If you are active in any kind of artistic endeavor, whether in writing, music or the visual arts, one of the biggest challenges is to be original and to extend your creativity to new dimensions. You can’t “learn” how to be creative and that is why creativity is sometimes viewed as a “gift” or an inborn talent that you either have or you don’t have. However true that may be there are ways to enhance your creativity, and one of the best means is through meditation.

Many people think that meditation is only useful for learning how to relax or others may associate it with religious or spiritual pursuits. Both of these views have a bit of validity but there is another aspect of meditation that is not generally well known. Meditation has the capacity to help one deepen one’s intuition and creativity.

In fact another name for meditation is “intuitional practice.” According to yoga and meditation masters, most human beings utilize only a fraction of their mental capacity. They remain engrossed in their conscious and subconscious minds but are unable to tap the powers of their “super conscious” mind. These yogis say that this super conscious mind (roughly equivalent to Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious mind) is the place where creativity and artistic expression originate.

All people enter this higher realm from time to time but their contact with it is often fleeting. When you practice meditation, and learn how to detach yourself from your physical surroundings and from the disturbances of your body, and go deeper into your inner mental world you will be at the gates of the more subtle layers of the mind and can enter this super conscious mind for longer periods.

The more you practice meditation the more “intuitive” you will become. It doesn’t happen immediately and may not even happen all of a sudden. It is a gradual process and that is why many people practice meditation and give it up thinking that nothing is happening.

How can you tell if you are making progress? Sometimes other people will notice the change in you and comment on it. This makes sense because we are often not the best judge of ourselves and it is difficult to see things that are very close to us. For example, when you grew as a child you were not able to see your physical growth, and probably were reminded of it by people who hadn’t seen you for a few months or a year.

Another way to know if you are making progress is that your feelings of love for others grows, and you become more large-hearted and service minded. As you feel better about yourself, it is natural that you will feel better about others.

But what about the creativity that I started off talking about? Well, if you are practicing some kind of artistic activity, that activity will get more subtle and become more fruitful as you get more established in meditation. In fact, even if you think you have meager artistic capacity, the constant practice of meditation can help you to develop talents that you would have never dreamed possible. So, try it out and get ready for some amazing results.