The inner world of highly creative people that most don’t see

Editor’s note: This article has been substantially updated in March 2026 to reflect Hack Spirit’s current editorial standards.

There’s a monastery in Tibet where monks spend weeks — sometimes months — building elaborate mandalas from coloured sand. Grain by grain, they create patterns of extraordinary precision and beauty. And then, when the work is finished, they sweep it all away.

The first time I read about this practice, I thought it was a lesson in humility. Now I think it’s a lesson in creativity. Because the monks aren’t destroying the mandala. They’re completing it. The destruction is the final act of creation — the moment that says: this was never about the object. It was about the attention.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, partly because of my own writing practice, and partly because I keep meeting people — readers, friends, strangers at workshops — who tell me some version of the same thing: “I used to be creative, but I lost it somewhere.” As if creativity were a set of keys that slipped between the couch cushions.

I don’t think creativity gets lost. I think it gets gripped. We hold on too tightly to the outcome, the identity, the idea of what creative work is supposed to look like — and the holding is what stops the flow.

The shape water takes

In Zen Buddhism, water is one of the oldest metaphors for the mind. Water doesn’t force its way through rock. It finds the gaps. It moves around obstacles. It has no fixed shape, which is exactly why it can take any shape.

Creativity works the same way. The moments when ideas arrive most freely — when a sentence lands right, when a melody appears fully formed, when a solution to a problem materialises in the shower — are almost always moments of release, not effort. You weren’t gripping. You were flowing.

This isn’t mystical hand-waving. Research published in PMC has found that mindfulness — the practice of present-moment, non-judgmental awareness — directly supports the cognitive skills associated with creativity: concentration, reduced fear of judgment, open-minded thinking, and decreased self-conscious rumination. In other words, the less tightly you hold your thoughts, the more freely they move.

The problem is that modern life trains us to grip. We grip our schedules, our identities, our standards, our timelines. And then we wonder why inspiration feels so scarce.

The uncomfortable truth about openness

Psychologists have long known that the personality trait most strongly linked to creativity is openness to experience — a disposition toward curiosity, emotional complexity, and tolerance for ambiguity. People high in openness don’t just think more divergently. They feel more widely. They’re drawn to novelty, but they’re also more affected by what they encounter.

This is the part that rarely gets celebrated. We love the output of creative people — the painting, the song, the breakthrough idea. We’re less comfortable with the inner weather that produces it: the restlessness, the self-doubt, the days when everything feels meaningless, the nights when the mind won’t stop rearranging the furniture.

In my own experience, the most creatively alive periods of my life have also been the most emotionally turbulent. Not because creativity requires suffering — that’s a romantic myth — but because creativity requires openness, and openness means you feel everything more. The good and the difficult. The inspiration and the doubt.

The Buddhist teaching of anicca — impermanence — is useful here. Not as comfort, but as orientation. Everything changes. The blank page that terrifies you today might excite you tomorrow. The idea that feels brilliant at midnight might feel ordinary by morning. The doubt that’s paralysing you right now will pass. It always does.

When you really absorb this — not intellectually, but in your bones — something shifts. You stop trying to capture the good states and outrun the bad ones. You start letting them move through you. And that movement, that willingness to let experience be temporary, is where creative energy lives.

What blocks creativity isn’t a lack of talent — it’s a kind of clinging

Most people who describe themselves as “not creative” or “formerly creative” aren’t actually describing a deficit. They’re describing a freeze. And the freeze almost always comes from attachment — to outcome, to identity, to perfection.

Here’s how it typically works: you create something and it’s well received. The praise feels good. So the next time, you try to recreate that feeling. But now you’re not creating from openness — you’re creating from fear of losing what you had. You’re clinging to a version of yourself that worked once, and that clinging is the opposite of flow.

This is why so many artists describe a painful period after early success. It’s not that they’ve lost their talent. It’s that they’ve gained an attachment — to the successful version of themselves — and that attachment has frozen the water.

The same thing happens outside the arts. In work, in relationships, in how we think about ourselves. We find a formula that works, and then we grip it. We stop experimenting. We stop playing. We optimise instead of exploring. And slowly, the aliveness drains out.

The Buddhist teacher Shunryu Suzuki called this “beginner’s mind” — the quality of approaching each experience as if for the first time, without the weight of what you already know or what already worked. In his words: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.”

