The joy of reclaiming our lost creativity through meditation
Can we reignite forgotten childhood virtues?
My own memories of being a child are often coated with a warm glaze, as I recall summer evenings playing outside, aimless fun with my sister and our cousins. Hours spent inventing games, building go-carts and figuring out how to climb to the top of the tallest tree. Each day was a new entrepreneurial venture, from writing songs as a pop duo, to developing ideas for our dog walking business. Did you ever notice that as a child you had innate creativity? As adults we probably don’t even realise that we lost this quality, only when reflecting back on those moments of childhood ingenuity do we recognise that we’ve changed.
Pablo Picasso mused about this loss of creativity that comes with age, he claimed:
“Every child is born an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
Picasso was referring to our culture’s repression of creativity, how instead it favours encouragement of learning within the box, sculpting us along with our beliefs of our own limitations to create a society of conformists, living predictably within the constraints of what society deems acceptable. The evolution of our society has always viewed creatives as dangerous, those who pose a risk to shaking up the status quo, the ultimate threat to a society that thrives on the opposite, maintaining a homeostasis. So naturally, through formal education and cultural norms, we neglect to nourish our creative selves.
But through denying our true expression of creativity we are losing so much vibrance in our lives. Creativity is linked with life longevity, it can relieve stress and even assist in recovery from illness. There is also a mounting body of evidence that highlight its links with happiness. Studies have shown that access to creative environments can boost levels of happiness, and that creative thinking can enhance a sense of freedom of choice, a key primer to both self-realisation and happiness.
People who are creative are often the ones we see as special, or lucky. They work in jobs they find challenging, rewarding and enjoyable, rather than settling for a job they’re not suited to, because somewhere along the line they decided that was enough for them. Creativity allows a person to prosper beyond imaginary limitations.
Creativity is the most common rarity
The secret is, creativity isn’t really rare. Or at least it doesn’t have to be. If we break down the barriers society has implanted in our minds, denying us access to the most beautiful and creative parts, we can all revel in the freedom to live a more fulfilled and happier life. We all have the capacity to be creative, it’s a matter of rediscovering this strength. Right now you’re like superman without his powers, but you can discover the strength to fly again.
The good news is that we already have the tool to do this, we’ve just been trained out of using it, dampening our creative side. Our brains are not passive control centres, but dynamic, ever changing and adaptive organs, we just need a way to harness this plasticity.
Rewiring our brains can make us superhuman
So how can we tell our brains to change to allow the creative flow? First let’s look at an example of the true capacity we hold for overriding our wiring.
In the late 90s, Swedish scientist Anna Gislen heard about the unique abilities of the children of the Moken tribe, a small community living on the west coast of Thailand. The tribe had become known as ‘sea-nomads’ due to their lifestyle of living in huts on stilts at the water’s edge and spending most of their day in the water fishing in the glistening Andaman Sea. What intrigued Gislen is how the children of Moken spent their days, splashing about in the sea, mostly underwater, diving down to catch food. For most, this would prove a difficult task as our eyes aren’t adapted to see underwater. However, Gilsen found that the children of the tribe were able to make their pupils smaller and change their lens shape to see twice as well under water as we can. Seals and dolphins have a similar adaptation. But, what was more amazing was that the children were not born with this ability, they’d learned it. Gislen was able to show that children of Sweden had the capacity to improve their underwater vision to the same extent as the Monken in a few brief practices. The dolphin-like vision of the Monken is an example of neuroplasticity, our brain’s ability to change continuously throughout our life to support new capabilities.
Originality is an illusion
Meditation offers us the key to open the part of our brain that has been increasingly closed off to us since childhood. The Moken children were able to rewire their brains to get it to do something different, they developed the skill to see underwater. Through meditation we can train our brains to rewire themselves, it won’t result in dolphin-vision, but it will give us back the gift of creativity.
The key to creativity is still debated, but thought-leader David Eagleman believes that the heart of creativity is:
“not about making something out of nothing… Instead it’s about refashioning what already exists.”
