In ancient traditions, open-mind consciousness was considered to be a spiritual awakening, the great enlightenment that dissolves the darkness of confusion and fear, and ushers in peace, happiness, clarity, and contentment. Today the notion that there’s one formulaic way to achieve this spiritual awakening and creative vibrancy has been blown apart. You don’t have to run off to a monastery or practice meditation for thirty years before attaining a breakthrough. A few years ago, I had a client, named Sarah who’d completely given up on psychotherapy until a failed suicide attempt convinced her to try it one more time. I urged her to begin a mindfulness practice, and she agreed. After several months—not years, but months—she had an extremely powerful experience while meditating. As she described it, she felt a rush of light and energy infuse her body, and experienced an ineffable sense of the presence of the divine, the cosmos, and a collective consciousness. After this transcendent experience, Sarah who’d been overweight to an unhealthy degree, lost several pounds, became more engaged by her work and closer to her friends, and was no longer suicidal. It was a major turning point for her.

What Sarah described has been called not only “open-mind awareness” but also, in the West, a “peak experience,” “being in the flow,” or “being in the zone.” I call it accessing your “core creativity,” because I believe that deep inside every person lies this potential for connecting to a universal flow of knowledge and creativity that’s boundless and expansive. Our individual thoughts and memories are a part of this greater, larger resource.

Just as an athlete who’s in condition has the muscle tone to be able to spring into action instantly, someone who regularly accesses their core creativity becomes creatively toned. For this person, the faucet to this remarkable flow of inspiration opens up easily, naturally, and often, allowing spontaneous and dramatic breakthroughs. When you’re creatively toned, instead of merely dipping your toe in the water and playing it safe, you’re willing to be utterly daring. Knowing this, you can navigate through a sea of self-limiting thoughts and transform such unwholesome beliefs as “I had my chance and blew it,” “It’s too late; my time is over,” “I’ll never be happy again,” and “I can’t.”

Here are 6 ways you can stimulate and tone your creativity from my book, Wise Mind, Open Mind.

Mindfulness Meditation Practice

One of the most effective ways to become creatively toned and start accessing core creativity is through a mindfulness meditation practice. Mindfulness allows us to listen and pay attention to what we might otherwise overlook—whether it’s a fresh idea or a new way of perceiving a situation—enhancing our creativity and letting go of our obstacles to innovation. Many people are intimidated with the idea of meditating with excuses of not having the time or ability to quiet the mind. Really all you need is 5 to 20 minutes a day and there are many mediation CDs that can help guide you through the process. In fact my CD Mindful Meditations for Creative Transformation was created to specifically help one access their inner resources.

Dabbling in the Arts

Our culture’s overemphasis on fame and great success often turns people away from their creative inclinations, because they feel that if they can’t reach a professional goal with their writing, singing, or painting endeavors, they shouldn’t bother. What they don’t realize is that simply dabbling in the fine arts, with no specific goals or intentions, awakens our ability to approach life with greater openness and curiosity. In the same way that mindfulness practice jogs the areas of the brain associated with well-being, optimism, and compassion for yourself and others, so too does immersing yourself in any artistic exploration or enjoyment jog your creativity.

Immersing Yourself in Nature

Experiencing nature can awaken in you a sense of vitality and infinity, which becomes a path to your core creativity. Without conscious thought, you can look up at the astonishing number of stars in the sky or leaves on a single tree in a forest, and feel a sense of vastness and spaciousness. As you gaze at the heavens the ancients observed, knowing that humanity throughout history and across continents has pondered these very stars, you experience being a part of something larger than yourself that feels as if it has always existed and always will.

Entering Sacred Space

In ancient times, sacred spaces, such as churches, temples, and sites for group rituals, were built on land whose features evoked a sense of spirituality. Treks to places like Machu Picchu, the temples of India, and Stonehenge have become more popular for Westerners who yearn for a sense of connection to their divine nature. Yet sacred spaces can exist wherever you feel a sense of spaciousness and connection to the creative, life-supporting forces of the universe. Arranging the space in your home or office to bring in light and nature will help you feel expansive and access your core creativity as you open up to your important role in all of creation.

