Changing something in your common environment will help disrupt mental ruts and open pathways for creative thinking.

Don’t Forget!!

You’ll want to have paper and a set of markers, crayons, or watercolors ready for next week’s session.

Week One: Personal Work

1. Mindfulness Meditation

For the next two weeks, you will be challenged to develop new habits and disrupt old ones in order to expand your capacity for creativity.  Because of the scientific evidence that regular mindfulness practice impacts creativity, we’ll begin with a couple of simple guided meditations.

Try to practice mindfulness meditation every day during this course. Feel free to use these guided meditations or your favorite mindfulness app.

Coffee / Tea Meditation:
Approx. 8 minutes

Mindfulness of Breath & Body:
Approx. 10 minutes

2. Habit Releaser

When the environment around stays the same over a period of time, our brains stop scanning for new information and how to relate to it. A fun and fairly simple way of stimulating our brain juices to open for creative thinking is to change up something in our familiar environment from time to time. Some possibilities might be:

  • Sit in a different place
  • Rearrange the furniture
  • Change something in your decor
  • Clean off a cluttered area
  • Paint a new color
  • OR make some kind of change to your familiar environment to make it feel different.

3. Daily Creativity Practice

Draw or paint THE SAME THING every day for at least a week. It’s okay to change it up to keep it interesting. For example:

  • Use different materials (charcoal, markers, pastels, watercolors, acrylics, etc.)
  • Use a different perspective. If you’re looking at an object or place in your room, try looking at it from above, below, or a completely new angle.
  • Use different styles. Perhaps one day you’ll try a realistic approach, another day a cartoon, or anime style, make it serious, make it silly, or do an abstract interpretation.

The goal is to have fun while using your creativity to think differently about the same thing—over and over. The confinement of needing to draw the same thing, again and again, will force you to stretch your imagination to make it interesting.

Feel free to continue this exercise for longer than a week. Perhaps a month? A year?