I’m not a journal person, I am not a writer, I never know what to write so why bother. I fully admit that this was my mindset for years. One day after much deliberation I decided to face my nemesis… journaling. Like so many I suffer from the human condition of perfectionism, if it can't be perfect I won't even try to do it, that fear of not being “good enough”, that voice deep inside that creeps in and says you can’t do that piped up every time I would think about it. I was, at the time, searching for something that I couldn’t quite name. I needed a grounding practice that could help me get out of my head and so I signed up for a community cohort where we worked our way through 12 weeks of The Artists Way.

One of the non-negotiables in this creative process was to do morning pages. What are morning pages you ask? It is a style of free writing/journaling that is typically done first thing in the morning where you allow the thoughts to flow from your mind through pen to paper filling three pages…pro tip choose the size of your notebook wisely when you start this practice. I chose a large spiral bound scribbler, which I think really forced me to create this habit of having to write way more than I thought possible. When I tell you that this practice has changed my life I am not exaggerating. This practice has changed my relationship with journaling. I have learned in the process of letting go of perfection, letting go of what I thought it “should” look like and practiced leaning into what it “could” look like. Four years later and I still put pen to paper every morning exercising that habit that I created. That is four years of showing up for myself in a way that helps me work through big feelings, dark shadow thoughts and day to day mundane things that would otherwise take up room in my brain if I didn’t dump them out.

Do I do it 365 days a year? No. I allow myself space to miss  a day here and there but I will be honest and say that if I miss more than 2 or 3 in a row I begin to feel it. There are days when I feel like I have nothing to say so I start out by writing the day/date and describing what the weather is like, what the cat is doing, how I slept etc. It is a rare occasion when that doesn’t lead into the words spilling out. The days when it feels there is nothing to chat to the universe about are often the days when about half way through something comes out that I could never have predicted. Some days, if I feel stuck on what to write, I pull a card from one of my favourite decks and use that as a focus, creating a prompt or an inquiry to get those juices flowing.

At the end of the day it is about developing a practice, it’s about showing up for yourself in some way each and every day. Allowing time to let the practice develop into habit may seem daunting but I promise if you allow yourself the time you will start to explore and find things in the mind/body/soul that you didn't know were taking up space and writing them out by hand can give them permission to release and you will indeed feel lighter.