Seeking Out Creative Stimulation

When the Irish band U2 wanted to reinvent their music, they traveled to Berlin, a bustling, gritty city unfamiliar to them, and soaked in the atmosphere, allowing its energy to infuse their songwriting and sound. Similarly, a famous actor I once spotted in an art museum stood before a painting for a good ten minutes before throwing his arms out and his head back, and standing for many more minutes, as if opening his heart to a beam of creative energy emanating from that painting. We all have this capacity to open to the vital forces around us and allow ourselves to take them in, mingling them with our own passions.

Mindful Movement

Many forms of physical movement can be an entrée into open-mind consciousness. Somatic therapy or somatic disciplines such as martial arts, tai chi, and yoga are the most well-known ways of quieting the rational mind and opening up to the intuitive mind and its connection to the numinous creative force. Any physical activity that involves discipline and a slowing down of thoughts, from skiing to dance, actually creates new neural pathways in your brain that become roads to innovation.

Becoming creatively toned can lead to a breakthrough in parenting or relating to others, or it can make you feel vitalized and fully engaged in the mundane chores of the day. The Buddha said that to find enlightenment, one must chop wood and carry water, meaning that the deepest, more purposeful life may not be one dedicated to an extraordinary cause or endeavor, but one that’s simply lived with a deep sense of awareness and openness to both the known and the unknown. A passion for discovery, for embracing the new and the unfamiliar can help you transform your life in ways you never dreamed possible, as you find the strength to move out of fear and resistance and into something new.

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Slowing down your activities and becoming quiet, cultivating a state of listening, and gaining access to the interior sanctum of the soul’s creative self are part of most religious traditions. In Buddhist monasteries, monks go for weeks or even months without speaking. Jesus was said to have spent forty days in the desert praying and meditating. I’ve also known creative artists who spend several hours sitting in a room, surrounded by their painting supplies, staring at a canvas, as Jackson Pollock regularly did, remaining in silence and waiting for the flow of ideas. A world-class drummer once took me inside his music room, slowly moved his hand across the drum kit, and said, “Sometimes I sit here for hours in the silence and quietly wait for the drums to tell me what to write and play.” As he spoke, I realized his ability to patiently wait and remain in an open, listening state was a key element in his ability to create amazing music.

But in a world that operates at a faster pace each year, we feel pressured to stay on our toes, thinking and planning, running from one activity to the next. We’ve lost the ability to completely immerse ourselves in a process of wonder and discovery. As children, we lost track of time while playing. Now, many schedule their lives in fifteen-minute intervals. Disruptions and distractions are everywhere, from our “smartphones” hounding us with text messages throughout the day to our e-mail demanding that we sign the latest petition.

What’s more, a long retreat or vacation is unavailable to many, given the demands on their time. Yet the Buddha taught that it’s the act of slowing down, becoming quiet, and opening up that’s most important, not the amount of time spent on a meditation cushion. Ten to twenty minutes, twice a day, spent in quiet awareness, resting the anxious activity of the monkey mind, tones us creatively.

When you’re in crisis, your body’s immune system may weaken to the point where you become ill and are forced to slow down and be quiet. You become acutely aware of your physical discomfort. You sleep more, accessing the world of your dreams. Rather than wait until your body forces you to retreat, you can actively choose to be in charge of this process of becoming quiet. If you do, you’ll gradually open yourself to the possibility of fully experiencing your core creativity.

Your self-insight and psychological awareness give the experience of core creativity its context. Someone who has very little self-awareness and suddenly opens the doors of perception won’t necessarily be able to use that experience to inform his understanding of himself or his life. A slow approach toward the threshold, achieved by working to become creatively toned and using the rational mind to make sense of your experiences, prepares you to do more than merely marvel at the rush of awareness that comes as a result of accessing an open-mind state. As a result of your reverie and your conscious mind’s understanding that, indeed, you were responsible for turning on this creative flow and you can do it again, you’re forever transformed. You’ll never forget your ability to break through to the deepest state of creativity.