A commonly accepted conceptualisation of creativity is, as Eagleman points out, the joining together of disparate ideas to look at a problem in a novel way, rather than the generation of newness that stands out on its own. This theory gives and entirely new concept to originality, where original ideas are actually always born out the meshing together of previous ones.
Training creativity through meditation
Two styles of practice are commonly used in mindfulness meditation, focused-attention and open-monitoring meditation. The technique of the latter involves the perception and observation of all inputs of information, without judgement or analysis. The meditator accepts and notices all sensory stimuli without fixation or elaboration. This results in crafting the attention to be unrestricted and flexible. Lorenza Colzato and colleagues discovered that this kind of meditation opened up a style of mental processing called divergent thinking, a key driver of creativity which encourages the thinker to consider multiple options and lines of thought simultaneously. Supporting the connection of current ideas in fresh, novel ways.
Observation is an essential skill used in open-monitoring meditation. In 2014, a team led by Dutch psychologist, Matthijs Baas found that observation skills were positively correlated with levels of creativity as well as being linked with the personality trait of being open to experience.
“To be creative, you need to have, or be trained in, the ability to observe, notice, and attend to phenomena that pass your mind’s eye”
Observation goes hand in hand with divergent thinking, it helps the mind attend simultaneously to all inputs, allowing divergent thinking the thread inputs together in an endless combination of new ways. These two factors of mindful meditation allow us to make connections between disparate things to come up with novel ideas, arguably the basis of creativity.
Stress kills creativity
The next two statements may seem obvious. The first is that meditation reduces stress, the second is that stress can hinder the creative process. Therefore, further to amending our thought processes, it’s pretty straightforward that meditation offers a route to enhanced creativity through stress relief. Until recently the science behind this had not been clear. But with developments in neuroimaging technology we are able to understand how meditation opens up the gates to creative thinking through both stress reduction and emotion regulation.
The essence of how it works is that while dealing with stressful or highly emotional situations we are activating the limbic system in your brain. In addition, we have an ancient part to our brains which evolved to keep us safe in situations that threatened our survival. We have less need for this reptilian brain now, but it is still activated to situations it perceives as threatening. Times of stress overload on the limbic system and the reptilian brain can drain resources away from the neocortex, the part of the brain responsible for higher order cognitions, such as creativity. Meditation can reduce the reactivity on the reptilian brain and limbic systems, freeing the brain up to think creatively.
Fear is the last hurdle
American author Joseph Chilton Pearce theorised that fear is a major barrier to accessing our creativity:
“To live a creative life, we must loose our fear of being wrong”
Pearce himself was an avid practitioner of Siddha Meditation, perhaps he felt the power of meditation over fear, since recent data has shown that mindfulness meditation can physically change the brain, reducing the fear response. A 2012 study found that just 8 weeks of mindfulness meditation was able to reduce distress signals and shrink the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for the fear response.
It’s a familiar scenario, failing to try something because of the fear of failing. The avoidance to begin the journey is often what stumps creativity. Our brains may calculate that the risk of making a mistake outweighs that of what we stand to gain by succeeding. But with all expressions of creativity, doing is the only way to improve. Failure to try will always end in failure to be creative. In reducing activity of the amygdala meditation can help us to overcome the fear to start something.
Our brains are malleable, let’s change them!
Evidence from brain imaging has been able to support the behavioural changes we see induced by meditation, as well as showing that these changes are not transient, they are long lasting.
The takeaway is that our brains are malleable. Through meditation we have the power to undo what society has taught us, to put our creativity in a box and leave it un-nurtured. By teaching our brains how to consider multiple lines of thought simultaneously through observation and convergent thinking, we give ourselves the opportunity to come up with novel solutions. Through reducing the activation of the reptilian brain and limbic system we free up our mental resources to be reallocated to the neocortex, where creative thinking happens. And in reducing activity of the brain’s fear centre, we can overcome the fear to fail, which prevents us from starting on a creative endeavour.
After years of connecting meditation with enhanced life satisfaction, we finally have the science to prove that meditation is a legitimate way of uplifting our lives through boosting creativity. There’s no doubt that whoever we are we can benefit from being more creative, meditation gives us the choice to say we’re not going to settle, we’re going to explore our potential, refresh hope in our goals and go for it!