Beginner’s mind isn’t ignorance. It’s a deliberate loosening of the grip. A choice to meet the blank page, the empty canvas, the unsolved problem, with curiosity rather than expectation.

The discipline of letting go

There’s a misunderstanding that creativity and discipline are opposites — that creative people are spontaneous and free-spirited while disciplined people are rigid and uncreative. This has never matched my experience.

The most creative people I know are deeply disciplined. But their discipline isn’t about control. It’s about showing up — again and again, without attachment to what will happen when they do.

Writers sit down and write when they don’t feel like writing. Musicians practise scales when they’d rather improvise. Painters stare at a canvas for an hour before a single mark appears. The discipline isn’t in the output. It’s in the returning. Over and over, you return to the work — not because you’re sure it will go well, but because the returning itself is the practice.

This is remarkably similar to meditation. You sit. You breathe. Your mind wanders. You notice it wandering. You come back. That’s it. There’s no “winning” at meditation, just as there’s no “winning” at creativity. There’s only the practice of coming back — to presence, to attention, to the moment where something might emerge.

Recent research reported in Psychology Today has found that mindfulness directly predicts higher levels of creative output, and that the mechanism appears to run through flow states and creative self-efficacy — essentially, the more present you are, the more easily you enter the state where good work happens, and the more you trust your capacity to do it.

A practice for the creatively stuck

If creativity feels distant — if the water has frozen — here’s a practice I’ve found genuinely useful. It’s not about generating ideas. It’s about thawing the conditions that allow ideas to arise.

Step 1: Sit somewhere quiet for two minutes. Close your eyes. Take three slow breaths. Don’t try to think creatively. Don’t try to think at all. Just breathe.

Step 2: Pick up an everyday object — a cup, a pen, a stone, anything within reach. Spend sixty seconds looking at it as if you’ve never seen it before. Notice its texture, its weight, its colour, the way light falls on it. Don’t name it. Don’t evaluate it. Just see it.

Step 3: Put the object down and, without planning, write one sentence. It doesn’t need to be good. It doesn’t need to be about anything. It just needs to exist. Let the sentence be whatever it is.

Step 4: Read the sentence once, then let it go. Don’t revise it. Don’t judge it. Just notice that you created something from nothing in less than three minutes — and that the quality doesn’t matter. The act does.

This practice works because it bypasses the two biggest creativity killers: self-judgment and attachment to outcome. By starting with presence (the breathing), moving through beginner’s mind (the object), and ending with release (letting the sentence go), you’re rehearsing the entire creative cycle in miniature.

Common traps

Waiting for inspiration to arrive before you begin

Inspiration is not a prerequisite for creative work. It’s a byproduct of it. You don’t wait to feel motivated and then sit down. You sit down and, sometimes, motivation follows. The monks don’t wait to feel spiritually moved before they begin the mandala. They begin, and the practice becomes the spiritual experience.

Confusing creativity with productivity

In a culture that measures value by output, it’s easy to confuse making things with creating things. Not every productive day is a creative one. Sometimes the most creative thing you do is stare out a window for twenty minutes and let your mind wander. That wandering is where new connections form — it just doesn’t look impressive on a to-do list.

Identifying too closely with your creative output

When you fuse your identity with what you create, every failed project becomes a personal failure. Every rejection is a rejection of you. This fusion is a form of attachment — and it’s one of the fastest ways to freeze the creative process. You are not your work. You are the awareness from which the work arises. The mandala is not the monk.

Believing creativity belongs to “creative people”

Creativity isn’t a trait that some people have and others don’t. It’s a capacity — like attention, like compassion — that can be cultivated or neglected. If you’ve neglected it, that doesn’t mean it’s gone. It means the water has been still for a while. The current is still there, underneath.

A simple takeaway

• Creativity isn’t something you produce. It’s something you allow — by releasing the grip on outcome, identity, and perfection.
• The Buddhist teaching of impermanence (anicca) isn’t just a spiritual concept. It’s a creative one. When you stop trying to make things permanent, you free yourself to make things honest.
• Mindfulness and creativity aren’t separate practices. Presence is the soil in which ideas grow. The more fully you’re here, the more freely the work flows.
• The discipline of creativity isn’t about control. It’s about returning — to the work, to the page, to the moment — without needing to know what will happen next.
• If the water has frozen, you don’t need more talent. You need more warmth. Start with attention. Start with letting go. Start with one sentence that doesn’t need to be good.