The Tibetan Buddhist master Chogyam Trungpa once told Allen Ginsberg, “Why don’t you do like the great poets do, like Milarepa? You’re bored with reading the same poems over and over. Why don’t you make poems up on the stage? Why do you need a piece of paper? Don’t you trust your own mind?” While this occurred before the advent of rap music, Trungpa was essentially telling Ginsberg to go up on stage and freestyle. One could reasonably argue that no creative medium requires one to trust their own mind more than freestyle rapping. Even the briefest moment of hesitation or self-judgment can bring the flow state required for freestyling to a crumbling halt.
A study done in 2012 by Siyuan Liu, a neuroscientist, studied the brain activity of rappers by observing them as they freestyled over beats. Interestingly, the researchers found that during their freestyles, the rappers showed activity in an area of the brain that also shows increased activation in long-term meditators.
While more research needs to be done before we can draw any definite conclusions, this certainly make sense. Mindfulness-based meditation aims to cultivate unbridled trust in the flow of reality, hindered by neither hesitation nor resistance, and this is precisely the same mindset that must be taken to freestyling. In this sense, the art of freestyling can function as a method for learning to trust one's self.
By Ryan Donberg for RAPstation
