Stimulating your creative genius (How to access unlimited creativity -- part 2)

October 5, 7:43 AMSalt Lake City Entertainment Industry ExaminerChristopher Harding

“I’m always looking for new ways to stimulate my creativity,” she told me.  As a songwriter, she confessed, her biggest fear was hitting the wall and coming down with a case of writer’s block. This is the challenge that many of us face when we conceptualize creativity as something that's in limited supply; or held captive to the whims of the muse; or as something we ourselves must struggle to generate from the limits of own conscious minds.

In a creative workshop series (Expressing the Genius Within) that I gave for a number of years, we explored methods and exercises for stimulating the creative centers of the brain and accessing the deeper, broader, and eventually unlimited realms of the mind in such a manner that the flow ideas would come easily and at will (rather than having to wait for days, weeks, or months to be struck with the fickle and ephemeral flash of genius).  These exercises were often used to assist actors in finding new voices for characters they were struggling with; to help songwriters bring up entirely new styles of writing; to allow authors to dive into a story from the various standpoints of the story's characters; or to enable a variety of artists to explore entirely new methods and mediums for expressing their creative genius.

The exercises I shared with the participants in the creativity sessions often seemed odd at first.  But almost without fail, they seem to facilitate the process of people opening themselves up to new ideas or approaches to their art—be it songwriting, sculpture, dance—you name it.  To give you some context about the exercises, I’ll refer back to the diagram I introduced in the previous article How to access unlimited creativity – a songwriter’s dream come true.

The idea behind the model and the exercises is to train ourselves to optimally utilize all of the various "layers" or “dimensions” of our consciousness in the creative process.  When we are consciously working on a song or other artistic creation, we can unintentionally limit ourselves to our conscious mind and whatever accidental “leakage” that may trickle in from the deeper aspects of our mind.  By intentionally accessing the other layers, however, many more creative possibilities open up. 

The following is an example of one exercise that can stimulate new ideas, moods, feelings, and (in some cases) entire story ideas that can be used for songs, books, paintings, etc.  As we mentioned in the previous article, for writers like Ray Bradbury, the initial step of the creative process is about accessing pure creativity—it's a more “right-brained” process.  At a later stage we can work on refining the material, putting things in order, etc.  But for now, we simply want to walk into the wild and wonderful world of creativity.  Ready?  Here we go.

Exercise #1 – Accessing the Sub-Conscious Mind:

As a reminder, in our model the subconscious mind is the level of consciousness just beneath our normal waking mind.  Accessible from the subconscious realm are elements like our various sub-personalities (the voices or aspects of ourselves that we typically allow to show up less often or that we sometimes disown), our dream consciousness (where all of dreams play out) and the realm of daydreams or fantasy.  This is the realm we're going to experiment with for this particular exercise.

So to get ready, sit in a comfortable place near your instrument or other creative implement (canvas, writing pad, etc.).  You may want to have a recording device easily at-hand, if you are a musician, singer, or someone who does better downloading ideas via a verbal stream of consciousness.

