Open Yoga Journal

Realizing a creative idea, quite often we are confronted with a situation where at first, everything goes “like clockwork”, and then at some point we get stuck and can’t move forward. This state is sometimes called “the agony of creation”. Why does it happen? Why, in some cases, we can easily bring our ideas to life and in others we are fighting over them and cannot find a resolution? What is the nature of creativity and what does it depend on? We will try to understand these questions by resorting to the teachings of Yoga.

Creativity is not intrinsic to art only!

Strangely enough, even if we don’t consider ourselves creative natures – we don’t write manuscripts, music, poetry and we don’t create masterpieces of art, it doesn’t mean that we can’t feel the “agony of creation” because creativity is not an exclusive privilege of artists. Developers, engineers, inventors, scientists, mathematicians and even doctors – anyone who creates something or makes a new discovery may face this difficulty. We all know the funny story of how Newton struggled for a long time over the discovery of his law, until one day an apple fell on his head — and it dawned on him!