This is episode 2,252 of your daily meditation podcast.

I'm Mary Mechley, and I welcome you back to day three of our series we're exploring this week.

This week, the theme is daring to live full out who you are, and this is also a theme where you unleash your creativity.

In fact, that is your challenge for this week.

It's to live creatively every single day in a particular way, to express your creativity in a particular way each day.

So for today, for all of you, journalists, and also for your meditation focus today, you are encouraged to begin to release fear by focusing on abundance and gratitude in your life.

One of the biggest obstacles to creativity is fear. Fear can make you stuck for years. It can catapult your creativity.

As you begin to focus more on abundance and gratitude, and by the way, here you are doing just that because meditation is one of the best ways to cultivate these important qualities in your life.

So you are on your way. You will release fear more and more as you focus on abundance.

So I want to share with you a little insight into what fear does to your creativity.

And this is from an article from Forbes.com. It is titled fear shrinks your brain and makes you less creative.

The author is Carolyn Centeno Milton. She interviews a neuroscientist, Dr. Wendy Suzuki from NYU.

She's a professor there and she wrote a book called Healthy Brain Happy Life. Dr. Suzuki emphasizes her studies on long-term memory, creativity, anxiety,

and how exercise affects your brain and overall health. All these are interrelated.

She talks about how abundance starts with appreciation and gratitude for what you have because everyone has abundance of some kind.

She goes on to talk about how gratitude affects your brain. When you have a mindset of gratitude and abundance, you basically help eliminate the fear that comes in all too easily when you think of something that causes you fear, such as taxes or any other fear-inducing word.

You're actually protecting your brain if you can come from gratitude and abundance.

In neuroscience speak, you are decreasing the activity in an area of your brain which processes fear called the amygdala.

You may already be familiar with how fear impacts the amygdala.

But what is interesting in what Dr. Suzuki has to say is that the amygdala is not only a sensory area for fear, but more dangerously.

It has motor outputs to those areas that make your heart beat faster, make you sweat, and contribute to that feeling of anxiety and this stunts creativity instantly.

So you want to counter that activity with other thoughts and activity.

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