[PODCAST TRANSCRIPT]
This podcast is for those who have an impulse to create, but feel stuck and something is holding them back from truly expressing themselves. But I believe the tool I’m going to share with you today is a great tool for anyone trying to improve their life.

First a little backstory.

When I was 19, I moved to Ireland from my home country of Slovakia, to study music production, and I was super excited because I was gonna meet my musician peers. I was gonna be a part of a community. I was gonna collaborate, and get this music thing off the ground. But there was one big, big, big problem. I had a crippling creative block. I was incredibly afraid to release any music, or to even finish songs or record myself singing. And I was hoping that by moving away from home to a completely different place, the creative block would disappear. But that did not happen. I realized that this internal stuff, all these internal fears we have, do not disappear when we move to a different place. We carry it with us everywhere we go. None of it went the way I was expecting. I really wanted to express myself as a creative, as a musician, and I was desperate for a solution. So I started reading books, right? I read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. I read the Creative Act by Rick Rubin. I read Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon. But none of them really did it for me. And then one day, I was in a bookstore, and on the bottom shelf there was one copy of this book called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, so I bought it on a whim and went home and started reading it. And in the first chapter the author, recommends doing what’s called the morning pages. And this is the practice that actually helped me cope with my creative block. And that’s what I want to share with you today.

So what is morning pages?

It’s a type of journaling method. There are different types of journaling, but this one is very specific and very simple. The practice is this: write three pages of handwritten stream of consciousness writing every day, preferably in the morning. It’s not called the night pages. And that’s it. There is no other rule. All you have to do is drag your pen from left to right and do it until you have three pages. And you do it every day, whether you feel like it or not.

But what am I supposed to write about? Anything that comes to mind. Absolutely anything mine would usually start with. “Here we go again. I have no idea to write about.” And it doesn’t have to be pretty, it doesn’t have to have any logical progression. It doesn’t have to sound smart, it just needs to exist. I have a tendency to be a perfectionist, so I bought a big cheap notebook, and on the first page I wrote: “This notebook has the permission to be ugly.” Your morning pages have the permission to be ugly. And nobody is allowed to read the morning pages except you, if you have intrusive parents, or pets or siblings or your partner, or roommates, hide the pages or label them something boring like vegan recipes. Morning pages are supposed to be your safe space, not to be seen by anyone.

Why does this work? What is the magic behind this?

Because it seems so simple, so what’s the sauce?

It works on multiple levels, and I’ll tell you what I noticed through my personal experience. But here is an excerpt from the book, which explains it quite well.

All that angry, whiny, petty stuff that you write down in the morning stands between you and your creativity. Worrying about the job, the laundry, the funny knock in the car, the weird look in your lover’s eye—this stuff eddies through our subconscious and muddies our days. Get it on the page. The morning pages are the primary tool of creative recovery. As blocked artists, we tend to criticize ourselves mercilessly. Even if we look like functioning artists to the world, we feel we never do enough and what we do isn’t right. We are victims of our own internalized perfectionist, a nasty internal and eternal critic, the Censor, who resides in our (left) brain and keeps up a constant stream of subversive remarks that are often disguised as the truth. The Censor says wonderful things like: “You call that writing? What a joke. You can’t even punctuate. If you haven’t done it by now you never will. You can’t even spell. What makes you think you can be creative?” And on and on.

So what the morning pages do is clear your head from all this noise that keeps playing 24/7. The writer, Anne Lamott calls it radio station KFKD or K fucked. Julia Cameron calls it the Censor.

By writing the pages, because it’s stream of consciousness, you abandon the logical part of your brain, and you engage the right brain, which is what the author calls the the artist brain. And all of this stuff that we carry in our heads all day, that we don’t even notice is there, comes out on the page, along with the Censor – the eternal critic.

And by physically putting it on the page, you create a separation between you and your thoughts and the Censor. And you can let the Censor rattle on. And you start to realize that the Censor isn’t you. That it’s the voices of your well-meaning parents, teachers or friends, who said something in the past that stuck with you, and you internalized it. Like “You know you can’t make a living as an artist right?” or you showed your painting to someone and they said “It’s nice, but it’s not Picasso.” And even though you know the comments were stupid, and you shouldn’t worry about them, they haunt you like the ghost of the Christmas past. And whenever you try to make something, the ghost shows up and starts poking you in the eye.

