Morning Pages

This post is about a basic, basic practice – like brushing one's teeth – that is absolutely critical to the journey. Maybe it seems as though it is coming late in my rather verbose blatherings. (A friend just emailed me saying he'll catch up on my blog when he has a few weeks of free time...point taken....point ignored.)

Morning Pages are something that you will read in the first chapter of The Artist's Way. They are something you might brush off as silly, stupid and a waste of time. You would be missing out on a major, major spiritual and creative tool if you did that. Morning Pages are, simply, three handwritten pages of stream-of-consciousness writing performed in the morning. Usually the first thing you do in the morning, i.e. before you start working.

It is not journaling. Although you may happen to recount events from your day and how you felt about them. It is not brainstorming. Although you may work through the various solutions to a certain problem. It is clearing space. Clearing mental, emotional, spiritual, creative space. It is skimming off that layer of mental crap that accumulates in the 24-hour period since you last did your Pages.

In Ayurvedic medicine, they recommend scraping your tongue in the mornings. That a layer of waste (called ama) has accumulated and come to the surface during the night and scraping it off is part of hygiene. Morning Pages are scraping off that layer of waste.

My pages always begin like this: Tired today. Hate the smell that is coming from my fridge. Am now dreading opening the fridge. Best diet in the world. A stinking fridge. X seemed pissy last night on the phone. Was it me? Am I imagining as usual?

You get the point. Insecure, irritated, tired...mental waste. Clear it off. As I'm becoming more and more aware: the good stuff is on the other side. In fact, Julia Cameron writes that in her book. Why do we do the morning pages? To get to the other side.

And what, you might ask, is on this glorious Other Side? Clarity, inspiration, gratitude and love. For real! Once you clear off the mental crud, you are able to access the responsive, open and intuitive realm of creativity.

The key is in the stream-of-consciousness, though. If you think and process and "journal" your way through these, the evil Editor will perk up its warty little pointy ears and start trying to manage the process. Write fast. Write faster than you can think. Messy scrawls across the page of total nonsense. Just to sneak past the Editor. Once you're through, you're golden.

Then you locate yourself firmly in your intuition, where thoughts, ideas and answers are true and real and good. Edited, censored, analyzed, processed answers...blech. They are about as authentic as processed food crammed full of additives, preservatives, BHT and red dye #5. The mental additives are things like "shoulds", ego and weird beliefs. Blast past all that crap and get to the good stuff.

How you use your Morning Pages and what you get out of them will emerge over time. These past few days, I've been using my Morning Pages to discover my characters. Today was a marvelous, marvelous example. I have really over-processed one of my characters, Claire, to death. I have no idea who she is anymore or why she is doing the the things she's doing. So today, I went to the pages. Cleared away all the 'I'm tired, life stinks' garbage and asked about Claire. I wrote about where she's at in life and what that means – still stream-of-consciousness. Still trying to sneak by the Editor.

Claire was just diagnosed with breast cancer. She has no children. So her breasts, parts that should have been life-giving and nurturing, are now, sadly, threatening her life. She never used her breasts for their true purpose and now...it's too late. You don't know what you've got until it's gone. So I explored that. What does that feel like? What would I do? What would Claire do? How would she cope with this reality?

And I'm there, hanging out in a really lovely intuitive, empathetic, compassionate space. And the answers start coming. Here's what she does. Here's how she copes. (I can't tell you yet because I need to write it first...there is another date with my intuition still to come.)

Clear away the waste, access the intuition, find the truth. What a glorious process. And then I usually spend half a page thanking God, thanking the Creator, thanking this delicious intuitive force that has guided me to the truth. Gratitude is important. More on that later.

Now, something must be said about the challenge of forming a habit like Morning Pages. It took me a full month of resisting, forgetting, minimizing, and a whole host of other 'reasons not to' until I understood the power of this simple exercise. It is a healing exercise. It is a joyful one. It is a habit that must be formed over time.

It's like exercise. It is so good for us. It makes us healthy. It is actually joyful, once you drag your ass outside to do it. But we resist it. We find a gazillion reasons why not. I'm busy. I'm tired. I'm hungry. I'm working. Blah blah blah. Exercise takes 30 minutes. So do Morning Pages. If you can't carve out 30 minutes in a day to nurture yourself and make yourself healthy...you've got bigger problems.

It's about self-worth. Valuing yourself enough to be healthy and whole. All those other things – the things that are more important than exercise or Morning Pages – by choosing them over yourself, you are making a fairly bold statement about where you fit in your own life. Everything else and everyone else is more important than me. Wow.

I'm not saying that we should all shirk responsibilities like jobs and kids and calling the plumber. Those things need your attention. But somewhere along the line, those things become more important than you, your needs, your dreams, your health. And the people in your life who see you putting everything else ahead of yourself...well, they get used to that. They start to count on it – they're only human, after all. And then those reasons become excuses – they can't survive without me – and the cycle continues.

Half an hour, People! It's so, so, so worth it.

And if you are still gunning for Martyr of the Year, check this out: nurturing yourself makes you better at nurturing others. You will have more patience, more compassion, more joy and more love to give because you are taking time for yourself.

The good stuff: love, joy, compassion, gratitude...is infinite. You can't "use up" your love quota. The gratitude bank account is never empty. The joy store is always having a red tag sale. And if you are in a scarcity mindset – a 'I can't give to them because I don't have enough myself' – that's because you aren't giving it to yourself! If you feel depleted it's because you are. And the only person who can solve that issue is you.

Give yourself love, respect, romance, compassion, appreciation – all those things you want from others. Give yourself time – this thing everyone else wants from you.

This post is really about habits. Morning Pages is a habit. Loving and giving to yourself is a habit. Giving to everyone but yourself is a habit. It's not a permanent state. You are not trapped. This is not 'just the way it is' or 'as good as it gets'. See those kinds of thoughts as resistance. Make a new habit.

Does forming a habit happen overnight? No. You didn't just wake up one morning a slave to the needs of your family, boss, friends. It happened over time due to choices that you made. Make new choices. And keep making new choices. And eventually, you will have new habits. Ones that, I hope, include things like Morning Pages and sunrise walks and telling yourself 'I love you'.

It takes 21 repetitions to form a habit. Twenty-one days to a new you. Think about that. Three weeks...a month if you fall off the wagon a little. What would you change? Take one thing. Morning Pages. Exercise. Saying no to people who take advantage of you. Carving out 30 minutes of nonnegotiable Mommy-Alone-Time.

I hope you try it. And if you do try it, I hope that every time you succeed – every day that you actually sit and write your Pages, or take your 30 minutes – that you thank yourself. Congratulate yourself. Add positive energy to what you are doing. Don't sit there and sulk about how you 'should have had this all along'. Your choices got you here and your choices can get you someplace better. So do it with joy and love and gratitude. Do everything with joy and love and gratitude, in fact.

How you do one thing is how you do everything, my friend Cathy says. How are you doing your everything?