Meditation is a viable method for unlocking your creative potential. A study was done by a Dutch psychologist to identify how different facets of meditation might affect a subject’s ability to be creative.

Several participants practised single focus mindfulness meditation and open monitoring mindfulness meditation.

After their practices, their cognitive and creative abilities were measured.

Results had shown that the practice of open monitoring mindfulness, resulted in an increase in the subject’s ability to think divergently, and therefore produced more creativity. Single focus mindfulness meditation allowed the participants to think in a more convergent manner.

Single focus mindfulness meditation is a type of meditation in which the subject focuses mindfully on a single point of focus, such as the breath for example. This practice promotes being present and observant by focusing on one single point.

Open monitoring mindfulness involves being intensely present in your environment through continuous extreme observation of all that is around you. Your focus remains flexible, where you’re not focused on only one thing.

Open monitoring mindfulness meditation leads to more creative thinking primarily because you become more observant and you analyze more artifacts in your environment than in single focus mindfulness meditation.

In single focus mindfulness meditation, by virtue of the fact that you are only focusing on one stimulus, you ignore everything else and that narrows your ability to think broadly in comparison to open monitoring mindfulness meditation.

The beauty of open monitoring mindfulness meditation is that it cultivates two extremely necessary skills for acting creatively; awareness and observe and hold deep thoughts about more than one subject.

Awareness is essential because it allows you to act with undivided attention. The most creative projects always come from a place of deep awareness. When acting on creative projects the subject is always deeply embedded in the project to the point where they even forget to eat or sleep. This shows that open monitoring mindfulness meditation is super useful for generating creativity as it intensely promotes being in the now.

As it relates to observation, this is a superior technique as it allows the subject to remain intensely in the now, while observing a number of phenomena surrounding them. This deepens the thinker’s ability to be present and observe all deeply penetrate several things at once, which is fertile ground for fertile thoughts. 

Creativity essentially is picking your idea out of a fertile ground of an infinite amount of ideas; you have to have the ability to think broadly.

Being able to observe effectively also increases cognitive functions, which are integral to the creative process. Your cognitive ability is the medium through which your creative urges are expressed, therefore doing practices to ensure its optimal functioning is also essential to generating more creativity.

Open monitoring mindfulness can be practised anywhere at any time. For some, it is best practised in nature as there is a wide array of natural phenomena to observe and through our biological connection with nature, it should be relatively easy to sustain presence with nature when it is established. 

All you need to do is become intensely present. Give it your undivided attention, really look at a leaf and its shape and complexity, really observe the birds flying in the air and contemplate how birds are able to traverse the sky, be in awe at the greenness of the grass. The point is to just leave your thoughts for a while and become engulfed with everything around you.