Morning Pages: The Faster You Write, the More They Help | "The Artist's Way" by Julia Cameron

morning pages are a journaling method described in this book the artist's Way by Julia Cameron and they're a a three-page burst of stream of Consciousness writing that the author recommends you do in the morning where you write as quickly as you can whatever comes to mind and she developed this technique specifically to help artists get past their creative blocks but really it can be used by anybody who has like thoughts and emotions going on inside our minds that like in some way are holding us back which pretty much applies to everybody so in this video I'll talk about why morning pages are effective and then I'll discuss two ways in which they specifically can help you get to a better place mentally and emotionally now in discussing why they work I have to talk a little bit about how the human mind works and a lot of this comes from Thinking Fast and Slow the body keeps the score and strangers to ourselves these are all psychology books that I've done videos on in the past now specific to the unconscious mind all right the unconscious mind is like the fast uh thinking system it processes a huge amount of information every second of every day and you know it does a whole lot of stuff but specific to morning Pages two things that it does is um it develops The Narrative over time for how we understand the world and how we understand ourselves and another thing that it does is when we have particularly emotionally charged things that happen to us when we when we have circumstances in our lives that are particularly um uh emotional whether it's you know good emotions or bad emotions it really embeds those in a strong way in this ongoing narrative that we have it embeds like the thoughts that we're having at the time and the emotions um and what were the circumstances of you know these really emotionally charged events now the problem is we can't look inside our unconscious minds the way you would use a microscope to look at like a cell in a petri dish and the problem is over time there's a lot of garbage that builds up kind of like you know hair and grease in a drain and we don't notice it because we can't look specifically into our unconscious minds to see what's going on now it's not like the unconscious mind does this deliberately it's trying to help but because it processes so much information so quickly all the time there's a lot of garbage that builds up that it just can't process and if we don't figure out a way to clear it out of the system it can really hurt us and that's you know one of the things morning pages is all about and she has a quote um talking about the unconscious mind all that angry whiny petty stuff including our fear our negativity our mood so all this stuff that we experience every day builds up in our unconscious mind and it creates this backup okay now for the conscious mind all right we're all very familiar with this um she calls uh the aspect of the conscious mind that is specific to morning Pages the sensor you know in the sense like you have if you had a newspaper and you had a sensor blacking out things that it didn't want the public to read you know that kind of sensor and the sensor in our in our conscious mind tries to protect us um specifically protecting us from harm and two ways that it does this is one it tries to prevent us from examining too closely or trying to examine too closely what's going on in our unconscious mind because it's in our unconscious mind that we develop this sense of identity and the conscious mind does not want us examining our sense of identity too closely because we might decide that we want to change it and the mind doesn't like change you know very much particularly when it comes to your sense of who you are um oh another thing that the sensor does is it sensors like our thoughts and emotions and our behavior in particular in certain situations now oftentimes this is really useful right somebody does something to kind of piss you off and you want to say something but you check yourself and you don't and a lot of times that's a good thing because you know if you said something nasty it would probably just make a bad situation worse so this internal sensor that we have oftentimes oftentimes helps prevent us from getting into trouble or perhaps any more trouble than we otherwise would but the downside is okay it also censors our thoughts and emotions in a way that could be unhealthy um and uh you know she she has a quote she has we are victims of a nasty internal critic the sensor who keeps up a constant stream of subversive remarks that are often disguised as the truth right so um you know while it does protect us from harm you know in certain ways it also stifles our thoughts and emotions that eventually could lead to being creative so that's this is another thing that the morning Pages try to overcome so how do the morning Pages fight the unconscious mind and the conscious mind the short answer is it doesn't it doesn't try to go over the hurdle it tries to go around it and it does this in two different ways one um because you're writing so quickly right it's a three-page burst of stream of Consciousness writing um you're so focused on writing anything that comes to mind right that the conscious sensor doesn't have time to inhibit uh your thoughts so you just write out whatever you're thinking and feeling and the conscious mind can't keep up and it can't say wait wait don't think that don't write that that's bad right that's why you have to go as quickly as possible as quickly as you can writing down anything that comes to mind because you're trying to get past the sensor and the sensor as part of our conscious mind works relatively slowly so if you can write really quickly and just write whatever comes to mind it doesn't have the time to prejudge what you're going to write down now because you're distracting the conscious mind and it's being overloaded it makes it much easier to dump out what's in our unconscious mind now as I said you know you can't exactly peer into the unconscious mind but it does let things out it's like a black box where you can't look inside but there are inputs and there