The Joy of Creativity: Practicing Your Creative Craft with Both Discipline and Enjoyment. (DAY 18)
DAY Eighteen: Show Up for Yourself
This is a 21-Day Exploration of Creativity.
In 2015, Neuroscientist Dr Lara Boyd gave a TED talk in Vancouver about how neuroplasticity can ensure that you have the kind of brain you want. She expounded on the latest research on the brain which has disproved long-held theories about the brain being ‘rigid’ meaning that it got to a certain stage and became ‘fixed’. It was believed that when the brain reached that stage, learning had stagnated and you were basically ‘set’ in your ways — your thinking patterns — forever. However, nothing could be further from the truth.
Brain research is teaching us that the brain is not made of granite but, rather, is more elastic. Believe it or not, it was the famous Cabbies of London who showed, in various experiments, that the brain actually expanded when we were learning new things. The expansion of Grey Matter allowed for new skills to be learned and for long-term memory to change to accommodate whatever is being learned.
Why Is This Important?
There are some patterns of thinking that we are used to. Maybe you have let yourself down so many times and you think that this is how it is or, rather, that your personality is just flawed. Or perhaps you’ve been so used to showing up for others, your family or children etc, and you don’t really remember what it was like to choose you and your dreams anymore. The good news is that in the same way that paths in the ground are formed, becoming more ingrained and permanent the more we use them, so too are neural pathways in your brain formed. That behaviour that is killing your dreams — think of it like a well-trodden path in your brain. Of course, it will take a lot of time and effort to erase that path but the more you practice a more positive behaviour over and over, the deeper that positive pathway goes and the easier it gets to daily perform the new positive behaviour while you forget the old one.
It may seem hard now to choose to show up for yourself and for your creative practice but the hard part is to be expected because your brain’s pathways are still being formed. Simply practising over and over, choosing yourself and your creative path continuously, will deepen the neural pathways for that creative pathway and you will find that it gets easier to choose to do it the more you choose to do it (if you know what I mean).
Offering up your dreams on the altar of the dreams of others is simply a pathway that has been created over the years. Choose to create a new pathway that will allow you to learn to choose your creative path every day until it becomes your new normal.
Originally published HERE — iampreciousck.com
