Reclaim your creative self

Last week I presented my first guest post on Craig's Enlightr blog. Today I am delighted to share his guest post on creativity with you.

Craig is a 22-year-old student currently studying psychology at Bournemouth University. He runs a self improvement blog and community filled with useful advice. His main aim is to help people exceed their expectations and reach their true potential.

If you like what you find there, please subscribe to his RSS and follow him on Twitter to keep up-to date with his articles and blog posts.

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Reclaim your creative self

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.” - Albert Einstein

You, like everyone else was born with unlimited creativity. You knew this when you was a child but misplaced the knowledge while growing with a strict, social conditioned life where creative ventures are outlawed in favour of rules and boundaries. The aim of this post is to allow you to regain your creative self by ejecting the systematic social conditioning that plagues our minds.

Social Conditioning

Social conditioning is your desire to fit in and be a part of society with whatever rules, regulations and norms it happens to spew at you. The drawback of this type of conditioning occurs when the social norm moves away from our basic human roots and begins cramming the fronts of magazines with worthless advice and ‘must haves’.

Social conditioning is what keeps you back from your dreams. It’s the nagging voice that tells you to go on a diet, to go to the gym or to not wear those shoes with that top. It’s what we must reveal and dismantle in order for us to achieve a truly successful life of happiness with bountiful creativity and fun, just as you were as a child, just as you still can be with a portion of effort on your side to follow the next few points of creating creativity.

How to create creativity

One thing you’ll notice about creative people is their undying understanding of themselves. A creative, happy person is uniquely at peace with themselves, they are assured of their own identity. They know exactly who they are and what they must do. They are also calm, healthy and thrive without a false sense of needs or desires. Does this sound like you, when you were 2 years of age?

1. Become aware of yourself

Being aware of yourself is the highest possible thing you could accomplish in life. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, self actualisation is at the very top.
To become aware of yourself you need to sit down, on your own without any interference with just a notepad and pen. You’ll need to stay in this position, staring at the paper until you can answer these two questions without a shade of hesitation –

• What do I enjoy doing the most?
• What makes me happy the most?

These two questions will allow you to decide what your purpose in life is. Don’t be ashamed if what you’re currently doing in life is nowhere near your enjoyment or happiness path, there’s always time to change. While sitting you may flick through hundreds of ideas, decisions and scenarios where you don’t fit but eventually after minutes, hours or years. You will know the one purpose that holds both enjoyment and happiness at the same time. Grown men are known to cry when they realise their purpose in this way.

Me on the other hand, I feel my purpose is to help people reach their potential. It’s the activity that gives me the most enjoyment and happiness combined; therefore I must be on the right track. Once you’ve got yours, you’re on the right track too. All you need to do next is follow the path. On the way you will discover yourself and who you are. You will gain self actualisation and you will smile with unlimited creativity once more.

2. Become aware of your surroundings

The next step in gaining the creative juice is to be aware of your surroundings, your environment and the people that fill your life. This requires you to open up, experience and feel every moment, object and person deeply with the creativity and curiosity as you once did as a child. Refrain from the boundaries of social conditioning and feel the experience of walking down the beach with sandals and socks or singing in a busy shopping centre. You are not controlled by your surroundings; they are there for you to play with.

3. Become silent

Next you want to become silent. The most genius and creative hunches strike you when you are at your quietest. The mystery of DNA came to the founder when he was asleep, there’s no saying your unlimited creativity can do something even better.

The reason you want to be silent is again related to social conditioning. Before you could speak, what was the voice in your head communicating? Interesting question huh... perhaps there was no voice in your head? Whatever you think the answer to the question is you’ll want to realise that stressing, worrying or thinking about which celebrity is in the next film will distract your mind away from its purpose and creativity. You can’t create the next big discovery while watching Friends.

4. Know you are already everything you want to be

Lastly, know you are already everything you want to be and you are just enjoying experiences and having fun in life, just like you did as a child. This is the final step forward. Your desires to be someone in a field you don’t enjoy because it pays well are bland, boring and unhealthy to your short existence on this planet.

Aim to follow your purpose and become who you are meant to be, that’s all you need to do to have complete happiness in your life.

To sum up, you are everything, you are unlimited creativity, and you are free. The reason you many not think that now is because you’ve misplaced the knowledge within the struggle of social conditioning and the stress it creates. Apply these steps in your life and you will see a major difference in your emotional state as well as every other level of your life.

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What is self improvement and how do you 'get it'?

I am excited and honored to present to you my very first guest post over at Enlightr dot com:

What is self improvement and how do you 'get it'?

At Enlightr, 22 year old Craig has managed to set up what I would call a self improvement portal. It contains several sections and categories, so depending on what subject you need enlightenment, you do not have to weed through many irrelevant posts but are directed right to the topics that you are interested in.

So if you like what you read there, you can subscribe to his RSS and follow him on Twitter to keep up-to date with his articles and blog posts.

