What Is the Best Meditation for Creativity?
I am often asked about the relationship between meditation and creativity and clarity. Many of my students are creative people, both for work and for pleasure. Some are writers, others painters, sculptors, dancers, or inventive entrepreneurs. They are interested to know, as you might be, if they can enhance creativity with meditation.
The answer is a resounding yes!
But meditation for creativity works differently, perhaps, than many people expect. You see, creativity meditation doesn’t require a specific soundtrack or affirmation, and it doesn’t necessitate guided meditation.
What is the best meditation for creativity?
The world we live in is often stressful. We are surrounded by noise and pressure, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. There is nothing that limits the creative mind as much as stress and anxiety.
Psychology Today tells us “Creativity encompasses the ability to discover new and original ideas, connections, and solutions to problems.” This ability sometimes extends to artistic thinking, lending to a creative performance or task like making art. Other times this ability centers on cognitive processes like problem-solving or innovation in the business world.
No matter how you personally define creativity, or in which realms you wish to enhance your creativity, stress can disrupt the creative process. The creative mind operates best when thinking is flexible and unrestricted. That’s precisely where meditation can help.
Vedic Meditation is designed to help you to release stress. My dear teacher Thom Knoles explains that through Vedic Meditation:
“As we remove stress more and more, we liberate the brain’s potential for creativity, for inventiveness, for improvisation, for innovation.
We awaken the creation-operator function of our brain, and our brain’s capacity to look at the demands of the world, not as obstacles to what I want to do, not as “have to,” the demands of the world as being I have to, but the demands of the world as being opportunities for creative expression.”
With our creation operator awake, we gain cognitive control of our creative mind, and can turn a good idea into a great idea with ease. This is why I firmly believe that the best meditation for creativity is meditation that helps remove the stress that prohibits our work.
How to meditate for creativity
If you sit and try to demand that your mind focuses on creativity, is that not a source of stress in itself? And, have we not agreed that stress is an inhibitor of creativity? It’s in this capacity that Vedic Meditation becomes the perfect solution for creative meditation.
In a twice-daily Vedic Meditation, meditators are free from the demand to focus their attention on the creative process. Vedic Meditation requires no effort. It’s okay for thoughts to come up and for your mind to wander if it chooses to do so.
In Vedic Meditation, the mantra is like a steady guide for your mind — it easily brings you to a settled state, and you naturally experience bliss and calm. That’s how we release stress and boost creativity.
If you wish to know more about how you can utilize Vedic Meditation for creativity, and clarity in other aspects of your life, attend an intro talk. Let’s work together to free your creative mind.
