My Writing Ritual
How “Morning Pages” has improved my life
By now, I am sure most of you have come across The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron. If you haven’t read it, one of the main guiding rituals is “Morning Pages.” You write three whole pages in one sitting, having no goals for your writing. This may seem counter-intuitive, but the act of writing with no goals — this stream- of- conscious act — actually helps me accomplish more during the day. The other instruction is this: Do not read your Morning Pages. If you are like me, you probably love your words, and you want to read them over and over and fix mistakes or revise the organization or pretend to be a New York Times Best Seller. But reading your Morning Pages back to yourself really isn’t the point. Cameron does write about potentially revisiting old notebooks someday. I may do that, but not now. I do sometimes wonder what will happen to my journals when I die. Who will read my randomness and what will they think? But that is another post for another time…
The first time I tried Morning Pages I fell in love with the practice. It was about 12 years ago. I was consistent for about three months. If I skipped a day, I felt off the whole day- kind of like forgetting to brush your teeth. I also fell in love with a man who joined me in this morning ritual. How romantic! Well, he decided to…
