Where Do Muses Live? Writing, the Elements, and the Five Buddha Families

by Miriam Hall

I've been thinking a lot about where inspiration comes from. Preparing for the creative process is less about coming up with ideas and more about opening ourselves, getting curious, and being receptive to what comes our way. There's plenty of inspiration constantly available to us, often through the most mundane-seeming daily moments. 

Many brilliant thinkers have proposed explanations for sources of inspiration over millennia. One recurrent idea, from Greek philosophers and many others, is the idea of muses as beings who exist outside of us. More recently, Elizabeth Gilbert revitalized the idea of muses in her bestselling book Big Magic.

How do we open to this inspiration, to our muses? The ground is meditation, which can bring us into more awareness of possibilities. These possibilities have flavors, and Tibetan Buddhism has a way of describing these flavors through the Five Buddha Families.

In late June, Melissa and I will be offering a retreat to connect writing with the Five Buddha Families. In Karuna Training, we explore them mainly through a practice from Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche called Maitri Space Awareness. Maitri means loving kindness, and through this mindset, we explore the qualities of space with deep awareness. This special practice involves taking certain postures and wearing colored glasses to immerse ourselves in qualities like clarity, richness, compassion, spaciousness, and efficiency. Together they create writing that, regardless of genre or style, feels complete and whole. These qualities also contain a set of teachings called the four karmas, or four actions, of pacifying, enriching, magnetizing, and destroying. These actions provide a wonderful structure for the creative process, whether at the beginning or the end.

The practice of Maitri Space Awareness physically helps our bodies align with the energies of the universe. Each of the Five Buddha Families is tied to an element, and the elements are key to creativity, even when I'm not writing something specifically natural like a haiku. As one of my teachers, Resmaa Menakem, likes to say, the elements are our ultimate ancestors. 

This retreat is open to everyone, whether you identify as a writer, a meditator, or neither. I have been teaching writing as a contemplative practice for twenty years now, and my students have found that this kind of writing helps them understand their minds better. Doing this as a group practice helps us generate compassion more efficiently, for what can be quite a vulnerable practice.

For those unfamiliar with the Five Buddha Families or Maitri Space Awareness, this will be a lovely introduction. In Karuna Training, we often pair Maitri Space Awareness with a creative practice of some kind. This is the very first time we are combining the Buddha Family postures with writing. So, From Posture to Page will be a discovery for all of us.

I'm excited about this forthcoming offering with Melissa just outside of Albuquerque. Both Melissa and I have a great deal of experience with Maitri Space Awareness practice and also with writing as a contemplative practice. This retreat will be unlike any other writing or meditation retreat you have attended. Rather than focusing on craft, editing, or publishing. We will spend most of our time focusing on connecting writing with the elemental muses through individual and group practices. 

I hope you can join us for this first-time program. Again, even if you don’t identify as a writer, if you're feeling a need to connect with the elements or with your mind compassionately, this retreat is for you. If you identify as a writer and feel the need for inspiration, or you're not sure how to connect with your muses, this retreat will feed you.