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One of the most effective ways to become creatively toned and start accessing your core creativity is through a mindfulness practice. Mindfulness allows us to listen and pay attention to what we might otherwise overlook – whether it’s a fresh idea or a new way of perceiving a situation — enhancing our creativity and letting go of our obstacles to innovation.

Here are four techniques from my book, Wise Mind, Open Mind on how you can start today to ignite your everyday creativity.

Working Mindfully with Dreams

If you feel that you simply have no creative abilities, consider your dreams. Most nights, your mind generates at least a few fantastical images that you can recall upon waking if you slowly bring yourself back into consciousness with the intent of remembering your dreams. I often ask my clients to work with the images of their dreams by meditating on them, writing about them, and exploring them to see what ideas and insights they have to offer.

To do this, keep a notebook, or tape recorder by the bed, and when you first become aware of your dream, record as much detail as possible of the entire dream or whatever fragments, images, feelings, or emotions you can recall. Enter a state of quiet, mindful reflection and let the dream replay itself in your consciousness. Note that each symbol in the dream represents some aspect of yourself, so after recalling the dream, think about how each one represents some part of you.

Mood Management

Depression is a loop of unwholesome thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and sensations that feed upon themselves, spiraling the sufferer downward and away from an experience of hope, joy, enthusiasm, or curiosity. It chokes off the pipeline to the creative core. If you want to open up to a sense that tomorrow will bring new situations, new people, and new ideas, eliminating unwholesome moods is very important.

Mindfulness meditation, yoga practice, and regular exercise are all excellent for mood regulation, because they lower the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in your bloodstream, increase your interleukin levels (enhancing your immune system and providing you with greater energy), and streamline your body’s ability to cleanse itself of chemical toxins, such as lactic acid in your muscles and bloodstream, which can affect neurotransmitter receptors and alter your mood.

Becoming Quiet and Doing Nothing

You don’t have to “try” to be creative when you access core creativity. You don’t have to “think through” what to do next, because a sense of possibility and wonder will simply come to you, followed by ideas that flow into you. By becoming quiet, you begin to tone yourself creatively as you allow your unconscious mind to open up. Ideas will start bubbling to the surface of your awareness, often in the form of images or a sense of deep, inner knowing.

A world-class drummer once took me inside his music room, slowly moved his hand across the drum kit, and said, “Sometimes I sit here for hours in the silence and quietly wait for the drums to tell me what to write and play.” As he spoke, I realized his ability to patiently wait and remain in an open, listening state was a key element in his ability to create amazing music.

Persevering and Trusting in the Creative Process

Although artists are often seen as flighty or undisciplined, the most successful ones are extremely disciplined. They may spend a workday seemingly doing nothing, but in fact, they’re consciously choosing to remain in a state of openness. They’ll often pick up a guitar and start playing anything, or sit at a computer and start typing whatever comes to mind, in order to start their creative flow. When nothing comes, they aren’t afraid to shift gears, to take a walk, or break the formula of how they’ve always chosen to connect to their creativity by trying something entirely different.

The reason they’re able to persevere isn’t because they have a particular temperament, but because they’ve experienced breakthroughs again and again. They know that they can rely on two distinct channels to glide into that space where we can all access our core creativity: honing our craft, a left-brain activity that tones us creatively over time, opening one of these channels; and persevering and trusting in this art of creative transformation, which opens the other.

When you’re creatively toned, instead of merely dipping your toe in the water and playing it safe, you’re willing to be utterly daring. Knowing this, you can navigate through a sea of self-limiting thoughts and transform such unwholesome beliefs as “I had my chance and blew it,” “It’s too late; my time is over,” “I’ll never be happy again,” and “I can’t.” The clouds of negativity part and the light of possibility beams down upon you.

