Do you know what my "Compass" moment was? Journaling, of course! Most unexpectedly, Morning Pages. Morning Pages is a practice that Julia Cameron teaches in her book The Artist's Way. {click here to read more about this book} In one of my earlier posts, I kind of complained about doing them. Why? Because Morning Pages aren't just a Spillage but a Dump of what is in your brain. And just like it sounds, often times, a dump isn't very pretty. And I wanted Pretty, Fun, Interesting... anything but a dump of "gunk", as I called it. What I didn't know is that I hadn't gotten the point... and I was doing it all wrong!
What restarted me on my Morning Page adventure is an online journal class that wasn't very inspiring to me. In fact within a day or two I was so disappointed... so I got out of my class and opened Kindle and lurked for sample books to read (one of my favorite hobbies) and what did I come across by chance? (Or by serendipity... we will go over that later.) A short kindle book for $2.99 by Julia Cameron called The Miracle of Morning Pages:... {click here to read more about this book}. It was a short little recap of how to do Morning Pages and how they work their magic.
What I realized is that Morning Pages are just a way of reminding yourself, about your worries, angst, anger, dreams, day to day trials, plans... anything and everything. Grab paper write three pages (a page is one side of a 8 1/2 by 11ish size page) and only those three pages. You do it first thing in the morning so you clear yourself out before you start your day. So its like a clean sweep for your day. You are limited to three pages so you don't muck around in the gunk, you just get it out! Now if you want to write more afterward you can but no more dumping! Work on a writing project, ideas, make art, journal, do a meditation practice, do anything... just no more dumping.
And I just had to try doing it the RIGHT way. And it kind of made me excited. Can you believe it? I was kind of excited to get up at 4:45 am in the morning so I would have just enough time to do my Morning Pages before I got ready and zipped to work. Since I didn't expect it to be fun or pretty, I didn't care about that. I just dumped. And dumped. What I found is that my dumping helped me keep track of some of the things I had wanted to do but just was too exhausted in the evening after work, to do. Like exercise, doing a budget, getting back to art journaling and ... getting back to blogging... ha! And by dumping it out every morning it stayed fresh in my mind. And I found I actually started to do something, a little bit, but something all the same, about a lot of the things I wrote about.
Better yet, I actually looked forward to getting up at 4:45 am to get to my Morning Pages! And after a week... I got back on track to budgeting, exercising, and can you guess it? Blogging!
So, here I am! I feel so lucky to be back!
NEW FORMAT:
I have decided to revamp the name and format of this blog a bit. Under EXPEDITION JOURNAL ENTRY: I will include personal journal life spilling. What is up in my life. What I have learned, experienced, discovered. Classes, book reviews, techniques, wonderings... anything I think you might interest you while on this expedition.
You will still find my interactive journaling EXPEDITIONS every week or so. Follow along and have fun!
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