Shoshin – Beginner’s Mind
Shoshin is a Zen Buddhist concept introduced to me by Louis Patler, one of my teachers in graduate school. It means beginner’s mind. Beginner’s mind is the mental state of being open, receptive, eager, unafraid of failure, willingly naïve, devoid of preconceptions. Shunryu Suzuki writes in his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind,[1] “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.” Lewis Hyde describes the mindset as “informed naiveté.”[2]
Approaching your work with beginner’s mind staves off the inner critic as it opens you up to a more projective way of working. It becomes a way of giving yourself over to the work. Maintaining beginner’s mind allows rapid progress. How? I’m not sure. How you manage to capture and recapture the spirit of doing something is wrapped up in the psychological equivalent to kinesthetic, or muscle memory. The body learns how to do a flip off the diving board, but you could never teach anyone to perform one just by describing how it feels to do it. Attaining an enhanced mental state of creativity is a bit like that.
You don’t have to be a beginner to use beginner’s mind. That is more or less the whole point of the term. It constitutes a little bit of what Zen, as I see it, is all about. We can’t just know stuff. We need to do it, embody it, and carry it forward in the practice. That’s why you don’t just meditate once.
[1] Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Boston: Weatherhill/Shambhala, 1970.
[2] Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, 25th Anniversary Edition, NY: Vintage, 2007, p. 188.