And when you’re creatively blocked these voices, these ghosts are overpowering. So we put them on the page. And by this we’re teaching the logical, Censor part of our brain to quiet down and watch the artist brain play. Because there is no wrong way to do morning pages and there are no stakes, the Censor has nothing to latch onto.

And so when I started doing this, one thing I noticed is that at first, you will usually start with, “I don’t know what to write, I don’t know what to write, I don’t know what to write.” And then you eventually start going, “Okay, I did my laundry. I went to buffet with Jimmy. I had a chicken wrap.” And so on. And you just kind of go through this, like, shallow “What happened to you during the day,” kind of thing. And then at some point, you can’t help but start getting introspective, you start to look inside, and it puts you in touch with your inner self. And you gain a lot of insight.

I find this writing creates a mirror to your thoughts. And slowly but surely, you start to untangle all this stuff that you’ve been keeping inside, and you start to construct a plan to change things.

So here’s another quote from the book.

It is very difficult to complain about a situation morning after morning, month after month, without being moved to constructive action.

The pages lead us out of despair and into undreamed-of solutions.

Like, you know, you go to work and you complain every day that you have to go to work. And it may take weeks, it may take months, it may take years, but at some point you get fed up of this complaining all the time. Of like, “Ugh poor me I have to go to work.” And you go “Okay, what do we do about this?” And this process snowballs into all areas in your life.

So a couple of things I started noticing after doing morning pages for a while:

• I started being more honest with myself and with others: Richard Feynman has a quote that I keep coming back to: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” When an artist feels blocked, we like to bullshit ourselves. Because we don’t really know why we can’t create freely, we make up reasons and excuses like “I’m still learning. I’m not good enough yet. The work is not ready yet.” And on and on and on. And when someone asks us why we’re not producing anything, we say that we have a creative block, and then people feel pity for us. That makes us feel better, so now we call ourselves “a blocked artist,” and we have another excuse to not face our fears. I labeled myself a blocked artist for a long time. And then I had to face the music, and look at the deeper underlying patterns and fears that were actually keeping me blocked. And I also started digging into my relationships and how those related to my artistic fears. And that forced me to be honest with other people as well. And even more important, I started being honest with myself about my relationship with others.
• I recovered a sense of security.
  • I always felt that if I put myself in my work too much, I would be exposed. Almost like being naked in front of a group of people. That people would not only criticize my work, but also me as a person. And it comes back to self love. That if you don’t love yourself enough, and you crave approval from others, you don’t trust your judgement. And you don’t trust yourself. By doing morning pages, I had that one place where I could be completely, 100% honest and I could express myself safely without having to worry about what other people thought. And I started trusting myself and my judgement. And then it slowly snowballed into other areas in my life, and my creative pursuits. And I have to admit, it’s still a work in progress for me. But it’s far far better than when I started. And being secure with myself, and trusting myself more, now I can create without the feeling that my life is on the line.
• And last but not least – I noticed that morning pages are not only about unblocking creativity. I believe that creativity is a natural part of being human. So by healing your creativity, you are forced to heal other aspects of your life. And vice versa – by healing other aspects of your life, you become more creative. Doing morning pages becomes a spiritual practice on its own. It’s a deeply meditative practice.

So to summarize the main points:

Morning pages is a simple practice – 3 pages of stream-of-consciousness writing. While it is simple, it works on multiple levels:

It helps us silence the internal critic, radio station K Fucked, so the artist part of our brain can come out and play.

It keeps us connected with ourselves and it keeps us brutally honest.

And it’s a truly holistic practice. It’s not only for healing our creative side, but also other aspects of our lives.

Final Words

Those are my two cents on morning pages. If you feel like this applies to you – if you feel blocked, or you feel like you’re not living up to your creative potential, I highly recommend you start morning pages. And I also recommend you buy the book – The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. It changed my life, it might change yours as well.

If you’re eager to start, I recommend you buy a designated notebook. I use a big, cheap, spiral-bound A4 notebook with like 250 pages. That’s what I find the most practical. And I find that using a big notebook encourages long form writing much better, compared to a small notebook. But that’s just my preference.

Share this with your friend who you think might benefit from this information. We need more creative people in this world, expressing themselves fully.

Thank you for listening. Take care.