Morning Pages
As soon as I started blogging, last December,
I stopped writing my Morning Pages.
Well, almost stopped.
That’s not good for the soul.
Not good at all.
When I opened my (dust covered) notebook this week, I saw that I hadn’t written in it since Tuesday, May 6. Before that, the entries go back to January. No wonder my creativity wasn’t glowing — it was buried under a pile of brain crap!
The Artist’s Way
In case you haven’t heard of it before, Julia Cameron‘s The Artist’s Way is a course in discovering and recovering your creative self — A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity.
I came across this international bestseller in 2002, but only worked through it for the first time in 2003. As this book has done and continues to do for so many people all over the world, it stirred a huge awakening in me; it fueled lots of excitement, unearthed many childhood dreams, and boosted my determination to make these dreams a reality.
BUT… one has to keep at it.
The Basic Tools
The author tells us there are two pivotal tools in creative recovery: the Morning Pages and the Artist Date. And she stresses the fact that a lasting creative awakening requires the consistent use of both these tools.
The Morning Pages
Though The Artist’s Way gives a thorough explanation of what the Morning Pages are, I prefer the one given in Julia’s other book on creativity, Walking in This World.
Here’s an excerpt:
Morning Pages are the primary tool of a creative recovery. Three pages stream-of-consciousness writing done before the day “begins,” Morning Pages serve to prioritize, clarify, and ground the day’s activities.
Frequently fragmented, petty, even whining, Morning Pages were once called “brain drain” because they so clearly siphoned off negativity. Anything and everything is fuel for Morning Pages. They hold worries about a lover’s tone of voice, the car’s peculiar knocking, the source of this month’s rent money.
They hold reservations about a friendship, speculation about a job possibility, a reminder to buy Kitty Litter. They mention, sometimes repeatedly, overeating, undersleeping, overdrinking, and over- thinking, that favorite procrastinator’s poison artists are fond of.
I like to think of Morning Pages as a withdrawal process but not in the usual sense, where we withdraw from a substance taken away from us. No, instead, we do the withdrawing in Morning Pages. We pull ourselves inward to the core of our true values, perceptions, and agendas.
This process takes approximately a half hour — about the same time normally set aside for meditation. I have come to think of Morning Pages as a form of meditation, a particularly potent and freeing form for most hyperactive Westerners. Our worries, fantasies, anxieties, hopes, dreams, concerns, and convictions all float freely across the page. The page becomes the screen of our consciousness.
So I’m back to doing
my Morning Pages.
Consistently.
I feel better already.
Here’s a tip — When I get stuck and don’t know what to write (rare, but it happens), I simply ask myself, How have you been feeling lately? or, How are you feeling at the moment? This always gets me going. And it’s a great way to dig into my deepest innards and see if there’s any poop that needs cleaning. 
Next ritual I’ll be going back to: The Artist Date.
How about you?
Do you brain dump?
Beach. Stacy’s a seasoned jewelry artist, her work is amazing. All I want to do is produce simple bracelets: small, delicate beads, assembled with elastic string. So she directed me to the right material but then I was also tempted into buying a moon-like bead, a piece of leather thread, and a metal thingy for a clasp, all this in order to make myself a cool necklace. In the photo, top right, is a stack of orange coral that used to be my mother’s necklace; it broke a few decades ago, and I want to turn the lot into an ankle bracelet. The white bracelet, bottom left, I got in Cuba (fish bone); it’s a tad too big, so I’ll be eliminating a few beads and joining the rest together using the elastic string concept.
After we left the bead store, we stopped for take-out sushi, wine, an assortment of baklavas, and a de-li-cious dark chocolate bar.