are outputs and when we're writing down you know as fast as you can it's and you're um you are preventing the conscious mind from pre-judging what you're writing it's a way specifically to help clear out all this garbage that's in our unconscious mind now I mean it's not like magic it takes you know a lot of practice and it takes a long time she recommends you know you write for eight weeks you know every morning for eight weeks before you even start looking at what you've written but the point is that because it's a burst of stream of Consciousness writing it allows your unconscious mind to dump out all this garbage that's building up and it prevents your conscious mind from pre-judging and censoring you know your ability to do that um so she's got two quotes here uh one is by Einstein he says why do I get my best ideas in the shower right and the point is and this is not uncommon to scientists who you know study problems with their conscious Minds really intensely and they go off and do something else like go for a walk or go biking or whatever or Einstein in the shower and they have these bright ideas why because when you take your conscious mind off the problem right it doesn't it doesn't the sensor isn't working and it's not pre-judging ideas and it allows um the creativity going on in your unconscious mind kind of like to work its magic and eventually to come out um and she actually has another quote by Paul Gogan a artist I shut my eyes in order to see okay and my interpretation of this quote again is that you know he's saying when he when he cuts off his conscious mind okay he can really feel deeply what it is he's trying to express through his art and she has another Edgar Degas also another famous artist only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things again it's the idea of if you can distract your conscious mind in you know whatever way for Einstein you're just taking a shower thinking about unrelated stuff or Edgar Degas when the conscious mind is like okay you know what I don't even know what I'm doing that allows the unconscious mind to sort of get out what's been stifled so you know this is how it works for scientists and artists now how is it that the morning Pages can help us mentally and emotionally well there's two specific ways that you know I said I was going to mention at the beginning one is to help heal what's broken internally all right so um you know as I said we have a lot of garbage that builds up in our unconscious mind and in a lot of ways it hurts us you know it hurts um how we think about ourselves how we relate to the world and its stifles our uh creativity our ability to express ourselves and so we have to heal you know what's been damaged on the inside and a very effective way of going through the process of healing is getting it you know all this stuff out on paper just the process of putting it on paper even if you don't read anything that you write ever just the process helps your subconscious mind work through you know this crazy entanglement of nonsense and garbage and pettiness so that it can like clear the drain so to speak and um you know in the process of writing so quickly you know you can get it all out without judging it uh without judging yourself and without judging what it is that you're writing and so doing this helps you process you know all this garbage clear it out straighten it out in your subconscious mind and move forward and she has a quote she says the reward for attention is always healing attention is an act of connection in times of pain when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember I have learned to pay attention to right now well this is what the morning pages does it it forces us to pay attention uh not in a conscious way but pay attention to what's going on in our unconscious minds and to just get it out so it's like you know you don't have to think about the future you're not thinking about the past in fact you're not consciously thinking about anything you're just getting you know all of this stuff out as quickly you can whatever comes to mind and it's a way of paying attention to what's going on inside you right so that you can um help you know heal the damage you know clear out the blockage and be able to move forward and so it's like after we do the healing right we can begin to grow and this is uh the second way that um morning Pages can really help us um so you know part of the the aspect of this sensor of our unconscious minds is to protect our egos um because nobody likes to try something and fail nobody likes to try something and be embarrassed nobody likes to have a low self-esteem generally and so it's not uncommon for this sensor in our conscious Minds to limit what we try to do um to within a range of comfort that it feels like we can achieve success so it's like don't jump over that really high hurdle jump over this low hurdle because I'm really confident that you can jump over the low hurdle and so you won't feel bad about yourself you know um and you won't be embarrassed because you'll be able to do it and it's this like self-limiting um that can really be damaging particularly if you know you want to be able to express um what's like most meaningful you know inside of you in a way that really resonates with other people because you know if you're if your conscious mind sensor is saying don't do this it might be embarrassing you're probably not going to be very good at it well that's just stifling right and if you go through life only doing those things that you're pretty pretty sure you're going to be able to be successful at well you're probably going to limit yourself and you're going the limit you know that the extent to which you can develop because you're limiting the extent to which you're challenging yourself um and so it's like by writing you know super quickly we release the Stranglehold that our ego and this sensor has on us we just we allow ourselves um to basically what she says we allow ourselves to be bad you know at something because like when you write this really quickly whatever comes to mind right it could just be total nonsense right I mean I just started doing this a couple days ago when I started reading this book and