Have you ever woken up feeling that your mind is going hundred miles an hour and your head is about to take off and shoot across the room? Or is it just me?

Hopefully you guys are with me on this one! I have found that the best way to help overcome this is to get the words out of my head and down on paper. In the past I have written journals, where I sat and pondered about what to write and then attempted to create a beautiful piece of poetic indulgence about my day. Most of the time, I ended up just feeling depressed about how dull my day had been and it made me think even more, followed by becoming even more confused and not resolving anything! 

Then I discovered the work of Julia Cameron. I had heard of the book ‘The Artists Way’, but didn’t really know much about it. Then, one day when I was attending the Hay House Writer’s Workshop in Bristol, Julia Cameron walked on stage. Throughout the weekend she took two fantastic, life-changing, workshops. The winter after the workshop (back in 2017) I set about working my way through her book ‘The Artists Way’ with a group of friends. 

So what’s this got to do with helping me, I hear you think?

Well, part of ‘The Artists Way’ course is that each day you do what are called ‘Morning Pages’. This involves committing for the twelve weeks on the course to waking up and getting out your notepad and writing three sides of A4 paper. You don’t edit, stop and think or re-read, you just write down whatever flows until you reach the end of the three pages. 

Some mornings I sat there and wrote ‘I have no idea what to wrote I am only doing this because I have to, the weather is crap I want to just crawl back into bed…’ But then it would happen. After writing about a page and a half, I started to realise I was accessing my own internal therapist, as I was answering my own questions without asking and my own internal wisdom was flowing through as I shut down my racing thoughts by giving them a chance to get onto the paper first.

Making this a routine, and doing it every morning, was a fantastic experience. Many mornings while I was following the course, I ended up doing it by candle-light, as it was winter and our solar panels weren’t producing enough electricity for lights. I began to really love the routine of sitting in bed and writing each morning. It allowed me to off load my internal shit without having to off load onto someone else and I could work things through without getting stuck in my thoughts. 

I see this process as a mind enema, as it allows you to have a good clear out in the morning, so those thoughts aren’t constantly whizzing round your head or, even worse, being off loaded onto someone you love. At the end of each morning’s writing, I would place the pages in an envelop with the intention of burning them on the dark moon. 

Julia Cameron explains the process here:

https://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/

So, this week, I invite you to try this out. Get an A4 notepad and, first thing in the morning, start writing and don’t stop to think. Just keep writing until you reach the end of the three pages and witness your own internal therapist emerging from inside. 

So, are you ready to embrace your own internal therapist? Let me know what the experience was like for you in the comments below.

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