How to increase creativity

So a friend of mine emailed me and said she thinks that my blog posts are too personal and I should be more content-focused. I suppose I'm in the unique position of being one of the very few people who can talk about her married life fully certain that her spouse is never going to read the posts, so that allows me to talk about some things that in most cases are better kept private. Honestly, I would love it if my husband read my blog, because one of the things that makes me feel less emotionally connected is his disinterest in what I write, or what I think about. I guess it's the complete opposite of being married to someone who snoops through all your emails and stuff, and I prefer the complete disinterest, but a bit of balance would be nice.

It's said that we always marry people who are like our fathers and mothers. I would never have thought my husband was like either of my parents, but oddly enough, my parents also have no interest in what I write or my many opinions on everything under the sun. When I was connected with the Berkeley Psychic Institute, I was on the "pastor track," doing the Christian Education Teacher's Program. So I had a lot of speaking parts in church. I gave two sermons, and I invited my parents to attend one of them. They came and they sat in the back of a room that was more than half empty. Later on, I asked them what they thought.

"Oh, we couldn't hear anything, because we were sitting in the back," they said.

Uh...

Anyway, I digress once more into the personal. So my content-based topic for the day is increasing creativity. I've started doing an Artist's Way group with Savvy Authors, and although I don't actually have the book with me here in Brazil--it's at my parents' house in California--I figure that really, the most important things in it for stimulating creativity are

• the morning pages, which allow you to suspend the judgment and Inner Critic that squelch most efforts to be creative, and 
• the artists' dates, which begin to take you out of the space of effort in creating--bringing play and joy back in, the only vibration in which inspiration really flows.

So I've now done morning pages for three days--it's just writing around three pages in the morning of whatever you want. It's helped me brainstorm parts of my novel that I've been stuck on, and generally it's made me just much more prone to expressing myself--for instance, I only blogged a couple times in the last two months and here I am, already on my fourth post in five days.

I've done one artist's date--I printed out a mandala coloring page and started coloring it. I got bored halfway through and gave it to my son to finish, but it was a good date while it lasted.

• I've also been playing with listening to theta and alpha wave brain entrainment music, because that helps shut down the beta chatter and resistance that often precedes settling down to create. Here's an example:

• and using aromatherapy, particularly rosemary essential oil for focus and creativity--one drop rubbed into the third-eye spot between the eyebrows.
• There's also a lot of good flower essences for increasing creativity, but what I've been doing instead is gather a bunch of flower essences from my personal stock and stand up holding each one in turn. If your body leans forward, it means "yes." If your body leans back, it means "no." If your body sways side to side, it means "maybe." Test each bottle without looking at the name and see what your body prescribes for you. Your body's response should be faster than thought, because if your mind gets in the way you'll simply sway whatever way you think you will. If your body takes too long to respond, test and test again.

So how's that for content?