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R – Jenny, what gave you the inspiration to write this book?

J – I was fascinated from a very early age by what made people creative and having been surrounded by musicians most of my life, it was an obvious choice, to ask them the questions I’d always wanted to know about the creative process. I believe musicians have a very special gift. They are the torchbearers, the spokespersons of our time. Their songs express not only the feelings and ideas of the individual but of each generation and its culture.

R – Did you find any common threads in what they had to say?

J – All of the seventy-five musicians, except for two had nurturing parents or grandparents who were supportive of their creativity. I found this was an important element and because of this nurturing environment from a young age, it gave them the courage and faith in themselves that is needed to pursue their creative yearnings, to delve into the depths of their unconscious.

R – You interviewed the late psychologist Frank Barron, a pioneer in creative research. That must have been pretty inspiring for you?

J – It was. He told me that creative individuals are persons whose dedication is nothing less than a quest for ultimate meaning. What is enjoined with them is to listen to the voice within and allow it to express itself.

R – The voice within is the creative collective that Swiss Psychologist Carl Jung referred to as the collective unconscious.

J – Yes, musicians seem to have no fear of exploring the unknown, entering into the creative world of the unconscious. They all have this incredible drive to create. Keith Richards said, “If you’re a musician, you can never really stop playing, even if you don’t do any gigs or you retire. You’re still in a way playing inside yourself.” It’s like Jung said, “Creative power is mightier than its possessor.”

R – We’re verging into the spiritual here. Were musicians aware of that side of themselves?

J – Absolutely. They all described in different ways what Abraham Maslow called a Peak Experience. Most of them had never spoken about it before, and some, such as Eric Clapton had no idea anyone else other than himself had experienced this feeling. They described it as a sort of mid-way point between conscious and unconscious, a place of timelessness, a dream state. It gave them a feeling of awe and reverence, being given a gift, being used as a vessel and at times the feeling of going into a trance. To get to that state many of them said they had to surrender to the power of the creative unconscious.

R – It sounds very similar to mindfulness meditation.

J – That’s right. Mindfulness meditation allows you to flow into a state of Open Mind to access your creativity but as soon as the ego takes over, and tells you you’re special or the best meditator in the world, it all disappears! You need to surrender and let go in order to hold the space but once you start grasping at it you lose the feeling of peak oneness.

R – Did these musicians say they had any special times of the day or week they were more creative or any particular environments?

J – George Harrison said he always liked to write in the early hours of the morning, when everything was still and everyone asleep.

R – That’s a good time to practice mindfulness meditation as well. In Asia and India this is the time of day where the prana of the earth and universe is felt to be the strongest.

J – As you know, George was a meditator, and another musician, flautist and saxophonist Paul Horn who was in India with us enjoyed the practice of regular meditation.

R – That’s right. You went to India with the Beatles. Were you able to witness their creativity at work?

J – Yes, I was very lucky. I would sit with my sister Pattie and the rest of the Beatles on the roof of our bungalow, watching and listening to them as they talked about their mediation or not being able to sleep at night. Then they’d start playing their guitars creating a song that would later be heard on The White Album. It was fantastic.

R – What about drugs and alcohol? I notice you have a chapter on that in your book.

J – Most of the musicians who talked about drugs and alcohol said that to begin with it would diminish the anxiety that can stall or prevent the creative process. Being high is like being put into another world, one without form or structure, similar to the unconscious. It would help them get the conscious mind, the busy mind, out of the way. But for many the tool became the end rather than the means. As Eric Clapton said, “The booze becomes more important than the doors it opened, so that’s the trap.” A lot of these musicians had stopped drinking and using when I interviewed them and were able to talk about the difference in their creativity since stopping.

R – And do we all have the potential to be creative?