I hope you like my guest post and please leave a comment over there. I will be posting Craig's post on creativity next week Tuesday, so be sure to check in.

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Every aspect of our lives is, in a sense, a vote for the kind of world we want to live in. -- Frances Moore Lappe

I am not particularly fond of politics. It is usually one of the three topics that I try to avoid talking to people about (the other two being religion and sex) because I find that many seem to define themselves by it and immediately jump into an arguing, defending mode.

I prefer to talk about their ideas, their family, their dreams and what they love to do. Politics, religion and sex often trigger a preset collection of prejudices. And I find that we already make judgments about people too easily for such topics to add another stamp on someone before we really get to know them.

However, in one week is election day. Communal and European elections. I must admit that I have so far never voted in my life. I am Dutch but don't live in the Netherlands. Voting is not mandatory there, so I figured 'why go through all the hassle and paperwork for a country I do not live in?'.

And living in Luxembourg as a foreigner I had no right to vote for communal elections. That has changed some time ago. Now the law says that you have to live here for 5 years in order to vote. And strangely you only have to live here for 6 months in order to become a candidate yourself.

So I am voting for both on Sunday June 7th. I have been listening to the parties' messages and debates and it just confirms what I was already thinking:

Most of them are FIGHTING AGAINST THE OTHERS much more than FIGHTING FOR THEIR CAUSE. It seems to become such a personal Ego war and I get the feeling that they forget that they are supposed to do this for the us not themselves.

So I have made up my decision and I will vote green. I am not saying these people are not in it for the ego. But at least they are fighting for things that interest all parties and all people in some way or another.

I vote green, because I think it's nice to have a job, a good health care system or well organised public transportation. There will be enough people voting the parties who lobby for these things.
But if the planet is dying there is no more room for any of that. I am usually a 'people first' person. I will give to a charity that supports the lives of people before giving money to animal rights for example. In this case, I feel that fighting for the planet concerns us all.

And if I can give my tiny vote to participate in making our planet a better place, then that's what I'll do.

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Progression, not perfection

Say you're not very fit and you want to start running. So the first day you are completely out of breath after 100 meters. But you're not giving up. The next day you run again and your lungs feel like bursting after 500 m.

Or say you want to loose a few pounds. The first week you loose 5 but the second week you gain 2 because you had a family dinner to attend.

Or say you want to become an artist. You start creating your wonderful pieces of art and you are proud of them. But as soon as you show them to some people you get some constructive but negative criticism.

Instead of acknowledging the affirmative experience of running 300 m further than yesterday, of loosing 3 pounds, or of creating this amazing imperfect art, you may obsess over not even being able to run a kilometer without dying on the way, on the 2 pounds you gained or on never becoming a real artist.

When you focus your attention on what you did not accomplish, you miss seeing the real picture.

If you beat yourself up with 'if only I had not overeaten at the family dinner', 'if only I had exercised more regularly' or 'if only I had used more red and redrawn that face' you are heading straight for disappointment and frustration. And in the long run, you become less brave and creative and unwilling to try again.

Constantly trying to be perfect nearly always ends in a feeling of abject failure.

Progression is not selling short, underachieving or letting ourselves down.

Progression is a journey that leads to accomplishment, to moving on, to developing a better you, a better life.

It is here to teach you your flaws and how they can be beautiful.

Or as Leonardo Da Vinci put it: "An arch is two weaknesses which together make a strength."

So revel in your projects.

Write.
Create.
Run.
Loose weight.
Learn.
Be imperfect.
Do it for yourself.
Progress.

Put your weaknesses together and build a bridge.

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The mind has exactly the same power as the hands: not merely to grasp the world, but to change it - Colin Wilson

Change your mind, change your brain and find happiness.

If happiness is an inner state, influenced by external conditions but not dependent on them, how can we achieve it?

Let Mathieu Ricard, Buddhist monk and biologist , show you how your mind has the power to make a huge difference in the quality of your life.
Meditation improves your health, your attention, your life expectancy, your attention capability and so on. He has a unique way of presenting things with his unassuming humor.

It is a long video, but well worth your time. So grab a coffee and listen while looking at amazing photos he took in the Himalayas.




Mind and Life Institute

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The creative process is a process of surrender, not control -- Julia Cameron

Release your creativity, create your art. Then share it and release it.

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There she sat...

There she sat, on the slide
looking for a place to hide

an adult among children at play
yet a child around grownups she'd stay.

She felt very often sad
and most of the time just mad

at the world and everyone
she couldn't remember when happiness had gone.

She wanted to do so much
conquer the world and such

her diary full of imagination
searching for some sort of salvation.

Confused and scared around boys
they were mainly just a lot of noise

a refuge in books she would find
allowing her to leave the world behind.

There she sat on the slide
Remembering the tears she'd cried

when she was just a young girl
trying hard to find her whirl

(c) Mindful Mimi - May 2009

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Prompt 'There she sat' from Pictures, Poetry and Prose
Picture by AVR

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