whole universe we are a part of. What I get out of this teaching is that it is human nature to like pleasant or beautiful things and to not like unpleasant or ugly things. In order to have less internal and external conflict we can practice radical acceptance of human nature for more peace for ourselves and others. We aim to cultivate flowers, good feelings, good relationships, and good paintings but accept that there are weeds, difficult feelings, difficult relationships, and bad or less skillful paintings.

We don’t want the bad but we don’t struggle or get in a fight or feel less because there is bad, we gently accept and keep practicing, keep painting, keep cultivating what we want without getting overly attached to outcomes.

To be able to look deeply at yourself, at the nature of reality and to not identify too closely with what you re making can be really hard for an artist or for any one that has the least bit of pride in what they make. The point being to be flexible, to being present, to be faithful to an art practice and to let go for a while of ego agendas so that a new way of seeing and creating can emerge.

What that looks like on a practical level day to day for me right now is making one awkward painting or sketch after another until I understand what I am doing more. Everyone is unique and practicing beginners mind might look different for you but I imagine it’s similar for anyone learning something new.

I have seen how pride and ego identification with awkward beginner art or even good competent art can thwart new learning processes and growth. As people and as artist’s we want to be open to growth, to learning. to expanding our minds and artistic repertoire and that usually means getting comfortable with discomfort for a bit.

In fact it might be a good idea for all if us to go outside of our comfort zone and do that thing that makes us uncomfortable for a time, to be the beginner, to be vulnerable and to see ourselves, others and especially our art with the gentle eyes of compassion.