Morning Pages, I Love You

For 30 days in April, I woke up at 5:30 am to write 3 full pages with my stream of conscious called Morning Pages. And I LOVED IT! 

These morning pages are a practice that come from The Artists Way by Julia Cameron (above. Note: I get a commission of the sales if you buy it, so please buy it). The Morning Pages are one part of this method which is meant to cultivate creativity in your life. Right when you wake up, you write 3 pages (big ones too, not tiny post-it notes) with stream of consciousness. The practice is supposed to connect you to a higher power and supply you with creativity. If you couple the morning pages with an Artist's Date, where you spend 2 hours doing something/anything creative once a week, it is supposed to bring you endless creativity. There are stories of people doing the pages, writing a screenplay, and selling it within a year!

​So for a month, I did morning pages every day at 5:30 am and the Artists Dates every other weekend. I changed some things to fit my lazy Millenial lifestyle: I scrolled instagram for 5 minutes to wake up after my alarm and I only wrote 2 pages because I didn't have enough time in my schedule. The Artists Dates were pretty simple. I colored, watched movies, played on the piano. Anything to fulfill the requirements, although they weren't quite 2 hours long!

But it worked! I had so much creativity and you saw a lot of the results: I started this blog! I ran into Lin Manuel Miranda and I wrote 8 bars of a song on the piano. I truly was getting more creative by the day. Everyday, there would be a moment where I would say, "Okay Morning Pages, I see you" because it truly had improved my relationship with creativity. I felt productive and was excited to see what I was creating. 

Unfortunately after Spring Break ended, I stopped doing the Morning Pages. This past Monday, I went to write a blog post and then NOTHING! My mind was blank, I was struggling to write a sentence, I was terrified. I stared at the empty page for 30 minutes until I decided that I couldn't finish the post. I looked up and told my fiance, "I gotta do morning pages again."

I'm back to doing morning pages: today is Day 2 of Round 2 and I feel great. I wrote all this in 40 minutes! If you want creativity in your life or just to feel inspired, I highly recommend doing Morning Pages. And read The Artists Way because I didn't get through everything: there are prompts and more ideas for Artists Dates. It has been truly a transformative experience for me.