In 1994 I lived in West Hollywood with my dog Greta on the second floor of a vintage courtyard building, sheltered by a canopy of trees that bordered Poinsettia Park. My three-year relationship with a live-in boyfriend had just snapped under the weight of things we could not say…things we didn’t even know about ourselves. And a torrent of creative energy was rushing through my life, whisking me to the edge of something thrilling and terrifying.
Smacking against old structures and views of my self, The Artist’s Way appeared right when I needed it. It showed me how to build a lifeboat of creative practice that could carry me through my rapids. It was a catalyst for countless practices yet to come.
In her book, author Julia Cameron promotes a foundational activity that she calls Morning Pages: the practice of non-stop stream-of-consciousness writing for three whole pages, every morning. She urges that no matter what kind of yuck shows up, keep writing! The idea is that once we get our mental junk out of the way, our minds are better able to receive creative inspiration.
For the next 5+ years, when Greta and I returned from our morning trip to the park, I faithfully sat at the kitchen table with my cup of tea and peekaboo view of the sandbox below. Once I placed pen to paper, I would not stop writing until I filled three pages of a standard sized spiral notebook.
Morning Pages were my spiritual practice at a time of self-reckoning and transformation. These daily attempts to dig beneath the internal critic, into the fertile mystery of wild mind, helped to till the soil of my being. The practice loosened my grip on a self-identity that was difficult for me to see other ways.
This gradual turning over of hard-packed (and previously unseen) ways of thinking has allowed a host of other practices to flourish in my life. Yet a free-flow of words across a page reliably aerates my egoic landscape, making it more hospitable to creativity.
A WRITING PRACTICE
Tools: paper, pen, and a timer.
Practice:
Find a place you won’t be disturbed and you’re comfortable writing.
Center yourself and let your rational, evaluative, critical mind know it’s off-duty while your creative, accepting, flowing mind plays for the next 10 minutes.
Set your timer, put your pen to paper and let yourself be completely surprised by what comes onto the page for a full 10 minutes.
You can write on any topic, but random prompts can be useful.
Try this one: When I had magical powers…You may want to pause and think of just the right word or wonder where the hell THAT came from. You might harshly evaluate the process and want to rip up what you wrote. You could be tempted to pause and marvel at the beauty of something that just came through you. Keep writing. You can notice your thoughts, you could even put them on the page, but keep your pen moving across the page. Let that movement release whatever needs to come out.
This is an opportunity to see your actual thoughts—to have a new relationship with the messy, unpredictable, controlling, embarrassing, and glorious aspects of yourself. As you practice putting your critic in the back seat, you allow your creative mind to take you to places you aren’t currently aware of.
Experiment. You might try starting your day with a 10-minute writing practice for a week or two and see where that takes you.
Explore with me through Creative Catalyst or The Gladstone Creative Community Lab, a community supported project to artfully co-create a New Earth culture.