sometimes I run out I'm trying to write as quickly as I can I just run out of stuff and I'm just like all I write down what I write down is I'm just writing just writing stalling stalling stalling until I have another thought and but the idea is doing this quickly without judgment allows you to be bad at something and so it it gets you over the fear of being bad it releases the Stranglehold that the ego and the sensor has on you which tries to limit you to only those things that you can be good at this is a non-judgmental way that you know uh only you will see and it allows you to be bad you know and to have fun with it and she has a quote she's like living within these bounds that the the conscious mind sets for ourselves we may feel stifled smothered despairing bored but yes we do feel safe and safety is a very expensive illusion right so it's like because of fear you know we want to feel safe because of this fear but it's very expensive and it it's expensive in the sense that you limit what you can do you limit how you can express yourself and that's detrimental to you and it it's also detrimental to the world because you're not sharing with the world you know those things that you are probably best suited to share if you could just get past this fear so what is the big picture like why is all this important why is it important you know I I talked about like you know how your mind works and you know how the morning Pages work and two ways that it can help you it can help heal what's going on in the inside and by doing thing you know by doing this badly and having fun with it it releases the Stranglehold of your ego and your sensor but like is there an ultimate goal well I mean there are many ultimate goals and you you know would have to decide what they are but one big thing and I've I've mentioned this you know in this video is that um doing the morning Pages all right clearing out this garbage right helps get us out of our own heads and helps us to engage with the rest of the world why because as she said we go through life and we're very very conscious of all these things that are like all these fears and concerns you know and embarrassments and these petty little things are looping in our minds and if we can clear all that garbage out we can free up our Consciousness to focus on what's going on you know in the outside world and why is this important well one right if you become observant of what's going on around you you open yourself up to Opportunities and possibilities that you wouldn't have noticed had you just been inside your own head worrying about your own fears and concerns and furthermore um by you know freeing up this like conscious energy that we have it allows us right to develop these um our originality to develop the creativity that I think is you know um a lot of people lack and a lot of people desire for this feeling of fulfillment and if we can develop our originality and creativity we can discover our voice right which I mentioned in another video and how we can find our voice to express ourselves in a way that is fulfilling for us and resonates with other people and really helps them so it's like you know ultimately it helps get us out of our own heads clears out the garbage so it frees up all the psychic and you know conscious mental energy you know that we can use to really engage with you with the outside world and it helps us um you know it helps free up this mental energy so that we can focus on developing our creativities not um without fear without concern for embarrassment because in order to get better at anything you're going to have to be bad for a little while that's generally how it goes and if you have this morning practice of being bad writing because it's just you know stream of conscious nonsense right it's a habit that you can develop you know to learn the skill of getting past the fear and she's got two quotes the quality of life is in proportion to the capacity for delight and the capacity for Delight is the gift of paying attention right so it's like there's a real satisfaction and joy that comes from getting out of your own head and being observant of the world around you and really engaging um with you know everything in the world that you can she has another quote this is by Eugene delaqua another famous artist um talking about what inspires the work of great artists he writes or he says is there um what inspires the working Radars is their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough and this really speaks to um whatever is inside of you like this like you know your voice and that which is most meaningful to you is unique to you and you can express it in a way that's unique to any of the other eight billion people on the planet but only okay generally only if you clear out the garbage in your mind you you free up your mental energy um you heal what's broken and um you have fun with the idea of being a beginner at something of being bad until you get better you get past the fear of failure you get past the fear of embarrassment and you can grow and develop so coming up okay oh first thank you to ajt for recommending this book the artist's way uh it was great I hope this video was useful as a result of reading this book I started doing the morning Pages I'm only like I don't know three or four days doing it so far so hopefully over the next couple months you know really you know see specific benefits next up is a book called make your bed it's a really really short book um by this guy he's a Navy admirable mcraven um I forget it's for oh it's right here uh William mcravens really short book um just talking about some of the lessons he learned particularly as a Navy SEAL that's going to be the next video and then the one after this is recommended by Russell thank you Russell I read this decades ago Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill super famous book um that's the video I'm going to do after make your bed uh this is going to be a really good one so thanks for watching I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Dear Niblings

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Length: 20min 45sec (1245 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 20 2023