What is creativity? It’s always good to define terms I find.

What I mean here is the capacity to remain curious, and from that curiosity see the world and resources from new perspectives. 

From these new perspectives we can then manipulate those resources and create new experiences, events, artefacts and ways of being that are potentially novel, insightful, comedic, profound or abstract reflections of being and its expression as life. 

We are creatures of habit though, creatures who mostly love routines and rituals. 

Think of all the routines and rituals you have in your life from when you get up in the morning through eating breakfast, how you get to work or how you set up your day if you work from home. 

If you change habits and routines it is often disconcerting when this happens when we are not ready or not expecting it. 

Yet creative juice requires consciousness of habits and the capacity to radically alter them as appropriate to our curious and conscious explorations. 

There comes a balance of order and chaos that is then reflected in each of us as we dive deeper into the creative expression of life. As Oscar Wilde said “A writer is someone who has taught their mind to misbehave”. 

Yet the reality of this universe is that it is unpredictable, other than the laws of physics, and even there with the second law of thermodynamics, everything eventually increases in entropy or disorder. 

Chaos and change is perpetual. Everything is always changing, even mountains, rising or eroding slowly, sometimes erupting, sometimes sliding in chaotic descent, but change they do. 

We could easily argue that the only unchanging thing is change itself. 

We also all know, deep down inside, that we will die, and the most common reaction to this level of biological knowing is to seek as much safety, comfort and familiarity as possible. Routines make us feel safe. Yet risk makes us feel alive. 

We all have a balance of needs between seeking safety and taking risks. Without this balance we are sedentary and dying through slow habituation or taking high level risks and dying through premature evacuation as we careen down some cliff slope or get eaten by crocodiles. 

To get creative juice going, the exploration of the balance between safety and risk, chaos and order is a primary source. What is your balance, today, now? 

In my Blog on ways of knowing (a worthy read in my view), I looked at several ways of knowing that offer differing and supportive perspectives. 

It is that old story of the elephant and the blindfolded people. The one at the front thought it was a snake, the one at the back thought it was a couple of tree trunks and the one by the tusks thought it was a spear. 

Being unable to look from opposing and often paradoxical perspectives predisposes us to ignorance and a closed viewpoint. It is being able to hold paradox comfortably in the palms of your hands and in your heart that gives you, the life-artist, the capacity to explore the universe of gravity and levity, light and shadow, masculine and feminine, yin and yang, form and formlessness. 

We have to be able to walk around, under and over the elephant to see what it really is. Habits of seeing, feeling and sensing can get in the way of creativity and creative expression and it is interrupting the habit patterns and seeing into and through the paradox that gives us the artistic vision and the comedic or tragic twists, that can only be represented through some kind of art-form. 

Indeed seeking to capture the balance of the poles in paradox, seeking to express the inconceivable can only be done through art, music, poetry, sculpture and mathematics. 

Remember Leonardo Da Vinci said “Study the art of science and the science of art”.  

So, being conscious of our habits and our habitual ways of seeing, sensing and feeling and of course sense-making from this, is a necessary preparation for sustainable creative juice. 

Creativity is play and exploration and it is also endeavours, method and skill. You have to train to play the guitar or any other instrument well. Imagination and creativity grow through doing the thing, there is practice and discipline required. 

As W. Somerset Maugham said - “Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature, than the young”

I’ve written fourteen books, one of which is a book of poetry and one a teaching tale, a cult novel. I’ve started, built, grown and lost a yoga studio, built cabins and am building a new business in service to life, love, divinity and evolutionary principles.

A painting I did forty years ago still sits on the wall of my teacher's kitchen in London. I used to work as a street performer, I love dancing and singing, though I have much work to do with singing well, I promise you. The point is that I, like you, am a creative being at heart.

To return to the question for this blog though, how do we sustain creative juice? 

For me the answer is continuously finding this balance I am pointing to between order and chaos, between habits and freedom of perception, between exploration and routine, between play and practice.

Recognising that you are also a completely free and innately powerful and wonderful being, growing empowering habits is important, but it’s not enough. 

Using meta-disciplines and practices such as conscious breathwork  and meditation consistently, remind us of our deeper nature in an experiential way and point to what is possible. That's why we do them. 

If you read Tim Ferriss' book Tools for Titans, where he interviewed many successful people to uncover their success strategies and creative habits - 90% of them practised these meta-disciplines.