• Slow down your breathing and focus on taking longer, slower, and deeper breaths (in through your nose and out through your mouth). 
• Do a gradual relaxation scan of your body, starting with your feet (simply imagine and then feel your feet relaxing, then your ankles, and calves, then up through your knees, thighs, buttocks and pelvis, lower back, abdomen, chest, upper back, neck, shoulders, arms, fingers, head, and face).  As you do this relaxation process, continue breathing slowly and deeply. 
• Once you’ve reached your head and face, tilt your head back slightly and imagine you are accessing the realm of your dreams.  All of the dreams, fantasies, and daydreams you’ve ever had and even ones you have yet to dream are there.  This is a realm fertile with volumes of ideas and myriad combinations. Invite the essence of this realm to bring you a story or idea for a song (or painting, poem, solution, invention, etc.). Be as specific as you like about the type of story or the quality of feeling you want the story or idea to evoke in you and others.  “I’m looking to access a story about intrigue (or love or passion or longing, etc.).”
• Continue to breathe slowly and deeply and imagine that the story idea is flowing from your dream realm down throughout your entire body so that every part of you is embodying the story idea (you don’t need to know what the story idea is at this point, just that the essence from your dream realm is allowing it flow throughout your body.  Imagine that you can feel this creative idea pulsing through your body and through each cell.  Sit with this process for a few minutes until you feel it is complete.
• Once you feel the idea has completely downloaded to your body, take your instrument or other creative implement, and imagine that the creative idea will now flow easily out of you in which ever voice or form you choose. As you feel the idea gathering energy, turn on your recorder if you are going to play, speak or sing and simply begin to express the story and its voice or voices (or you may choose to write, paint, dance it, etc.). 
• Trust that the idea is there and that it flows out of you easily.  Suspend all judgment about the idea and the form it takes and just allow it to come out and find its way into notes (or words, or brush strokes).
• Continue the process of downloading the idea into form until you feel it's complete.  Play with the expression and form of this newly birthed idea as long as it feels right.  Get to know it, be familiar with its various angles. Often you'll get hit with additional pieces of the information transfer later.  Many people engaging in this process carry a writing pad, journal, or digital recorder to assist them in capturing the ideas as they continue to flow.

Like everything we do in the creative fields, mastering this exercise and the others I’ll share, takes practice.  So be patient and try the process several times until you begin to create a broader more intentional opening between your dream realm (or subconscious mind) and your conscious mind.

Another way to access additional ideas from our subconscious mind is to imagine that you are another character or one of your different sub-personalities.  The amount of characters or sub-personalities we can access is virtually limitless.  You may want to use the relaxation process described above to get you into the right frame of mind.  Once you are there, write a song from the standpoint of a particular character.  Imagine that you are that person or aspect.  Allow yourself to get fully into character and to feel who they are and what they want to convey.  Maybe you are a very wealthy person, a castaway, one who’s been banished, or someone who’s just found new love or someone from a history in ages past.  Perhaps you’ll imagine that you’ve been lost and are seeking your purpose or that you’re a misunderstood messenger who had something important to share.  Each of these characters will give you a different story idea and voice from which you can create.

By moving beyond the limitations of our conscious mind and our dominant personality, we open up the field to a countless host of other voices and ideas.  Our subconscious mind is truly a treasure trove of genius ideas and stories.  It’s the realm from which our dreams emerge and it has access to everything we’ve seen, heard, felt or experienced throughout our life.

As you practice at this initial stage beyond your immediate conscious mind, you’ll also be preparing yourself for the much more expansive experience that can come when we begin the exercises about the supraconscious and superconscious levels of our existence.  Remember to trust that the creative flow is always there and always available and that you’re in charge of your experience. 

If you ever feel or experience anything you’re not comfortable with, you can stop the process by simply saying, “Stop!”  It’s like the stop button on a DVD player.  But remember, if you set the context up at the beginning of the process so that you tap into the type of story ideas that you really want to, your subconscious is perfectly designed to present you with what you ask for.  It’s basically a creative software program that’s waiting for your instructions as to what to create.

As we said at the beginning of this article.  This is exercise is one stage in a process.  The next step will be for you to come back to your work a little later, with a fresh perspective and with the aid of the more left-brained attributes of logic and order.  From there you can take this purely creative material and, to the extent you want, mold, re-shape, edit, etc. in order to fit the form and funtion you're after.

In the following article in this series, we’ll walk through the process of sleep-state programming and share an exercise for tapping into your body’s cellular memory and intelligence.  From there, in a subsequent article we’ll invite you to step into the truly limitless realms beyond.  It’s amazing the creative power that we have at our access when we simply decide to access it; when we realize that creativity is an unlimited font of genius that's available to everyone who has the willingness to open the doors into its realm.

To add your thoughts or experiences about creativity, please visit the Passionate Genius blog on How to Access Unlimited Creativity.

If you enjoyed this article, here are three more you might like “20 questions every band should answer,” “How to empower your band” and “Before you record your music: part 1.”