Can you remember a time as a child when you were completely engaged in painting a picture? During that time, there was only the brush, the paint, and your imagination, as the image on the paper came to life. In our adult lives, we can also experience the same connected engagement with a creative activity. Maybe you sing in a choir, paint, write poetry or play an instrument. When we’re involved in these activities, we occasionally feel the same sense of total engagement as a child does, which is part of the pleasure that comes with being creative. In fact, creativity and play share similar characteristics.
The ability to be creative is not limited to the special talented few; it’s something everyone can experience. Creativity means going beyond established ideas and forms and creating meaningful new ones. Creativity is important to us as individuals as well as organisations, for instance, for innovation in products, services, or processes. We can be creative in finding a solution to a problem, cooking a meal, and expressing creativity in our relationships with others.
Imagination is an important part of our ability to be creative, which can be defined as, “The ability to consider possibilities that we know are not true in the here and now.” In human evolution, we developed our imagination to explore future situations, including how we or others might react emotionally in advance, which is useful for making decisions. When you think about it, everything around us that is made by humans started life in someone’s imagination, from the international space station to the London tube map.
Recent research on creativity used musicians who often end up playing the same piece of music. After a while, their performance can become automatic and mindless. Researchers asked an orchestra to play a familiar piece twice. At the first, they were instructed to try and recreate their best performance. In the second they were asked to find subtle ways to make the music new to them. When surveyed afterward, over 90% of the audience noticed a distinct difference between the two performances and 80% preferred the more open and creative version.
Some of the theories of creativity include incubating an idea; mentally sending a question or request for the mind to work on, without expecting an immediate result. At some point in the future, you may be in the shower or walking the dog, when a solution or creative idea pops into your head as an answer. Creative ideas are free-flowing thoughts that are more likely to arise when our mind wanders, rather than through logical and deliberate thinking. This is the positive side of mind-wandering, which is a normal part of how our brain works. The downside is that automatic thoughts can sometimes be negative and self-defeating. So, there are good reasons to be aware of and notice your automatic thoughts. On the one hand, it could be a great creative idea that you don’t want to miss, and on the other, it could be your inner critic attempting to feed you negative thoughts that no longer serve you.
Apart from noticing thoughts, how can practising mindfulness improve creativity? Creative ideas are more likely to emerge when we have less agitation and noise around. A bit like a shaken-up snow globe, with all that content spinning around it’s not easy to imagine original ideas. Mindfulness and mindfulness meditation can help create the space and stillness for new ideas to emerge. We’re also more able to break free from existing patterns and habits of thought, including some of the limitations of language.
In the 2018 film Eternity’s Gate about the artist Van Gogh’s final years, he explains his creative approach by saying, “When I paint, I stop thinking and I feel that I am part of everything outside and inside of me.” In an interview with the actor William Defoe, who plays the artist, he says, “Van Gogh does not think when he’s painting. He’s engaged in a way that’s beyond thinking. When you are doing something new, when you’re learning something, when you have a shift of how you see, that’s always a great place to be because you’re ready to be transformed, you’re ready to think in a new way and if you are guided and apply that to an impression like Van Gogh, then it becomes thrilling, not just in the work, but for your life. “
Given the complexity and uncertainty in the modern world, the need for human creativity to find solutions to global challenges has never been more important. As Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Maybe cultivating mindful awareness can help us access the insight and creativity that makes a difference.
Suggested weekly practice
- If you’re not doing this already, weave some creative projects into your life. For example, this could be having a go at creative writing, poetry, painting, or playing an instrument.
- It’s not easy to be creative by thinking hard about something, especially a solution to a complex problem. Try asking a question and throwing it out there in your mind to incubate and see what happens.
- To really improve your creativity, try taking a different perspective, breaking the rules, turning something upside down, reversing the emotional lens (e.g., from anger to openness), capturing ideas when your mind wanders, and bringing in things from a different discipline, and see what difference that makes.
Guidance
Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified, and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.
- Play the first settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
- Then play the second practice to help create the space and stillness for creativity to emerge.
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