Creative Contemplation Bhavana at its core refers to being fully present and aware of the moment, with your mind, body, and soul. In many ways it can be seen as a prayer or meditation, and as such remains a popular practice across faiths and religious lines.

A contemplative prayer essentially involves seeking direct awareness of the divine, while creativity and bhavana, or feeling are tools that help in attaining the same. 

The practice of creative contemplation bhavana aims to connect our “inner monk” with our “inner artist,” compelling us to witness the creativity in religious practices, and the divinity in art. It offers an effective method for individuals to take their spiritual practices and prayers to the next level.

1. What Is Creative Contemplation Bhavana?

We’ve all heard the adage ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, and on the same lines creative contemplation bhavana is about using creativity or the use of visuals to exponentially increase the potency of prayers. ¹

It is about giving shape to our emotions with the use of creative expressions, ultimately aimed at becoming more contemplative and aware of divinity. 

All forms of art and imagery resonate with us in certain ways, a starry night sky, or peaceful forest might evoke states of blissfulness or contentment, while the scenes of celebrations or hanging out with friends and family evoke feelings of happiness and joy. 

As a result, these visuals, and their respective emotional states play an outsized role when it comes to law of attraction practices and even regular prayers. Intense emotions are essential for contemplative spiritual practices, and resonation at the right level is required to connect with the divine. ²

2. How To Start With Creative Contemplation Bhavana?

2.1 Choose The Right Place

There are a number of different ways in which creative contemplation bhavana can be practiced, depending on individual preferences and proclivities, but the core essence, or framework remains the same. In this article, we highlight a basic boilerplate approach to get started, which can be expanded on overtime.

The first step is to create an altar for your contemplative practices, one that is free from any kind of distractions, along with total privacy. The place should be dedicated for praying, meditating, and other spiritual endeavors, and should reflect the right energy and frequencies to aid and make the most of your efforts.

You can further enhance this space, place idols of deities, and perform rituals to consecrate the place to resemble your own personal shrine.³ Once you’re done with it, the place should reflect a cocoon of energy, to support all your practices and spiritual growth going forward.

2.2 Set A Proper Time

It goes without saying, but success with such practices isn’t something that can be achieved overnight, and often takes weeks of practice before you can start to see results. So, it is essential to block a few minutes every day for creative contemplation bhavana, and stick to it.

The perfect time of day is when you are less likely to have distractions, or interruptions, and at the same time, your mind must be free from the stream of thoughts arising from the events, media, and incidents that it witnessed throughout the day.

2.3 Take A Deep Breath

Once everything is set, you can get started with the practice by starting with some deep breathing. Take a deep breath, and while exhaling, ask yourself — why am I doing this? What exactly do I want? What does success mean to me? Start digging deeper… Is that really a success? How will my life be different when I am successful?

This is contemplation at its essence, the process of exploring your deepest wants and desires, trying to figure out where they came from, and why you want to achieve them? 

This, when done with absolute focus and awareness will lead to high levels of clarity, making your thoughts a lot more subtler, leading to better communications with the Universe, the divine, or any deity that you might be worshiping.

2.4 Refine Your Thoughts

With this, you can fundamentally refine the thoughts and affirmations that have long been the foundation of law of attraction practices, leading to better results overall. 

After digging deep into your wants and desires, over time you will finally have the answer to what exactly you are looking for in this world. This helps get rid of the volatility and uncertainty that hounds the minds of most individuals, leaving a single guiding light to accomplish your desires.

Spirituality aside, such a practice provides clarity, and helps in the accomplishment of most goals even for skeptics and non-believers, such is the power of a clear mind and thought-process.

2.5 Creative Affirmations & Bhavana

Once you have clarity on what it is that your heart most desires, we can then move onto the creative aspect, and this includes coming up with prayers, affirmations, or visuals that best reflect the same. 

As discussed earlier, the best way to make prayers and law of attraction work is by attuning your affirmations with visuals, and your emotions. So, the key is to come up with visuals that best represent your desires, and helps provoke an emotional response.

