Creativity Is An Inside Job

In today's talk, we explore creativity and how it's a core part of you. We are creating constantly throughout the day without realizing it. We start with an arrival practice in the surfaces of the body - you can choose the ones I explore or a different set, it's up to you. The take-home invitation is to notice creativity happening all day and all week through you - where something is made out of nothing and plopped into this external, material world.

Transcript

Hey everyone,

This is Dr.

Tia H.

Ho with Finding Mindful Now,

Guiding you out of your head and into your life with applied mindfulness.

Finding Mindful Now is about starting with a mindfulness practice and then seeing the capacity for us to tune in and be present with life more of the time,

Whatever we're up to.

Today we're focusing on how creativity is an inside job.

So I like to start these talks with what I call an arrival practice.

And today's arrival practice is to support attention arriving into the body here in this space between us now.

So I like to call this practice the surfaces of everything.

So I'm going to invite you to notice the surface of the top of your head.

And we can do that through taking in a deep breath and exhaling it as we let attention rest in the tops of our heads.

And I'm going to pick another surface.

I'm going to go with the surface of the bottom of my feet.

And I'm going to wiggle my toes.

And you are invited to join me in feeling the surfaces of the bottom of your feet.

And you might notice the way the bottom of your feet is resting on the ground.

If you have socks on,

You might notice what the texture of that clothing feels like.

And if your feet are bare,

You might notice the temperature differences as the air is touching your feet versus the places where you have skin covered with clothing.

So I like to take a deep breath and breathe into these surfaces.

I'm going to breathe into the soles of my feet.

This next surface,

I'm going to choose the front of my belly as a surface.

And in this invitation,

I'm going to invite myself to just notice the belly moving with breathing without my trying to change breathing at all.

Just might notice it moving up and down.

And I might feel the way the belly moves against cloth.

I might feel the way that cloth stretches around my frame.

I'm going to take in another deep breath and exhale and imagine any constriction leaving with that breath.

For this last surface,

I'm going to notice my back,

The surface of the back of my body.

I'm just going to bring attention and let it rest.

Maybe the upper parts of my shoulders.

I'm going to see if I can feel where the clothing is touching my spine.

And if the spine feels,

I can't,

I'm noticing I can't feel the difference.

Like I can't figure out where my spine is relative to where other muscles of my back are.

So I'm just going to stay with noticing the feeling of the back of my body and where fabric is touching it.

And I'm going to take another deep breath.

And when I breathe out,

I'm going to imagine constriction that's in my shoulders.

You might have it somewhere else.

Just going to imagine letting some of that leave the body on the exhale for the last piece.

So I feel like I've arrived here in this space with you.

And so today I want to talk about how creativity is an inside job.

You know,

When I was younger,

I used to think that creativity was the same thing as being an artist and that artists were special superhuman people who had this creative talent that the rest of us,

Well,

At least me,

Don't have.

And if I were,

If I had a buzzer sound,

I would,

I would make one because I was wrong.

I was mixing up the skills of honing a craft with the constant that is innate creativity.

And everyone is creative without exception.

And I can hear that your chatting mind might have some disagreements,

Some arguments about that mind does.

It might say my drawings are terrible.

I can't sing.

I don't spend time being creative.

And it's okay if statements like that are percolating.

You can give them a thank you for sharing nod.

And the chatty mind uses itself doubt.

It's kind of like a special voice it uses when it's trying to protect this concept of you from potential risk of social judging us.

And I appreciate that it can be a little bit like a helicopter parent,

But it's just doing its best.

And there's more going on here to see.

So for today's mindfulness exploration,

Or if you play with this for the whole week,

I invite you to look inward and see what you notice about the nature of creativity inside yourself today.

And I invite you to try this out multiple times with different situations and see what you notice each time.

In this mindfulness exploration,

I invite you to experiment with creating anything simple for 15 seconds.

So I'm going to do this with you.

And this might be something as simple as a doodle.

It might be writing a few words down,

It might involve humming a tune,

Might involve writing a poem,

Or even creating and solving a mouth problem.

If you're doing this at home,

And you want to pause this recording right now.

