David Lynch Explains Why Depression Is the Enemy of Creativity–and Why Meditation Is the Solution

David Lynch has a vari­ety of notions about what it takes to make art, but suf­fer­ing is not among them. “This is part of the myth, I think,” he said in one inter­view. “Van Gogh did suf­fer. He suf­fered a lot. But I think he did­n’t suf­fer while he was paint­ing.” That is, “he did­n’t need to be suf­fer­ing to do those great paint­ings.” As Lynch sees it, “the more you suf­fer, the less you want to cre­ate. If you’re tru­ly depressed, they say, you can’t even get out of bed, let alone cre­ate.” This rela­tion­ship between men­tal state and cre­ativ­i­ty is a sub­ject he’s addressed over and over again, and the video above assem­bles sev­er­al of those instances from over the decades. It may come as a sur­prise that the auteur of Blue Vel­vet, Twin Peaks, and Mul­hol­land Dri­ve, rec­om­mends med­i­ta­tion as the solu­tion.

That cer­tain­ly won’t come as a sur­prise, how­ev­er, to any­one famil­iar with Lynch’s world­view. Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Lynch’s expla­na­tion of how med­i­ta­tion boosts cre­ativ­i­ty, his draw­ing depict­ing how med­i­ta­tion works, his method of get­ting ideas through med­i­ta­tion, and his con­ver­sa­tions about med­i­ta­tion with the likes of Paul McCart­ney and Moby.

In the video below, he lays out how his favorite kind of med­i­ta­tion, the Tran­scen­den­tal vari­ety, has the poten­tial to dri­ve out not just depres­sion, but also neg­a­tiv­i­ty, ten­sion, stress, anx­i­ety, sor­row, anger, hate, and fear. These are grand promis­es, but not with­out inter­est to the non-med­i­tat­ing Lynch fan curi­ous about the mind behind his work, both of which were once wide­ly assumed to be deeply trou­bled indeed.

“Do you think you’re a genius, or a real­ly sick per­son?” CBC cor­re­spon­dent Valerie Pringle asks him in a Blue Vel­vet-era inter­view includ­ed in the com­pi­la­tion at the top of the post. “Well, Valerie,” he responds, “I don’t know.” He did not, at that time, speak pub­licly about his med­i­ta­tion prac­tice, but by the late nineties he’d begun to dis­cuss per­son­al mat­ters much more freely. In one Char­lie Rose inter­view, a clip from which appears in the video, he even tells of the time he went to ther­a­py. The begin­ning of this sto­ry makes it in, but not the end: Lynch asked his new ther­a­pist “straight out, right up front, ‘Could this process that we’re going to go through affect cre­ativ­i­ty?’ And he said, ‘David, I have to be hon­est with you, it could” — where­upon Lynch shook the man’s hand and walked right back out the door.

Relat­ed con­tent:

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Boosts Our Cre­ativ­i­ty (Plus Free Resources to Help You Start Med­i­tat­ing)

One Hour of David Lynch Lis­ten­ing to Rain, Smok­ing & Reflect­ing on Art

David Lynch Visu­al­izes How Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion Works, Using a Sharpie & Big Pad of Paper

Are We All Get­ting More Depressed?: A New Study Ana­lyz­ing 14 Mil­lion Books, Writ­ten Over 160 Years, Finds the Lan­guage of Depres­sion Steadi­ly Ris­ing

David Lynch Mus­es About the Mag­ic of Cin­e­ma & Med­i­ta­tion in a New Abstract Short Film

Charles Bukows­ki Explains How to Beat Depres­sion: Spend 3–4 Days in Bed and You’ll Get the Juices Flow­ing Again (NSFW)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.