Core Meditation Practices

To enhance creativity, it is important to pay attention to daydreams.

"When we daydream, we're at the center of the Universe," says neurologist Marcus Raichle of Washington University in St. Louis, who first the described, in 2001, the neural network that is most active when our minds wander.

In 2009, Jonathan Schooler and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia published the first study to directly link creativity with mental activity in this network, now dubbed the "default network" because it is the region of mental activity that engages when minds drift into "off-task thinking."

"What we find," says Schooler, "is that the people who regularly catch themselves daydreaming--who become mindfully aware that they are doing it--seem to be the most creative."

Artful Meditation workshops teach the mindfulness techniques of moment-by-moment awareness and willfully "coming back" to the here-and-now. With these techniques, used for over 2500 years to maintain conscious awareness, combined with exercises that promote daydreaming, we reconnect to our creative powers.