Everyday Creativity and the Healthy Mind Dynamic New Paths for Self and Society
“We all have universal creative potential, essential in evolution, yet it often goes unnamed and underdeveloped.” So writes (M.D., Ph.D.) in. She adds that creativity, our “originality of everyday life,” offers health, joy, and life meaning, plus a fresh new worldview and view of self-in-world. One sees self as process, life as profoundly interconnected, emergent, surprising, and dynamically changing, with health related to qualities including our change potential, conscious awareness, openness, and non-defensiveness, as we “go with” —and add our unique piece to—this flow.
Framed by the “Four Ps of Creativity” (product, person, process, press) this treatment highlights process. It turns the camera around from the usual preoccupation with creative product to look back—to explore our creative process and how this changes the creative person. This can be for the better, enhancing connections with life, beauty, possibility, each other, and our future.
In addition, environmental press can build or kill creative potential. Happily we humans, with our meta-awareness, can create conscious and deliberate change in self and world. We can shift environment (and ourselves) toward vastly healthier norms.
Further exploration includes unusual topics, less common in the creativity literature, including “normality,” creative potential and some seeming mental health paradoxes, beauty and awareness, nuance, intimacy and creative relationships, chaos theory and “shimmering infinities” in our endangered environment, self-actualizing creativity, higher human development, and higher consciousness. The questions can be profound, including: What is intuition? Is mind the same as brain? Can creativity come from a higher place? Can adopting a creative way of life further our spiritual path? Dr. Ruth’s “creativity” insights will change your world!
Ruth Richards, MD, PHD
Ruth Richards, MD, PHD, One of the leading researchers on creativity in daily life, is a distinguished educational psychologist and Board Certified psychiatrist. As Professor of Psychology at Saybrook University in the College of Social Sciences, she specializes in the areas of Consciousness, Spirituality, Integrative Health, and Creativity Studies.
Many years ago, before she went on to earn an M.D. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, she was studying to become a high school teacher. While taking a required psychology class, a discussion about diagnostics tests led to a “light bulb” life-changing moment when she realized that it was possible to come up with profoundly creative ways to answer even standardized questions!
That creativity, even in such a mundane situation, was real and could be studied. She has researched creativity in educational, clinical, social action, and spiritual contexts, as well as issues in aesthetics and awareness, consciousness studies, and chaos and complexity theories. Dr. Richards has authored numerous papers and chapters and a monograph, and has edited/co-edited two books: Eminent Creativity, Everyday Creativity, and Health and Everyday Creativity and New Views of Human Nature: Psychological and Spiritual Perspectives. She authored Everyday Creativity: Coping and Thriving in the 21st Century, and is currently co-editing Nonlinear Psychology: Keys to Chaos and Creativity in Mind and Life. She was also principal investigator and co-author for The Lifetime Creativity Scales. Dr. Richards is on editorial boards for both The Creativity Research Journal and The Journal of Humanistic Psychology. As a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA), she was the 2009 recipient of the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Lifetime Achievement in Psychology and the Arts. Among her many interests is the concern for whether the everyday creative process can bring each of us, as a creative person, to greater health and purpose by offering new ways to be present with ourselves, each other, our larger world, and life’s possibilities.
