Getting Creative

Do you get flashes of inspiration? If so, when do you get them?

For me, and I know I'm not the only one, I often get my best ideas in the shower! It's strange that these flashes of inspiration happen when we are obviously not thinking about the subject of the 'flash' - in fact we are busy with something else.

I've noticed that immediately after meditating I often get really useful ideas or insights. These are not because I've been thinking about them during the meditation. They come anyway, so I keep a notebook next to me to jot them down.

There is a connection here. In 'shower moments' and in meditation, there is an opportunity for background thinking to come to the surface. This valuable and creative thinking may have laid buried if there had been no opportunity for it to surface.

This is not a case for making more effort and thinking harder, but for true open-mindedness so that what is already there can be seen and heard. Starting in our school years, we are encouraged to stuff more and more into our minds whereas we can often get more benefit from those occasions we let things out.

Sometimes when we try to recall a piece of information, perhaps a person's name, it doesn't immediately come to mind. Later, only when we stop thinking about it, it pops up, welcome but unexpected.

When we unpick this common experience, we see that in reality we didn't entirely stop thinking about the recall. Instead we did the thinking unconsciously, out of our awareness. This is an example of how we can hand over a task to our unconscious mind and free our conscious mind for other things.

Talk of the unconscious mind suggests to some people a dark force within our personality that is liable to take us in undesired directions. In fact our unconscious mind looks after our best interests - it keeps our heart beating and remembers to keep breathing while we sleep. It controls all the other background functions that we need for survival automatically so our conscious mind can focus on other things.

You will be well aware that the conscious mind is limited by how many things it can deal with at once! Psychological research suggests that we can hold an average of seven items in our conscious mind at the same time.

By contrast our unconscious mind is vast, with resources that are largely untapped. So most of our brain power resides in the unconscious mind. When we consciously hand over a task to our unconscious mind, we are giving direction to our unconscious thinking.

Suppose we ask our unconscious mind to come up with a way forward for whatever current project we have. This is sometimes called 'setting intent' - the intent being that we gain a way forward. Suppose that we then deliberately stop thinking (consciously) about it and get on with other things. We can expect an 'answer' from our unconscious mind - we just need to be ready to notice it when it arrives.

Keeping an open-mind is important - if you have preconceived ideas about what the 'answer' should be, you may not recognize it when it pops up. This process can feel like a step of faith because you are not in conscious control - that's OK because that's how the process works! The process is truly creative in that you are not constraining the possibilities.

Here's a summary:

1. Decide what you want to delegate to your unconscious mind - a straightforward request or question works best.
2. Set your intent - make the request/ask the question and set a time frame for the answer. (eg. by tomorrow lunchtime)
3. Stop thinking about the issue - get on with other things.
4. Be ready and open for the 'answer' - don't reject what may, on first glance, look unpromising.

Experiment with the process and your trust in it will grow. It offers a creative alternative to conscious problem solving and, as such, addresses the observation made by Albert Einstein:

"The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them"