Mindfulness and Creativity are linked
Submitted by Lesley Drummond
It’s 8:57 am on a Wednesday morning and I’m lying on my yoga mat in the last five minutes of savasana, with the cardinals and house wrens distantly complaining about the gentle rain I can hear falling on the steel roof of my art studio.
Although this meant I had to do my yoga class today by zoom instead of outside under the trees, my studio is my indoor happy place. It also gave me the chance to grab sneak peaks during poses at the two recently finished paintings hanging from a beam above my mat, as well as the almost completed canvas on my easel. As the clock ticks nine, I come to sitting and wish my classmates a good day, then I look at the easel – and realize I know exactly what I have to do to finish this piece.
But why?
Savasana – the final meditative moments of a yoga class in corpse pose – is a restorative asana that cultivates inner stillness, but also improves focus and increases productivity. Similarly, meditation is a way of creating a state where the mind is calm, thereby allowing creative thinking to thrive. This mindfulness quiets a noisy or cluttered brain, lets you produce higher quality “rough ideas”, and helps you stay focused to choose the most effective pathway to a solution.
Meditation helps strengthen the mind, which requires both freedom and constraint in order to bring about inspiration. Creativity is not a switch that can be turned on and off: it’s an energy that you have to tap into and exercise. Ideas need to incubate and percolate to produce that “aha” moment, which is followed by some convergent thinking in order to fine-tune those thoughts.
For me, this morning was the perfect combination: being in my physical happy place, an excellent yoga class that strengthened my body and calmed my mind, soothing repetitive rain sounds in the background – all resulting in the “aha” moment with a positive belief in myself and my artistic abilities.
My morning is planned: time to get the acrylics on the palette, choose my favourite brush and finish that painting. Namaste.
Lesley Drummond studio
