Some articles on the blog contain affiliate links, which provide a small commission to help fund the blog. However, they won’t affect the price you pay or the blog’s independence. Read more here.
Meditation is a practice that has been around for centuries. It is a way to focus the mind and achieve a state of mindfulness, but what if you are wanting to improve your creative thinking, and produce more creative work, does meditation help with creativity?
Yes, meditation does help with creativity, as it allows you to calm the inner dialogue of the conscious mind and access different levels of consciousness and your subconscious mind where all your memories and past experiences are stored, giving you a huge pool of knowledge to pull creativity from.
Your conscious mind has no memory other than whats occurring in present moment. It’s job is to guide you through life using your senses, so you can experience sights, sounds, smells, touch and taste, but for you to recall any of this, your conscious mind relies on storing all these experiences in your subconscious mind, ready to pull the information from when needed.
In fact there is a popular school of thought that your subconscious mind remembers absolutely everything you ever experience, even if you think you have forgotten it.
For example, you may come across a familiar smell, that immediately takes you back to a childhood memory that you had completely forgotten, or at least you thought you had forgotten it, but it was stored in your subconscious mind all along, just waiting for the right circumstance to trigger the memory.
In this case it was a familiar smell from your childhood, but it could have just as easily been something you happened to taste or hear, perhaps candyfloss getting you thinking of your first trip to an amusement park as a child or a song from your first dance at prom.
The point is that the subconscious mind has a vast amount of knowledge and information stored in it and a focused attention meditation can give you direct access to it, therefore, meditation is great for gaining divergent thinking and creative insight allowing you to come up more creative ideas and innovative solutions to problems, and ultimately become a much more creative person.
This is not to be confused with self hypnosis, it’s true there are similarities, but there are also some key differences, which are covered in this post regarding if Self-Hypnosis and Meditation are the Same, if you want to delve further into this topic.
By now you may be saying to yourself, okay, I get it, meditation does help with being creative, so how do I do it? I am going to share two perfect videos on this in a minute, but first I need to draw your attention to the universal mind (sometimes referred to as universal consciousness), which when combined, can be the most powerful way to use meditation for creativity.
Universal mind
The universal mind or consciousness is pool of collective knowledge that we all have access to and carrying out meditation is one of the best ways to gain access to it.
Where the universal mind differs from the subconscious mind, in that the subconscious mind just stores your personal memories, and experiences, whereas the universal mind is a pool of everyone’s and everything’s memories, experiences and knowledge across all time, that we can all tap into.
I understand this can sound like gobbledegook and can be difficult to get your head round, but when you delve into the evidence it actually makes perfect sense.
Inventions as evidence for universal mind/consciousness
Many of the most important discoveries of all time, were invented around the same time frame, by different inventors, completely independently of each other.
Here are just a few examples of this happening:
1. Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce invented the microchip independently within half a year of each other.
2. Benjamin Franklin and Prokop Divis both discovered the identity of electricity and invented the lightning rod independently of each other.
3. In 1902 Leon Chester Teisserence de Bort from France and Richard Assman from Germany discovered the stratosphere only three days apart from each other.
4. Sir Frank Whittle and Hans von Ohain came up with the first jet engine independently while serving on opposite sides of World War Two.
(source: https://www.cracked.com/pictofacts-687-12-inventions-created-by-different-people-at-same-time)
Is it not therefore conceivable, that the knowledge for these inventions, was already within the universal mind ready to be discovered and these inventors were able to pull the information from it, when the time was right, to bring them into psychical reality?
Nature as evidence for universal mind/consciousness
More evidence for a universal mind exists in nature and evolution. For example, how a seed knows how to grow into a flower, or how birds instinctively know to how to fly without ever having tried it before or to fly south and find warmer climates as winter approaches, or what about migrating salmon, or homing pigeons and the list goes on.
How is all this possible without some form of universal intelligence or consciousness? The answer is that the universal mind guides and directs them as they access the required information from it instinctively. The universal mind is every bit as infinite as the universe it exists in and is therefore unlimited in knowledge and creativity.
The fact that there are so many examples of people coming up with the same idea independently, or that things like seeds, birds and bees seem to know what to do without being taught, is strong evidence that we are all connected to the universal mind and it’s through meditation we can tap into this collective knowledge, for creativity and problem solving, far beyond what we can achieve by using our conscious minds alone.
So without further ado lets see how to use meditation for creativity.
Using meditation for creativity
Here is a great Relaxing Guided Meditation To Boost Creativity by accessing the subconscious mind, by Mindvalley , who also have other great content such as mindfulness meditation videos.
And here is a perfect Guided Universal Mind Meditation video by Brian Scott, who has lots of absolutely great videos on his channel to increase your awareness of the universal mind and much more, such as transcendental meditation videos.
Final Thoughts
As you can see meditation is a powerful tool and can dramatically improve your creativity, by giving you are direct path to accessing your subconscious and the universal mind.
There are of course many other ways to get your creative juices flowing, but when it comes to accessing your subconscious mind and universal consciousness, which are the key to creative thought, practicing regular meditation is one of the best ways to overcome any creative problem you may be having.
If you looking for more inspiration to meditate and developing a more creative mind you may also like the related posts listed below…
