Meditation & Creativity:
The Oldest Technology on the Planet

Building a bonfire and using meditation for creative purposes have a lot in common. After all, fire was one of mankind’s first innovative technologies.

If you were to build a bonfire, then you would need the following materials: heavy logs, kindling wood, tinder (like birch bark, for example), and matches or flint. You would surround the tinder with a structure of kindling wood (some people like log cabins and some people like teepees), and then you would light the tinder. The tinder needs to be protected from too much air so that it will stay lit long enough to grow and ignite the kindling wood. Once the kindling wood burns you have a small fire on your hands, and you can begin, slowly and carefully, to add bigger logs. Voila: a crackling hot bonfire.

Now add some hot apple cider, marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate and you have all the ingredients for staying warm and happy around the fire pit. Not quite primitive cave man style, but it’s a sure bet that cave men would take smores over Wooly Mammoths any day!

The way that daily meditation practice stimulates creativity is analogous to fire building in many ways.  In order to see the connection we have to talk about nature and the human brain.

Creation is all around us. Look around. What do you see that is not constantly changing? You might immediately answer mountains or something gigantic like the sun, but science teaches us that even things as big as mountains and stars are constantly changing. Sunspots move and the energetic intensity of the sun changes subtly all of the time. Eventually Stars like our sun die and then come back to life again. Even mountains crumble over time!

You might be thinking, “But science can predict things perfectly, so certain things must be absolutely unchangeable.” The answer is yes, you’re right, we can predict certain trends and patterns of change in nature, but even the most predictable patterns are constantly changed by chance and randomness (scientists have actually called this natural paradox “chaos theory”).

For example, Scientists this past year celebrated 50 years of studying the relationship between wolves and Caribou on Isle Royale, on the Upper Peninsula of Northern Michigan. During the study certain patterns became predictable between the wolves and caribou. When the caribou herds became overpopulated, the wolves helped the struggling caribou herd by eating more than usual. In turn the wolf population grew quicker, which caused the wolves to become overpopulated. When the wolf packs were too many and the Caribou too few, the wolves died off from lack of food, and the Caribou herds grew large again. This back and forth pattern over fifty years on the island remained constant. It didn’t change much at all.

But even though this large pattern remained the same, independent variables remained unpredictable. For example the wolves on the island have typically been divided into three or four packs; one pack usually dominates the others. Several years ago researchers on the Island watched a lone female wolf split from her pack to wander solo. She crossed into another wolf pack’s turf and was attacked. She was left for dead on the banks of Lake Superior.

Curiously, one of the male wolves from the attacking wolf pack abandoned his pack and stayed to nurse the lone female wolf back to health. He licked her wounds for days on the banks of the lake. The two wolves mated and within a few years created the new dominant pack on the island. In this second observation from Isle Royale individual choices were unpredictable, even though larger trends remained constant.

This proves that while larger patterns remain stable, smaller trends remain unpredictable and random. Scientists at Isle Royale have additionally concluded that the single most unpredictable ingredient of an otherwise balanced ecosystem is human interference. Something about human beings acts like the “x” factor in an otherwise predictable system. The conclusion of the study suggests that nature is constantly changing. If we ponder those two words, “constant,” and “change,” they don’t seem to fit together. That’s because it’s a paradox: when two things work together even though it doesn’t seem like they should.

Meditation and creativity are two similar words. You wouldn’t typically think sitting down to do nothing you could create something. The word “nothing,” and the word “something” do not go together, right? But they actually do.

By sitting down and focusing on your breath, there are many things happening while other things stop happening. You might stop talking when you meditate, and you might stop moving your body. But this doesn’t mean that your body stops moving on the smallest cellular levels, and it doesn’t mean that your brain turns off.

In fact, most of us have a hard time meditating because we can’t stop thinking even when we’re sitting still. The feeling actually makes us motion sick. We try to get quiet, but we feel like we’re moving inside. The only way to take care of that discomforting paradox (I’m moving while I’m sitting) is to get up and move around.  It’s not a bad reaction. It makes sense. If my head is moving and I have all these thoughts, then my body has to be “doing” something too, otherwise I feel uncomfortable. And this is why most people don’t think they can meditate. They say to themselves, “I can’t sit still long enough. My head is too busy.” However the truth is that sitting still is not the only point of meditation. The point of meditation is to sit still over and over again until your brain learns to quiet down and sit still right next to you. Besides, if you were totally quiet when you first sat down to meditate what would you need meditation for anyway?

