Creativity and Health
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Creativity belongs to all of us, and not just to a few “creative types”.
Creativity belongs to all of us, and not just to a few “creative types”.
Creativity inside us is reflected all around, so we see insight as a “light”, our inspiration as a “flash” or “lightning strike”, and our love as a “tidal wave”.
As another example, we see our imagination as “fire”, and say that the logs added to a fire save it from "dying out".
Simply put, creativity is what puts the true aliveness into the natural world - ourselves included.
Stress, meanwhile, is what robs us of that creativity.
Staying alive in our creativity comes from defending ourselves from slave-driving crushers of creativity like fear
, anger
, and compulsive desire
.
For this we rely on having the heart to be truly free - to be as unique as any other piece of creative reality.
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Creativity goes to the heart of who we are as human beings - not just in terms of our art and inventiveness, but in terms of what makes us truly thrive.
Look at the love a mother has for her child, and the joy and inspiration that keeps a musician motivated even after achieving commercial success.
Innate human creativity is our most valuable yet underappreciated asset, being by far and away our most powerful - and intelligent - drive.
Take the effort it takes to maintain a healthy lifestyle. This succeeds best when we nurture our own, innate initiative to adopt measures like healthy eating, exercise and social engagement - and on terms that are meaningful for us personally.
A few other examples of our innate creativity are our imagination and inspiration, our generosity and our courage. All make us feel more connected - and more "ourselves" and "at home in our own skin" - and can be contrasted with the altogether different kind of influence of stress
, powered by "stress forces" like anger
and fear
that make us "beside ourselves" with rage, or "scared out of our skin".
The purpose of this website - and the accompanying book
- is to explore creativity as it applies to our nature, health and well-being.
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This personal, innate creativity is as necessary as the technological
innovation and creativity that's revolutionised our economy - if we're to reverse worrying trends like today's rise in illnesses like obesity and teenage depression.
True health goes with being innately creative, while distress and illness come when minds (as well as habits and compulsions) become "locked down". Returning to depression
, therefore, in this illness everything can appear to turn monochrome grey, while thoughts can become uniformly negative. Anxiety
, meanwhile, can make us overwhelmed by the sense of danger, and simmering anger can be unrelentingly harsh in its judgement of others (or even our own self). In every case, the mind becomes a (highly "efficient") factory of sameness when it produces only "one track" thoughts, beliefs and moods.
Again, we come back to the same conclusion: we need to reconnect with our own, innate dynamism and creativity.
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The perspective being presented here is that there are two competing sets of "forces" within us; one that enables - and another that robs us of - our true aliveness and health. These are:
(1) Creative forces
like love and joy - that move and inspire us, not just emotionally but also in terms of how committed and engaged we are in our lives. These forces give us real power and freedom, and need only that we give them our backing.
(2) "Stress forces"
- that attack us from the inside, like fear
, anger
and compulsive desire
(the kind that makes us obsessed or addicted). Given half a chance, these deprive us our own, real power and freedom, and destroy our self-creativeness.
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Without self-creativity, no "miracle" of modern science can spare us from the evolving social fractures and epidemics of our age. Now is the perfect time to grow our awareness and knowledge of self-creativity, and to stand up for this priceless resource.
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