Journaling the Journey

I’ve been drawn to journaling through out my life but I do not have a shelf full of journals I look back on fondly. They’ve been misplaced over the years and I think many of them would make me cringe at my emotional ramblings.

Now this blog is my journal. I still do a paper and pen journal but it is really this blog that has become my journal that I do enjoy looking back on. I believe writing is a valuable skill to process the highlights and lowlights in life so we can move forward with purpose and intention. Without taking the opportunity to reflect it is all too easy to fall into exsisting instead of living. My goal is to live fully in, fully present, always learning - meditating and writing help me do that.

I tried forcing the family to keep a journal on our recent trip. They were resistant to say the least. I stayed on their case for the first couple weeks but then I got tired of the battle. It is hard to force someone to journal. It is something you have to choose to get something out of it. Julia Cameron’s book, The Artists Way,  inspired a daily discipline to my writing. 

Morning Pages - Julia Cameron

“Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages - they are not high art. They are about anything and everything that crosses your mind - and they are for your eyes only.”

Julia has shared Morning Pages with writers, painters, and CEOs and across the board people who commit to it report an awakening of creativity in their lives. I decided to try it for 30 days and see what would happen. There were many mornings it was hard to fit in but I stuck to it. Now I am almost to a 100 days in and it is a part of my life that I really value and can’t imagine not doing it. Something happens when we hand write our thoughts without our inner critic. The idea of Morning Pages is to write in an almost stream of conscious state of mind. Through handwriting we can connect to our hearts, our inner voice. The daily handwriting of three pages has opened a creative flow in me that I want to keep open. 

Just try it, start with a small goal, and see what happens.

What if we all awakened our creative flow? Imagine the problems that could be solved, the incredible art that could be created. Imagine the joy of living in creative flow.