Whether you work in a creative industry, or you express your artistic and innovative side in your free time, you rely on your mind for inspiration and new ideas. When your mind is working for you, it can be a powerful instrument for creativity and expression. However, many people find their creative process often hampered by stress, muddled thoughts and inability to focus.
Fortunately, spending just a few minutes a day in meditation can make all the difference for you, allowing you to use your mind more effectively to perceive clearly and create the things you want. Though a daily meditation practice enriches your life in so many ways beyond just the level of your mind, these “side benefits” of meditation are sure to surprise you and may help you unlock creativity and potential you didn’t know you had!
Read below as Sadhguru explains what meditation can do for your creativity:
Mental Clarity
Sadhguru: “If creativity has to happen, we have to develop a certain level of un-distortedness in the mind. If you carry the baggage of life with you all the time, you cannot see anything the way it is. In yoga, we always describe the mind as a mirror. A mirror is useful to you only if it is clean and plain. If it is undulating or has accumulated something, it does not show you things as they are. The nature of a mirror is such that if you stand before it, it carries you in full glory. If you leave, the mirror leaves you 100%. It will not retain even a little residue of who you are. The next person who comes and stands in front of the mirror is also reflected in full glory. If a million people look at themselves in a mirror, they will not leave an iota of their quality in the mirror.
If you can keep your mind in such a way that the exposure to life does not leave any residue on your mind, then you see things just the way they are. Then there is room to innovate and create every aspect of your life. If you are just receptive to life, if you become a reflection of life rather than becoming a mind and a jumble of thoughts, this is what is generally considered as creativity.”
Neurocognitive tests performed on practitioners of Shambhavi Mahamudra kriya, a meditative practice learned in Isha Foundation’s Inner Engineering program, demonstrated increased performances in attention-oriented tasks, while EEG studies on meditators showed higher levels of coherence between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, leading to greatly enhanced mental capabilities: better learning ability, increased creativity, heightened mental clarity and sharper intellect.
Focus
Sadhguru: “Don’t be anxious to be focused. Learn to relax into life. If you develop a love for what you are doing, you will see that you will naturally grasp everything that you need to grasp. Rather than trying to concentrate on your study or work, if you see the usefulness of what you are doing, if you enjoy what you are doing, you will see that grasping things will come naturally to you. Everybody has the capability.”
A neurophysiological study using EEG revealed a substantial increase in delta and theta brain waves and markedly reduced beta and alpha brain waves when measured after 21 minutes of the practice of Shambhavi Maha Mudra. Increase in delta and theta waves are associated with deep relaxation and higher levels of mental focus, while reduced beta waves are associated with reduced mental tension and anxiety. Reduced alpha waves in conjunction with increased theta and delta waves are associated with conscious awareness of the subconscious mind. Taken together, these results support a drop in stress and anxiety, a boost in mental alertness and focus, and an increase in self-awareness.
Intuition
Sadhguru: “When you were first learning to drive a car, you turned on the ignition, then pressed the clutch, then the first gear, and you slowly released the clutch, but the damn thing would just jump and stop no matter how many times you tried. But now you have been driving for ten years, and you could be talking on your cell phone and still everything happens right. And even today after ten years of driving, if you sit in the car and think, “What should I do properly? First, ignition, then clutch, then first gear, then clutch…” again you won’t know how to drive.
If you go intellectually, for every little thing that you do there are ten steps. Instead of going through these ten steps from one to ten, if you jump, that is what is intuition. But intuition is not a different dimension of perception, it is just a different dimension of computing. You are computing it faster, but still it is the same information. If your brain becomes more intuitive, you can use what you know better. To move from a “dumb” phone to a smart phone and from a smart phone to an iPad, we did not discover anything new. We are just learning to use it better. It is the same thing with your brain when you are intuitive.”
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