So how do you ‘grow’ creative ability and lose your appetite for the things that do not serve you in life?
So we are born creative, to be creative and then we seem to lose it. To grow and reconnect with the creative spark within you must be willing to make mistakes, and laugh at yourself. Einstein’s quote is relevant here: “A person who has never made a mistake never tried anything new.”
Creativity can be re-cultivated. Creativity comes from using the “whole brain” that is left and right working together. Believe it or not meditation has been shown to increase creativity helping to connect left and right brain. Meditation and creativity go together and both can become your daily practice. To begin your daily practice check out the meditation made easy program I developed. You can also look at Julia Cameron’s groundbreaking book on creativity The Artist’s Way. Growing creativity is like exercising you have to do it everyday as a daily practice.
Something happens in school that shuts that down, favors and rewards left brain thinking. I remember with my own children growing up and how different it was moving from kindergarten to first grade. My daughter came home from school one day very upset complaining how the first grade and school was not fun anymore. There was the big push to learn how to read and from then on creativity was not honored but marginalized. I also think it has a lot to do with playing… children spend so much of their lives playing. If you can bring more play into your life you may find yourself more focused to achieve your lifestyle goals whether it be to lose weight or find your passion.
Ultimately creativity involves the capacity to see relationships between things that are not related and to “think out of the box.” The problem is if one lives in a box, how does one think outside it? I also think creativity comes from the muses. It is about inklings, flashes of ideas that just pop into one’s head that may not even be one’s own.
Creativity is also about change and transformation. It is the process of bringing something new into being and making something of it. Does that sound familiar? Isn’t that how we change a habit? To that I would also like to add Amit Goswami’s definition: “creativity is the discontinuous exploration of new meaning in new and old contexts(s) of value. Looking for the link between creativity, change and values is a creative act.
What do you want to create? When you give some focus and attention to this drive, you may see that eating healthier food and exercising daily comes more naturally to you and watching TV are no longer interesting. Ultimately tending to our creative side makes us more stress hardy as well.
Tell me how some ways you can begin to activate and tend to your creative side.
Goswami, A. (1999). Quantum creativity. Creskill, NY: Hampton Press.
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