Morning Pages

If you’ve read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, then you know what Morning Pages are. If you haven’t tried them, I totally recommend you do. Especially if you are stuck in a creative rut. The whole book is dedicated to getting you unstuck and having you do your best work.

So, what are Morning Pages? They are basically 3 pages of writing that you do first thing in the morning when you are somewhere between being fully awake and half asleep. They are a recording of your uncensored thoughts. You don’t actually think about what to write, you merely record what goes through your mind in this first half hour of the day. Note that there are some specific ground rules you need to follow to make this process effective, but I won’t go into that, you can just google that.

My point for writing this is to share how it has worked for me and hope that you will find it useful. (No I’m not getting a commission for this, but this is so brilliant that I think the world should know about it!)

Firstly, if you’re honestly writing down your thoughts without trying to make yourself look good, which means absolutely no censoring and no re-writing to make yourself look better, then the Morning Pages are very revealing. They reveal your deepest fears, worries and anxieties. They also reveal what brings you the most joy and satisfaction.

It helps to see this in black and white because the truth is that some of these feelings have been tucked away so deep that for some reason or another, we are ashamed of it. Our awareness of these deep-rooted emotions helps us make better decisions. Once we can name our fears, we become less intimidated by it, less trapped by it. We can make more conscious decisions to do more of what brings us joy.  

The other important thing it does, is to slow down our thought processes. We move from one thought to another quickly. Some books say the average person has between 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts a day. We are overloaded with information and distractions daily.

In order to focus on what’s really important, we need to slow down our thoughts.

In other words, take captive of our thoughts—be aware of each thought as it comes. Morning Pages helps us do just that. We take every thought and hold it captive long enough to be written down in long hand. It gives us the clarity we need to produce creative work throughout the day.

Personally I have gone from drawing and painting once every few weeks (and then chucking all of it out) to drawing and painting almost every single day. The best part is that I no longer find the process of creating so excruciating and discouraging. It is now an enjoyable and fruitful process.

So I encourage you to try this out for yourself. It works!