Everything you can imagine is real. - Pablo Picasso
Imagination is at the heart of creativity. It offers us offers us a doorway to expanded possibilities and ways of knowing. Imagination is a powerful capacity for creating not only stories or pictures or music but our very lives. With it we can find solutions to problems, for ourselves and the world, that our rational minds couldn’t solve.
In my own creativity as a writer and photographer as well as my work as a creativity coach, I’ve always insisted that our imagination is smarter than our mind. It allows us to access expanded states of consciousness where fresh ideas spark and we find the flow of infinite possibilities and intuition. If we can imagine something, see it in our mind’s eye or get feeling sense of it, we can create it, often in ways that seem miraculous.
Most of us have been discouraged from engaging our imagination with comments like "stop daydreaming” or “why are you wasting time staring out the window.” or “oh you’re just making that up.” These activities all allow our creative mind to run free to make new connections and give birth to new ideas. Rather than being encouraged to dream big, to ask questions or expand our awareness beyond our linear rational mind, we have been consistently schooled in restricting our imaginative potential.
As adults we often define ourselves as not being creative and imaginative. Yet it is a gift we were all born with and something we can easily reclaim by our willingness to play with it. One way to start is with “just pretend”. Just pretend what you want your creativity or life to look like if you had no limits and all was possible. Imagination is the faculty that can take you there.
Our imaginations are like muscles. If they haven't been used they atrophy and we to strengthen them to allow for optimum access. As we start to exercise our imaginations we actually form new neural connections in our brain.
Try this. Take three deep breaths all the way down into your belly and with each exhalation let everything go and let the peace of simply being present in the moment enter you. Then imagine being in a favorite place. What do you see. If you are not visual, don't worry about it. Instead focus on what it feels like to be there. What sounds, scents, tastes are involved. Use all your senses. The body can't distinguish between a real experience and something that is imagined so this is a great way to give yourself a mini vacation without leaving home.
Then try this. Try using your imagination to talk to a tree, a squirrel or a stone. See what they have to say to you. Just pretend and play with it. Have fun.