The Path to Creativity

Some might consider the best path painful.

Creativity occurs in degrees. We are always looking for ways to make our lives simpler, things more convenient, life more affordable, activities less boring, food more interesting, exercise more appealing, romance more exciting and so on.

In fact that is just the problem. We have too much on our minds to be creative in one area. We are trying to improve our lives while carrying on our daily activities of work or study or parenting. In the few minutes in between we probably say I wish this were more…. Or less…

Then when we have a few minutes we are checking our messages, texting, listening to our I Pods, surfing the net, checking on the news and talking.

Creativity needs space, quiet and focus. The mind/brain needs time off. Most of our activity is in the left brain beta wave driven logical calculating sphere. Or we are ramped up in our emotion centered alpha wave driven right brain emotional sphere.

Real creativity originates out of the slower theta and delta wave centers of the reptilian brain where we venture when we sleep or meditate.

In his book “The Mindful Brain” Harvard Medical graduate, doctor and psychiatrist discusses how to get mindfulness or mind/brain control. It is nothing new to most, but as a busy person with his own children and full schedule he took time off to slow down.  He took a week off to spend time in groups where he couldn’t talk and could only spend time quieting his mind.

Just as Patt Lynn-Kyle wrote about in “Heal Your Mind Rewire Your Brain”, you have to slow down the monkey chatter to get creative thoughts if you are not accustomed to tapping your creative mind. She has taken as much as three months at a time where she and others would not talk and spent time focusing and slowing down the mind’s busyness.

I have the perfect scenario for tapping creativity. I rise early in the morning refreshed with nothing on my mind but creating a few writings. When I have spent my energy I walk across the street to the beach and either exercise or sit looking and listening to the waves.

When I am sufficiently refreshed or my mind has been energized or relaxed by exercise, I can return for another session of writing. I do not have electronic devices that I check when I am not at my computer. My down time is 100% downtime.

I create intensely focused work time and extremely focused or relaxed withdrawal time. I have started to spend short periods of meditation or as Daniel J. Siegel would say  “mindfulness time”.

We often engage in one activity and are thinking about other activities. We go for a walk and think about what happened last Sunday.  We eat and think about what is on schedule for the next day. We exercise and listen to music to take our minds off the pain.

We are never in the here and now.  Creativity comes from digging deep into the here and now. Mindfulness comes from paying attention to what is going on this second and allowing the mind/brain to balance.

Meditation is focusing on the breath or the sensual experiences of sitting outside. Walking meditations are thinking only about each step and what we are feeling each second. Meditation is about thinking of one word and seeing how long we can keep out our encroaching monkey chatter.

If you want to create real change with innovative or creative thinking every day, you need to focus, lock out distractions, and access your peaceful core.

Revelations, epiphanies, and ahas come from a synchronicity of the mind/brain function that swirl in and out of the physical brain. A balance of the emotional and logical spheres focused on relaxation can give rise to breakthroughs a busy mind can’t grasp.