Life is a dynamic, creative process that is best encountered with conscious awareness. As we face and are bombarded in everyday life by the needs of the moment – the myriad signals, threats and opportunities – we choose, sometimes in real time, how to respond to these challenges. With conscious awareness we can weave the tapestry of a life well lived, in health, contentment, compassion and joy.
Many have noted that mindfulness, the mind’s response to internal chaos and turmoil, is gaining widespread interest just as states of distraction, anxiety, suffering, and lack of connection are becoming increasingly common and harmful. In recent decades, the practice of mindfulness, usually defined as non-judgmental moment-by-moment awareness, has helped individuals in our culture develop skills essential to the art of healthy living and indicative of a creative mind.
Here are five ways mindfulness helps you live a joyful, contented, creative, and compassionate life:
1. Consciousness
Mindfulness improves a person’s ability to concentrate and respond to situations in an unusual way. Most research has examined mindfulness in a health and wellness context, including its ability to regulate stress and improve cognitive, emotional, and interpersonal functioning. Yet we do so at the risk of forgetting its open and transcendent nature. Mindfulness is listening to the music of life and a way to embody consciousness, cultivate clarity, emotional balance, equanimity and compassion. It offers the ability to navigate a seemingly chaotic world with all our senses wide open, and a sensitivity to the small changes needed to navigate it successfully and joyfully.
2. Creativity
Mindfulness promotes open-minded, creative thinking and reduces aversive, self-conscious thinking. We often associate the word creativity with special people, artists, creators, doers of new things, forgetting that every moment of life offers us the opportunity to be such a person. Creativity is more than the ability to develop new and effective ideas, artifacts or solutions. From the moment we are born to the moment we breathe our last, life is a dynamic and creative endeavor. There is ample evidence to show that practicing mindfulness supports and promotes creativity, while creativity is an act of mindfulness. Together, this beneficial and supportive relationship provides an important foundation for a healthy lifestyle.
3. Adaptability
Mindfulness increases the ability to change perspectives by increasing flexibility and adaptability. An important aspect of life is the way we express the plasticity and adaptability of the mind, or fluid intelligence. This intelligence includes abstract thinking, quick reasoning and problem solving. independent of any previously acquired knowledge. Divergent thinking is associated with creative flexibility. It is an adaptable, iterative and web-like strategy, focused on connections between ideas. Divergent thinking leads to an optimal solution from a multitude of options, but in a more fluid, less linear and more open strategy. Individuals who demonstrate curiosity, nonconformity, persistence, and willingness to take risks exhibit more diverse coping processes and engage in activities that elicit such judgment.
4. Openness
Mindfulness increases curiosity, empathy, love and wisdom. These are all qualities that reflect our sense of connection and responsibility for others. We feel what others feel, and are moved to help alleviate their suffering. As fears diminish in our mindfulness practice, the innate nature of our mind comes to the fore: an inner and outer limitless field of consciousness that is open, active, adaptable, dynamic, curious and creative. With greater openness, curiosity, and creativity, intuition of something greater than ourselves increases, and trust in its benevolence grows. It is a non-conceptual consciousness that carries with it a sense of vitality, intelligence, love and wisdom.
5. Positivity
Mindfulness reduces our fear of the negative. The uncontrolled mind and the creative mind are two sides of a similar brain dynamic. These different expressions of the mind are like identical twins growing up in different environments yet sharing the same genetics. Basically the uncontrolled mind is the creative mind. What differs is that creativity feels more at home in the present moment, while the problem-solving, troublesome mind emerges as it accesses the past and looks ahead to the future and gets stuck in the problem. The nature of this ‘chaos’ causes negative feelings, from confusion to depression. Getting rid of such a ghost is not the solution: rather, it is best to place it in the right environment and context. The key is to train and guide the obsessive, uncontrolled mind, through mindfulness exercises, back to a more natural, controlled and original state in which it can deal with the challenges of living in the moment..
Mindfulness helps weave the tapestry of a life well lived. It is the true art of healthy living.
Author biography
Jaime A. Pineda, PhD is a professor of cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of many highly cited articles in the cognitive and systems neurosciences of animals and humans, as well as two collections of poetry on mind-brain relationships, with an emphasis on spirituality, mysticism, environmentalism, and social activism. More information at the author’s website. His new book is Mastering Mental Chaos: Harnessing the Power of the Creative Mind.