J – Yes. Joni Mitchell said, “The net with which you capture creativity is made up of the threads of your alertness.” It’s about expressing yourself. As psychologist Rollo May says, “If you do not express your own original ideas, or listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.”

R – Jenny, your book not only shares the context and development of these iconic musicians but also shows that anyone who takes the time to slow down, relax and listen to their inner self can tap into the richness of this creative collective. So taking time for a Mindful Pause throughout the day really is a great way to turn on the creative self. Thank you for writing such an inspiring and interesting book.

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Mindfulness allows you to set aside the instantaneous, unwholesome thoughts that limit one’s ability to think of creative solutions and embrace more positive, wholesome ones, laying new neural pathways and building what I call, mindstrength. This is the ability to very quickly and easily shift out of a reactive mode and become fully present in the moment. It gives you mastery over your thoughts and feelings, opening your eyes to whether the products of your mind are useful tools for self-discovery or merely distractions.

Often, unwholesome, painful thoughts are about the past and the future, or cause and effect: You might think, “If I wasn’t able to do that in the past, I won’t be able to do that in the future” and “Because of what I did in the past, I can’t create the future situation I’d like.” Again, by applying mindfulness training, you open a doorway to a mindful-inquiry process in which you can examine these beliefs and let go of a sense of being stuck or trapped. Painful and fearful thoughts about the past and future will prevent you from focusing on the present, and accepting where you are at this moment in time.

Here are three mindful techniques from my book, Wise Mind, Open Mind to help you shift painful afflictive thoughts and feelings.

Step One: Examine Unwholesome Thoughts

When distorted and unwholesome thoughts arise, stop, observe what you’re thinking, and ask yourself, “Is this true?” You can consider the evidence that it is and weigh that against the evidence that it isn’t, keeping in mind that extreme statements such as “I’ll never…” or “It always happens that…” are almost certainly distortions. Using logic and reason, you can analyze a situation and determine whether you were assuming a worst-case scenario, and consider what the best-case scenario and even the most likely scenario are. If you don’t know whether a particular negative thought is likely to be true, you can explore the possibilities instead of being pessimistic and assuming the worst.

Step Two: Replace Unwholesome Thoughts with Wholesome Ones

Ideally it is best to work with a mindfulness trainer or a therapist to help figure out specific wholesome, remedying thoughts. It this isn’t possible, then write out the replacement thoughts. When you first begin using this remedy of a positive thought, feeling, or sensation, you’re likely to feel resistance, as the old neural pathways in the brain protest, “But this isn’t true!” One way to get around this obstacle is to design remedying thoughts that feel true in the moment. Instead of trying to replace an unwholesome feeling of longing and emptiness with the belief, “I’m going to meet the love of my life very soon,” you can remedy that afflictive feeling with a thought such as “I’m doing all the right things to attract and create a healthy, loving partnership,” which is less likely to arouse feelings of dishonesty, discomfort, or embarrassment. In mindfulness training, you actually teach the mind to create wholesome thoughts, and in so doing, you reprogram your brain, replacing old neural networks with new ones that foster creativity and optimism.

Step Three: Reinforce New Wholesome Thoughts

Once you’ve generated a new positive and healing thought, make a point of saying the words silently or aloud every time you witness yourself thinking negatively. Let’s say you’re experiencing the recurring negative thought, “I’m no good with numbers.” First look back to the source of that belief, examining your past. You may simply need to notice that your mind is creating a negative loop of self-talk, comprised of self-defeating thoughts. By adopting the new, wholesome thought, “I’m fully capable of learning anything I wish to learn,” your mind flow will begin to shift and travel on a more wholesome course.

Creative individuals have learned the habit of rejecting limiting, constrictive thinking. They allow the witnessing mind to arise, look at an obstacle, and say, “Perhaps that’s true, but let’s sit with that idea for a while.” In Buddhism, we say that a constrictive quality of mind keeps mind flow within a narrow range of awareness, while mindfulness allows us to drop our limitations and ultimately enter the creative space of open mind.

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