But what do we achieve by getting quiet? The answer is simple. We achieve creativity.

Think about this. The brain is our oldest technological device. It was the technology that made fire in the first place. Our brains can do anything we ask them to. The problem is that we have to let our brain do its job and step out of its way. For example, have you ever tried to remember the lyrics to a song? Let’s say that you can’t remember the lyrics to your favorite 80’s song you and your best girlfriend sang the time you road tripped together during summer vacation. Maybe you’re having coffee years later trying to figure it out. Finally you look at your girlfriend and you say, “Eh, no worries. I guarantee you that it will come to me at some strange time in the next few days. While I am blow-drying my hair I will remember the lyrics. Then I’ll call you!”

Everybody does this because this is how the brain works when we get out of its way. When we ask the brain to do something it responds by doing exactly what we ask it to. Our brain will sort through memories, associations, patterns, and sensations as we go through the next few minutes, hours or days, and it will discover what it’s looking for: “Blinded by the light. Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night.” It’s like a “search” command on your computer. Bingo. It just comes to you. Unless you’re one of those people murdering song lyrics from the get go. Like if the initial input of the song was messed up, “Blinded by the light. Something about a douche and a kite?” Regardless you mostly have what you were looking for!

The problem is that our brains get viruses just like computers (computers being another technology created by our brains). Brain viruses slow down the speed of production because we’re trying to accomplish too many things at once. You can always tell a virus on your computer by the amount of clutter there is floating around. And when we ask our computer to do something for us it seems incapable of responding, right? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the connection. Maybe our brains created computers in part because we were cluttered and needing some external hard drives to do extra work? Or maybe we’ve been overloading our internal hard drives! To follow the technological analogy, meditation is like running disc-defrag on our C drive.  It’s like running spyware to clean out Trojan horses.

When we teach our brains to get quiet, to get really good at doing nothing, we are actually giving all of our back logged ambitions, hopes, and dreams the chance to manifest into something. Why? Because when we ask our brain to participate in creating what we desire, it responds at command. The problem is that it cannot respond to our desires if it is too busy responding to arbitrary thoughts like, “Did I sound stupid?, Should I have really said that?, Do I look ugly today?”  Those kinds of thoughts are like asking our computers to do a million silly things at once when we have larger fish to fry. It would be like opening a million text boxes at once but then never actually typing anything into them, all the while we have a quarterly report due by the end of the day. Brain stress slows down our brains ability to perform larger functions.

The great news is that Science has actually confirmed every bit of this argument. Scientists have shown in the past years that meditation improves creativity because there is a solid link between reduced surface brain activity and the brain’s ability to create new thoughts and new solutions to long and short term problems. We don’t ever need the answers to most questions we ask on a daily basis. They take care of themselves when we get quiet and meditate.

To conclude, we started by talking about fire building, the most primitive technology our brain created. The coolest thing about meditation and creativity is that not only do they go hand in hand, but creativity and meditation build upon each other exponentially, just like smaller tinder ignites kindling wood, which ignites logs, which leads to a big bonfire. The more you meditate, the quieter your brain gets. The quieter your brain becomes the easier it is for your brain to do its creative work, and the more creative work you do the more you begin to nurture your understanding of creation itself (which is a part of nature all around us!). Consequently, the more you understand nature all around you, the more inspired you are by the world in which you live. And there is nothing more essential to creating the life you want than being truly inspired by the little things you see on a daily basis. If your brain is too busy, then you won’t see the best inspiration that’s around you all of the time!

The trick is to realize that you are not your thoughts. You----are thinking. Your brain is something you can learn to use creatively like a high-speed computer; instead of getting stuck in your head thinking that you are only your brain. Meditation is a great way to realize that you are not your brain. You are the one operating your brain, and the rest of your body for that matter. What a special mystery that is! And that’s what getting selfcentered is all about.

The result of selfcentered meditation----creativity and inspiration: the warmest and loveliest bonfire you could ever sit next to!