A Divine Message for Discouraged Writers
Revelations from the process of automatic writing
I’ve been doing morning pages (automatic writing) off and on for years now — mostly off. But during a recent phase of this morning ritual of mine, something broke through. I opened up, I stepped myself to the side and, in a hypnotic fervor, I scribbled down exactly what I needed to hear. And I thought to myself that maybe others needed to hear it too.
Before this occurred, I was struggling for most of the morning. I had already overslept, skipped my morning pranayama practice and I had major objections to sitting down to write.
But I sat anyway. The first few pages were uninspired, banal commentary on the day before, my dreams of the previous night, and, at one point, I was even making a list of items I could see in the room. Not exactly Shakespeare, but this is the process of automatic writing.
Before I knew it, my mindless script had transformed into something with direction. I watched my hand twitch fervently as sentence after sentence came streaming out of my ballpoint pen. I didn’t even know what letter would come next and nor did I attempt to know, for that would have broken the trance I was in.
Much like the process of meditation, I was merely a witness to a phenomenon, to something…
