The Book That Made Me a Morning Person

Proof that morning persons are made and not born:  me.  It has not always been this way (just ask my mother, my roommates, former college professors, and previous employers).  It was never a goal of mine to be a morning person since showering and getting to classes/work on time was challenging enough.  It all happened in spite of me.

So what changed?  My mindset, and a simple technique called "morning pages."

My much-loved and well-worn 16 year old copy.

In the mid 90's there was a lot of buzz about a book called The Artist's Way.  At the time, I was working in a bookstore and fielded numerous requests for the book. Intrigued, I bought a copy with my employee discount, and then promptly left the unopened book on my shelf for a couple of years.  A cross-country move to the hinterlands of the mid-Atlantic provided the ripe opportunity for Cameron's book to take hold as I looked for ways to distract myself from feelings of being uprooted and alienated.

You will notice the subtitle says A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity.  Honestly, if so many people hadn't asked me about this book I would have blown it off as spiritual hoo-hah.  This book is a 12 week course that basically guides the reader through numerous techniques that gets one thinking differently.  It is not solely for artists (of which I am not) nor for spirituality-seekers (also, not me) but for folks who just want to see if being creative adds in any way to the quality of their lives.  Spoiler alert:  it does.

Tatters.  My poor book sports a broken binding,
 numerous colors of highlighting, and many many scribbles.

The hardest part about The Artist's Way course is a thing called "morning pages."  I used to hate these things with a blinding passion.  They're hard.  And, to get back to the point of this blog, they have to be done first thing in the morning.  And they have to be done in long hand (using a computer is cheating).  "So," you think, "writing three pages in long hand every morning for twelve weeks.  No big deal."  Except that if you're used to editing every thought that comes into your head before you can get it down on paper these pages are like wrenching a nail out of a fence board by using a butter knife.

This is the beauty of the course; it reveals to you the way your family, your community, your culture has affected how you think and view the world.  It took me years of doing the course -- badly, I might add -- before I learned to turn off the editor in my head.  Now, the pages flow easily.  I can fill three pages in about 30 minutes AND I look forward to the process.  Please excuse the coarse words, but the morning pages are basically a brain dump.  After you dump the gunk out of your brain, you leave room for new stuff to come in, potentially better stuff than what you left on your morning pages.

The course is great if you love binders.  Every few years I pull
out the contents and have my husband burn them.  I have
never, ever re-read any of my hundreds of  morning pages.

I credit The Artist's Way for bringing me to Harmony Stable because one of the jazillion exercises in the book dares you to imagine your ideal life.  If you never let those thoughts into your consciousness, you may never get the chance to seize the opportunities when they appear before you.



And so it goes, every year when the time changes back to EST, when I am awake in the darkness of 5:00 a.m., I begin anew the 12 week Artist's Way course.  It is a fantastic winter project, as far as I am concerned, and I have no plans to abandon the routine.  I am currently in the midst of week four, galloping along strongly and feeling full of run.  See?  Pretty creative use of equestrian metaphor, huh?

Lefty's way of doing the morning pages.

And what time did I begin my morning pages today:

Yup.  A.M.

I had to make some coffee first.