Capture Your Flag

Eric Michielsen: How does meditating help you be more self aware and introspective in
your writing?

Nina Godiwalla: For me, meditation is a general term and it is for a lot of people as well
of being present at every moment. So while we’re speaking, actually, really listening to
what you're saying and not having my mind think about, ‘oh I’m really nervous, does this
make sense.’ It’s a lifestyle and I can choose where I’m putting my intention.

Meditation is choosing where you put your attention at every single moment of your life.

So in terms of being able to take that self-awareness and understand and quietly be with
myself and be comfortable, it’s completely affected my writing specifically the book I've
written because it’s a memoire and it’s about my life. One of the things because I think
we go through experiences and if they don't work the way we want them to work, we
kind of can put them off. We can bury them someplace else and to be honest, some of
the stuff I wrote about were definitely things that I've buried. I didn’t have to -- I don't
want to go back, I don't want to think about them and meditation allows me -- it gives me
the safety and comfort with myself to go back and visit those experiences and not just
visit them, but try and understand why I put myself in that situation, why that happened
and get that depth.

And in all honesty, when you're writing, you want to take people to that different level.
You don't want to -- it doesn’t need it just being, ‘hey, this is what happened,’ it’s kind of
like, ‘I’m trying to understand what happened,’ and when you're meditating, you're
actually getting comfortable enough with yourself to where you're not denying things,
you're not -- you're saying, ‘I accept the way I acted. I accept what happened and let me
take it to a different level.’

And I think that way, you're able to take the reader to a different level.