And you feel like I'm going to make a snack,

And you're going to go to the refrigerator and get out some items and assemble them together into a snack,

Or you want to go to your closet and create an outfit from whatever's going on there.

Or you might take out some paper and fold it into a new shape.

Creativity is built into the human system,

It is life force.

You can't help but create things throughout your day.

Your brain is making thoughts.

Your brain is creating words,

Emotions in the system called the body.

And I'm just going to invite you to notice the capacity of this system.

So we'll give ourselves 15 seconds to direct our attention inward as we make something.

And for real,

I promise there's something here for you to see.

See if you can do it right quick with me.

So I'm going to go ahead and this activity,

By the way,

Is adapted from an iteration.

It's a different version than one that's in the book Creating the Impossible by Michael Neill.

So I'm going to go ahead and start a 15 second timer and I invite you to create something.

Okay,

So that was 15 seconds.

And if you experimented and you're looking at some random words or squiggly flower doodle,

That's I kind of did some squiggle squiggle eights.

Or maybe it's an abstract image or a funnily shaped piece of folded paper and you're wondering what this is about.

I'm just going to ask you to ask yourself where this thing you just made in the external world came from.

And your mind may have chatted alongside you while you took the small action or it may have gotten quiet as you focused on the activity.

Regardless of what your talking intellect was doing just now,

You brought something out of the vast boundaryless repository of creative potential that's always flowing through you and you plopped it into the external world.

And I'm pointing at the fact that you made something apparently out of nowhere.

You created just like that.

You were creating nearly constantly all day long without calling it that or noticing it.

The emails you send,

That's creating.

If you are a bit of a desk jockey like I am and you write reports or newsletters,

Same thing.

If you do things in the engineering field and you are crunching numbers or analyzing statistics,

You know what?

There's no p-value without you.

That tasty new dish you made from a recipe changeup,

That's also a creation.

The meeting you facilitated where you covered a ton of content in 60 minutes also you creating.

The grant,

The marketing plan,

The little tune you hummed on the way to work.

You might see where this is going.

I'm not pointing at the quality of the creation here.

This isn't about comparing the doodle to the newsletter to the engineering plans.

It's a different type of skill set we're talking about.

That's all skill training and honing a craft.

What I'm actually inviting you to notice is underneath that practice and intentionally directing your awareness inward,

You have built in creative capacity.

Another way to put this is that each of us has what I call universal wisdom moving through us.

It's a creative force that converts electrical signals in our brain bodies into thoughts,

Feelings,

Sensations,

Language concepts,

Written words,

Actions,

Built structures that can be shared and exchanged with others.

The letters you wrote down weren't on the piece of paper.

The paper wasn't folded.

The doodle didn't exist.

The meal was a pile of ingredients.

The outfit was a bunch of random fabric before it came through you and showed up in the outer world.

And you might be wondering what's the big deal?

Well this basic capacity is taken for granted to such a degree that people have forgotten their true nature as creative beings and its ramifications.

When we don't realize that we are creating all the time,

We don't realize the capacity we have to contribute,

To inspire,

To lead,

To build,

As well as to destroy.

Because breaking something apart is just as much a creative act,

Even if it doesn't look like it.

We then create unconsciously,

Randomly,

And sometimes harmfully unaware of what is possible because we can't see that this creative force we have is coming through us.

And we don't realize our contribution potential because we've misunderstood how our brain body systems work.

So today,

Or this week,

Or this weekend,

Whenever you're hearing this,

I invite you to notice whenever it occurs to you,

The process of creating,

Making a meal,

Going for a walk or a roll,

You know you create a route even when it seems aimless.

Doing something at home,

I'm just going to invite you to tune in and notice that each time you are making something,

That's coming from what's flowing through you,

This alive awareness that you are.

One small action,

One small decision at a time.

One of your default modes is creativity.

And a bonus invitation for those who want to peek a little further,

I'm just going to invite you to notice that you know,

Even if your mind is chatting away,

What to do in each of these creations,

In each of these creative explanations.

Thanks for tuning in today.

And I'm going to ring the bell to end our talk.

Reviews

This is an awesome way to reveal some creative ideas when you are feeling stuck.