This can be visualizing the end results, for example, if you want to win a sports tournament, visualize lifting a trophy, and celebrating with your teammates. If it’s a promotion, or a salary hike, visualize a celebratory lunch after attaining the same, along with positive affirmations.

With this, we’ve covered the core essence of creative contemplation bhavana, as a means of making your prayers and practices more potent.

3. The Benefits of Creative Contemplation In Sadhana

For seekers and practitioners of the law of attraction, creative contemplation holds a host of different benefits that make it indispensable. 

Starting from a true realization of your deepest desires and wants, to using emotions and vibrations to best convey them to the Universe, this technique essentially represents a more evolved approach to communicating with the divine.

3.1 More Clarity of The Self

As discussed earlier, we often have little clarity on our own desires and wants. Many of the things that we desire are a result of various insecurities, or traumas, that materialize in this form.

Spiritual progress, however, is only possible when we dig deep into these traits and understand the true nature of desires.

3.2 Reduced Desires

Once we start to dig deep and examine our thoughts, desires, and other traits from a distance, we start to realize the pointlessness of many of these desires, helping us overcome them fairly quickly.

3.3 Better Results With Prayers & Practices

People who pray regularly, or practice the Law of Attraction stand to see better and quicker results when their practices are paired with creative contemplation bhavana.

This allows individuals to get closer to their non-dual selves, before affecting reality with their thoughts, prayers and affirmations.

While all prayers and spiritual practices in pursuit of materialistic goals have to be accompanied with material efforts, the practices themselves help in removing roadblocks, and help us better align our energies as we fight through the chaos of the universe in-pursuit of our goals.

3.4 Spiritual Experiences 

The regular practice of prayer and meditation, along with contemplation and staying in touch with your emotions is the perfect recipe for spiritual progress, on a slow, but steady pace. 

Regular practitioners of this method go through a number of spiritual experiences over time, further purifying their minds, and cementing their faith.

This concludes our take on the creative contemplation bhavana, an old practice that has just recently come into prominence, especially among new-age and occult practitioners. Even for those of you who don’t believe in the spiritual basis for prayer, or the law of attraction, contemplation holds a host of benefits such as mental clarity, understanding of true desires, and more.

4. Final Words

As a concept, this remains at nascent stages, and is yet to receive widespread recognition or acceptance in the new age communities. As a result, we’ve had to scour through the web and relevant literature to come up with information and methods discussed above, but over the next few months, we should see a lot more case studies, methods, and stories from experts and amateur practitioners alike.

If you’ve had the chance to put this in action, please do share your experiences with the method in the comments section below.

5. Frequently Asked Questions

5.1 What Does Contemplate About Life Mean?

Contemplating about life is essentially asking yourself a few deep questions and digging into your own personal experiences, thoughts and understanding for the answers. It helps people better understand why they do the things they do, why they react the way they do, and the factors that lie at the root of their various desires, fears, and insecurities.

The practice of contemplation, or contemplating the meaning of life, when done with focus, sincerity, and dedication, opens up long hidden and suppressed emotions, and forces us to contend with them.

5.2 What Is Bhavana?

The term ‘Bhavana’ refers to feeling, emotions, or reflection, and in the context of this practice, it refers to the emotions that are evoked with the use of certain visuals.

Emotions such as joy, happiness, contentment, and euphoria are some of the frequencies that can resonate with your practice with the right use of creative visuals.

5.3 How Does Creative Contemplation Help?

The practice of creative contemplation helps make your prayers, affirmations, and meditations a more potent force, resulting in better and quicker responses from the universe.

Even for skeptics and non-believers, the practice holds a lot of value by helping them dive deep into their minds to identify the true nature, extent, and reasons behind their deepest desires.

5.4 What Is Contemplating The Divine?

Contemplation is the art of deep listening that allows us to connect within ourselves, and as we dig deeper and deeper within ourselves, we eventually start to discover the divine non-dual aspect that lies hidden within each of us.

1. https://baptistspirituality.org/2011/03/03/your-potrait-with-god-prayer-with-visuals-and-the-power-of-daydreams/
2. https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/manifest-what-you-want
3. https://isha.sadhguru.org/us/en/wisdom/article/what-is-consecration