Yuval Noah Harari, author of many books including Sapiens and Homo Deus, as well as winner of the Polonsky prize, meditates for two hours per day. As Jocko Willinks said “There is no lasting freedom without discipline”. Simply put, creativity instead of freedom - you have the idea. 

How do we make habits? Through repetition. We do a thing often enough until it becomes what we do. Until it becomes something of what we are. 

Creativity is no different, it is a habit too, but a different kind of habit, not a safety seeking habit, not a way of feeling alive through risk taking but something radically different. It is a meta-habit that seeks to express the inexpressible.  

The thing about habits is that we worked hard to make them and then have done them so routinely that they have become encoded, ingrained, embedded in our nervous system. 

It takes effort and good friends to even spot them sometimes, let alone break them. Making new ones takes effort and discipline. Yes, those words again. 

The power of awareness practice comes in here, because when we cultivate sufficient meditative depth, which we can do fairly easily when we know how, (contact me for strategies that really work!). 

Again, it takes effort, strategic effort to craft meditative depth and strategic effort to access creative juice on demand. You don’t have to wait for the right time, the right mood, you create the right time and the right mood, regardless of what else is going on. 

I wasn’t in the mood for writing this blog today, I was distracted, upset about some emotional dynamic going on in my life and tired from my little one having nightmares last night and waking me up in the middle of the night. So, I sat down and started. This is the skill, creative juice on demand. Invoke your muse. 

Every-time you sit to meditate or practice breathwork you commit to being fully present, fully here, fully now with every breath, every subtle nuance of ‘your’ existence, this way the practice is a healthy habit but not habituated. If you are habituating the practice, falling asleep into unconscious patterns, that's how to get a sore bum. 

You are choosing to sit as a habit, but resting in the powerful novelty of every moment in the practice so as not to die a death of slow habituation - a terrible way to die. 

Creativity is the same, a practice of ever present novelty, curiosity and exploration of method. 

How we think about things, how we see things, is often the result of habits rooted in our family's way of looking at the world, the way they made sense of what was happening. 

Our way of seeing things and making sense of the world is also often a result of the conditioning we received from our culture. These habits of mind can be very unhelpful and they can be very destructive.

When we take them for granted as the ‘truth’ we cannot filter them to find out how true they actually are or how helpful a way of making sense they actually are. 

First we have to see that the way we see the world is conditioned perspectives. Once we can accept this we can inquire into their validity, if we choose to. The alternative is simply to accept them. 

What we are taught to attend to and how to attend is also a habit. Thinking is largely a habit. Often an addictive habit. We believe we are our thinking and that no thinking happening means we are sometimes less existent. 

We can be so attached to just thinking that we find it impossible to sit and watch our minds, impossible to be empty and allow the bubbles of creativity to arise. 

There was a scientific experiment where people had a choice to sit and watch their minds (meditate) or give themselves a large electric shock, most people chose a large electric shock.

Why?

Fear of emptiness and what it means for our existence. It means that we as separate self-senses no longer exist. At least pain and suffering proves we exist!

To develop authentic creative juice we have to look into and through all of these old habits and dissolve them back into the formless consciousness from which they arose. We become the tapestry, the canvas on which the art of our life is written. 

I believe a habit of dissolving our self-sense and then rebirthing it, regularly, allowing our no-selves a creative exploration of who we are is a really healthy and quite advanced habit. One well worth cultivating. Way better than being in a bad habit of thinking difficult things about one self and others, surely? 

Conscious breathwork and meditative depth give us the capacity to rebirth every day, in every moment, and to consistently and consciously drop old patterns of thought, emotion, body and mind as effortlessly as taking off an old coat. Yes, this is possible. 

Do you want a life of empowering and healthy habits? A life of creative juice? 

Where will you begin? 

How will you weave the strategies of creative empowerment into your life?

What habits of conscious breathwork, mediative depth and embodied awareness are you going to cultivate?  

When are you going to begin? 

I recommend you begin right now. 

Get the introductory 7-day challenge course, or the Level One Breathwork for Beginners course from my website… Begin, right now. 

I want to live on a planet of mutually empowered and super creative individuals, I for one look forward to you shining even brighter, through utilising the practices that we share at Embodied Evolution - Evolutionary Conscious Breathwork, Mind Mastery, Embody Flow and Embodied Awareness. 

And remember with novelty that there is also nothing new under the sun. As Jim Jarmusch said, 

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to”

Where are you taking them to?