A few weeks ago I started doing Morning Pages, which is a three-page writing practice described in The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Each morning for the past 19 days I’ve done my three pages, with some mild benefit each day. This morning, however, I had a different experience entirely.
I woke up around midnight and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I began my daily writing session (two hours, the first part of which is Morning Pages). Somewhere in the middle of the third page I was thinking that this particular session felt so beneficial that maybe I should write a bit more. While I was apprehensive because I didn’t want to overdo the writing today, only to be unmotivated tomorrow, I decided to continue. Somewhere in the middle of the fourth page the intensity began to pick up, strong feelings from within began to surface, and my writing become more frantic to the point of being completely illegible. I began sweating, my pulse had likely quickened, and I was writing as though in a rage.
Finally, on the seventh or eighth page I wrote myself out. I sat there is stunned silence for what felt like 20-30 minutes, wondering what exactly had just happened. I’d never had such an intense, emotionally-charged writing session, and I didn’t quite know what to make of it. I felt drained, having gone through some form of catharsis without personal precedent. It was then that I truly appreciated not only the amount of chaos that bubbles in our unconscious minds, but the power of Morning Pages to help extract and resolve it.
Wanting to document my experience while the memory was still fresh, at 2:30am I recorded and published a YouTube video titled “My first truly cathartic experience with Morning Pages”. I expect I’ll be doing Morning Pages every day for the rest of my life, and I encourage everyone else to pursue this or a similar writing practice to help clear out his or her own unconscious chaos.