“Different forms of meditation are conducive to different stages of the creative process.” – Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman. See more below.
How can mindfulness or other meditation practices help enhance awareness, thinking, and creative expression?
Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry and director of the UCLA Longevity Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior, comments:
“We see remarkable increases in neural activity as a result of meditation, You only have to do it 6 or 10 minutes a day and you see those changes.”
Kerry Washington on meditation and self-care
A magazine article reported that when she was a college student, Washington “suffered through what she describes as an abusive relationship with food and exercise: compulsive overeating followed by endless workouts to erase the damage.”
“I started therapy, which I still do today,” says Washington.
“I also see a nutritionist and I meditate. Learning how to love myself and my body is a lifelong process.
“But I definitely don’t struggle the way I used to.”
Cory Muscara is founder of the Long Island Center for Mindfulness and assistant instructor in Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.
In an interview about his own meditation journey and teaching mindfulness, he recommended the book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport.
He explains, “The premise of it is that we’re living in a society where there’s so many demands for our attention, but if we’re to do deep, creative work, it requires longer chunks of time to dive into it fully.”
From my article Meditation for Emotional Health and Creativity.
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Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman notes that meditation author and teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”
[See link to article about course by Zinn below.]
- Kaufman writes about his own experience with mindfulness meditation as a participant in the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course in the Program for Mindfulness at the University of Pennsylvania:
Taking this attitude toward my thoughts and emotions made me realize just how much suffering I cause myself on a daily basis.
I just had no idea how much I was in it, bound/attached to the drama of my emotions.
I also had no idea just how free I was to step out of it, at least momentarily.
I can honestly say this is one of the most important insights I gleaned from my meditation practice.
- Kaufman explains more about meditation, mind, and creativity:
While the inability to control your attention was associated with lower levels of conscientiousness and self-control, and guilty-dysphoric daydreaming was associated with higher levels of neuroticism, anxiety, and worry, positive constructive daydreaming was associated with increased levels of openness to experience, a key contributor of creativity.
Which brings us to the mindfulness-creativity connection.
Before I took the 8-week course, there was a particular paradox in the field that just didn’t make any sense to me.
On the one hand, the neuroscience of creativity literature shows that the “default mode network” — which is involved in mind-wandering and the construction of our sense of self — is absolutely essential for creative thinking.
On the other hand, some mindfulness studies were showing that mindfulness practice reduces default mode network activity but simultaneously increases creative thinking.
How can this be??! How can the brain network most associated with daydreaming both contribute and not contribute to creative thinking?
I found some ways out of this paradox.
I warn you that this is all going to get really technical really quickly, but heck, I assume the readers of this blog find that just as fun as I do. 🙂
OK, first way out: Creativity is not a single thing.
It’s a whole process that involves various different stages– some messier than others.
For instance, during the process of bringing something original and meaningful into this world there are times when you want to think divergently and generate lots of possibilities.
But there are times when you want to focus more intensely on a single idea and help it grow and develop.
Different forms of meditation are conducive to different stages of the creative process.”
From One Skeptical Scientist’s Mindfulness Journey, by Scott Barry Kaufman, in his Scientific American blog “Beautiful Minds.”
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Creative thinking in the shower
Publisher Sounds True notes Jon Kabat-Zinn is “a professor of medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he founded the world-renowned Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Clinic in 1979.
“MBSR programs have now spread around the world to hospitals, clinics, schools, and other institutions.”
See another video with Zinn and information about his online course in article:
Opening to Our Lives – A Meditation Course With Jon Kabat-Zinn
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Douglas Eby (M.A./Psychology) is author of the The Creative Mind series of sites which provide “Information and inspiration to help creative people thrive.”
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