Expand Your Creativity

How to Use Mindfulness to Expand Your Creativity

Mindfulness can expand your creativity and open up your thinking. You’ve probably heard about mindfulness, and maybe you even have a regular mindfulness practice. It’s not just useful for keeping you calm and focused. Here’s how to use mindfulness to expand your creativity and help you reach your creative potential.

Understanding How the Creative Process Works

To understand how mindfulness can boost your creativity, it helps to look at the creative process. It can be a delicate synchronization of four steps:

Information gathering and idea stimulation. This is the phase where the sky’s the limit. You research and braindump as many ideas as you can. Your brain needs to be in free-roaming mode here, with your cognitive control network on the back burner, to let you get on with it!
Incubation. Once you have as many thoughts and ideas down on paper as you can, your brain can get on processing and thinking over options for the next stage.
Stage three is inspiration. That “Eureka!” moment when you make connections and get creative insights. These usually happen randomly, so I like to carry a notebook with me at all times.
The final stage is the verification or testing phase, when you can invite in your critical brain to analyze and evaluate what you came up with.

Different parts of your brain dominate different stages of the creative process. Stage one relies on divergent thinking, which is freewheeling and non-critical.

The incubation stage is taken care of by the brain’s memory organization area.

Inspiration is controlled by your brain’s salience network, which is basically an early warning system for great ideas and making good choices.

The verification stage is where you can allow the cognitive control network to get analyzing and critiquing.

But it’s essential to keep these phases in sequence and in balance. If any of these stages get side-lined, say if your Inner Critic jumps in at stage one or two, your creative process is in danger of falling apart.

The Role of Mindfulness in Expanding Your Creativity

Mindfulness can help with each stage of the creative process. It boosts the divergent thinking necessary for brainstorming, it calms distracting thoughts, allowing the incubation of all your brilliant ideas.

Mindfulness also strengthens the salience network, so that bright spark of creative insight doesn’t get lost in the crowd.

Finally, mindfulness promotes cognitive function, helping you analyze and evaluate your project during the final phase of the creative process.

As well as assisting with the mechanics of the creative process, mindfulness meditation will help you develop self-compassion and non-judgment.

Not all creative projects work out, and that’s okay.

Fail forward and keep going, using what you’ve learned to move the needle favorably. Mindfulness will help you develop insight into your own creative process and how you can reach your creative potential.

Summary

I’m a fan of easy, elegant solutions for everything. I love healing through creativity for anyone who is on their personal journey to change and transformation and it has become one of the Ravynwood Foundations.

Even if the result they want has nothing to do with creating, the experience of creating something is healing, and opens your mind to new possibilities as you do it.

Creativity can be such a healing process, and connecting it to mindfulness can make it even more so.

It’s definitely worth putting a bit of time into whatever form of creativity you choose.

Mindfulness practices can help you be more creative, which in turn will probably help you become more mindful as well as help you see things in a new way.

That’s a win-win, for sure!

Do you want to do more with mindfulness? Check out the posts below for more inspiration.

Whether you’re a beginner or have been practicing mindfulness for a while now, these are simple, effective, and great additions to your mindfulness toolbox.

Expand your creativity.

Blessed Be!

Karen

Karen believes in making a little magick every day. She's a green witch, eclectic pagan, Certified Moonologer ™, Reiki Master/Teacher, animist, shamanic practitioner, ordained minister, equestrian, mom to a human daughter and many animals including cats, horses, chickens and dogs. When she’s not working, you’ll find her enjoying the outdoors, spending time with her family, friends and horses, gardening or reading a good book.