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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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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