Meditation and the Increase of Creativity

Meditation is a mental exercise that involves being mindful, observing, analyzing, and concentrating. It is used to train awareness and attention. It is as beneficial to the human brain as exercise is for the human body. It has numerous advantages on a person as it greatly helps a person to relax, to get more aware, get more conscious and to get more directed and focused in life. 
It is excellent for improving your health, increasing your ability to heal from the past emotional pain or damage, improving your ability to have better self-control and it helps in your personal growth and development by enhancing your self-awareness, self-management and, discipline. Meditation is also widely known and recognized to increase your spirituality as it allows you to connect with the higher power and find internal peace which ultimately helps in harmonizing your soul. Since meditation is known to have a positive impact on the brain it helps in improving the various tasks associated with a cognitive activity of the brain such as problem- solving, analyzing, and creative thinking. 
Types of Meditation to Boost Creativity
Meditation can be practiced in three ways;
Concentration
This involves concentrating fully on a single object which could be internal or external. This form of meditation involves mindfulness as the person here totally neglects and ignores any other stimuli and diverts all the attention and focus to a single object forcefully.
Observation
Another form of meditation that involves mindfulness is the open monitoring which involves observing a particular object or a thing that is dominant in the present situation and not allowing anything else to bother you or distract you from it.
Awareness
Being fully aware of the present situation and not allowing any sort of observation and concentration to interfere with it. 
According to the research, a meditation that involves mindfulness plays a big role in increasing your creative thinking skills by reaching the Neocortex part of the brain. This part of the brain is extremely important for stimulating your creative thinking, analyzing, problem- solving and other types of cognitive skills.
How Meditation Boosts Creative Thinking Skills
Meditation that involves mindfulness is recognized to stimulate the three parts of the brain by making its way from the lowest part which is the oldest part of the brain to the highest and the most difficult part to reach which is the Neocortex.
Reptilian Brain
The lowest part of the brain that is also known as the reptilian brain is mainly responsible to deal with the most basic issues of human life that are mainly linked to survival and other elementary needs of a human such as hunger, thirst and, sex. It only processes things that are very important for our survival and ignores and disregards other things. This way, it does not let anything reach the Neocortex of the brain which does not seem crucial for survival. Meditation helps you to get through this part and let the ideas and thoughts reach the upper levels of the brain.
Limbic Brain
​Above this is a limbic system that is entirely responsible for dealing with emotions and feelings. This is the second part of the brain above the reptilian brain and this part of the brain activates when one feels sad, stressed, depressed or nostalgic and then engages the brain in dealing with the emotional stress hindering the creative ideas to flow to the Neocortex.
Neocortex
The uppermost part of the brain is the Neocortex that is responsible for all the important cognitive activities such as analyzing, problem- solving, creative thinking, planning, and organizing. However, Neocortex is known to be extremely selective and only that thing which is agreed on or passed by the other two parts of the brain will reach Neocortex for processing.
As meditation can help reach the neocortex of an individual which stimulates the creative thinking skills, it is an extremely useful exercise that every individual who wants to excel and do better in his work must do as creativity and innovation are highly demanded and greatly appreciated in every job and every aspect of a human's life. Moreover, meditation also helps us to become more empathetic and emotionally intelligent which is a very useful and important personality trait that helps the flow of creative ideas to the brain. Many successful and popular people in the world have been known to practice meditation religiously and this has greatly contributed to their personal development and universal success. An example is Walt Disney Company which was one of the earliest to adopt this practice at the workplace. The results of this practice were increased creativity and efficiency in problem -solving by the employers. General Mills Company also puts meditation in practice and encourages the employees to sit still and concentrate on the special rooms that are designed specifically for this purpose. Salesforce Tower has a mindfulness room on every floor. 
There has been a lot of research going on the effects meditation has on the cognitive activity and one such research has shown that people who did not meditate were most likely to find old and complex solutions of the simple issues based on their experiences in the past whereas people who meditated regularly could easily solve those problems and issues faster and better than them. The research has also shown that open-monitoring meditation helps to improve one's memory and mitigates the cognitive rigidity by allowing the creative ideas to flow freely to the most important and cognitive part of the brain i.e. your neocortex. 
Conclusion
In the light of the above mentioned information it can be safely concluded that meditation is an excellent exercise for brain that is extremely beneficial for health, mind, and soul as it plays a great role in relaxing you and helping you break the cognitive rigidity by letting the creative ideas flow easily from the reptilian part of the brain to the neocortex of the brain. It is proven to stimulate creative thinking skills and has been known to be practiced by various successful people and companies in the world.

Citations and References
https://chopra.com/articles/5-ways-to-improve-creativity-through-meditation
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-science-of-how-medita_b_5579901
https://www.mindful.org/does-meditation-boost-creativity/
https://hbr.org/2017/08/can-10-minutes-of-meditation-make-you-more-creative