Meditation is a powerful practice that can help us to be creative. Meditation helps us to focus our attention, and focused attention skills are essential for engaging in creative expression. The practice can help us to let go of all of the creative anxiety, self-doubt, harsh inner critic voice, and other hindrances to creativity. In addition, research has shown that practicing a particular type of meditation, open monitoring meditation, can boost creativity. How does this work?
Open your mind and heart to a greater sense of creative freedom and creative flow with mindfulness meditation.
Meditation for Creativity
Open Monitoring Meditation
Open monitoring meditation, or Insight meditation, is about being with whatever arises in the present moment. We experience the present moment through sensations in the body, feelings, and thoughts. So in open monitoring meditation, we rest the attention on whatever sensations, feelings, and thoughts arise. When the attention wanders, as soon as we notice that it has wandered, we bring it back to the sensations, feelings, and thoughts.
Meditation involves taking a step back from the usual entanglement in these sensations, feelings, and thoughts, in which you can sometimes feel swept away in them or overwhelmed by them, to just objectively notice them. This kind of awareness practice can help us to be more responsive to our experience and less reactive to it. It can help us to cultivate a calm body, open heart, and steady mind that supports our creative process and practice.
Studies have shown that this kind of open monitoring meditation increases creativity. One study demonstrated that meditators who practiced open monitoring meditation showed increased mood as well as increased fluency, flexibility and originality, which are all measures of divergent thinking. Other studies have shown that positive mood increases divergent thinking. Both a positive mood and divergent thinking can boost creativity, both while you’re engaged in creative expression and in other areas of your life.
Focused Attention Meditation
Focused attention meditation, such as Awareness of Breathing, can help us to build concentration skills. Concentration skills can be useful for helping us to notice when our attention has wandered to distractions and creativity blocks and help us bring our attention back to the present moment.
For more information on focused attention meditation and open monitoring meditation, be sure to read my post on “How to Meditate.”
Check out my Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction MBSR online course if you are interested in an intensive mindfulness training course.