Ellen Livingston is founder of Living Yoga Now, a yoga studio and raw food learning center in Ann Arbor, MI. Ellen has studied nutrition for over 20 years, and lives a vibrant, healthy raw lifestyle. She provides raw food coaching, classes, and nutrition tips.

When passion, mental clarity, and focused energy all come together, our creative expression is at its peak. We’re not likely to make major creative breakthroughs when we’re tired, uninspired, feeling foggy or scatterbrained, or in pain or discomfort of some kind. If you want to live an inspired life and spend a lot of time in your creative genius zone, you need to keep yourself feeling good.

There are many spokes in the “wheel of health” that require our dedicated attention, such as healthy food, good sleep, sunshine, fresh air and exercise, loving relationships, beauty, humor, and meaningful creative work that we enjoy. Our health is hampered by any spoke that is out of alignment. It is a lifetime project to keep all these important requisites of health in balance, a project that requires our constant recommitment if we truly want to thrive and experience our peak creativity.

One spoke is not more critical than another, but the food we choose to put into our body several times every day has a particularly major impact on how we will feel, how well we can function and whether we can tap our genius zone.

Surely you have experienced the dullness of being that follows a very rich or heavy meal, or the mental fog that accompanies a day of eating mostly junk foods. How about a scattered or antsy feeling from refined sugars or stimulants, followed later by a deep tiredness? In these scenarios it is often all we can do just to keep up with the general tasks laid before us – originality and sustained creative flow is just not happening. Can you imagine the possibilities if instead you were running on the perfect fuel and operating at full capacity, all the time?