Morning Pages and Gratitude Journals
I am terrible at journaling. I am terrible at blogging. I start and then stop and then start again in a year. I buy new journals with prompts and abandon them after filling out 3-5 entries. I start a blog and worry about sharing what’s in my mind with the world. Not necessarily with the world at large, but with my world of people I know. That’s the anxiety creeping in. Does anyone care what I have to say? Do I care what I have to say? But I persist and keep writing in fits and starts, usually when I don’t know how to get out everything that's lurking in my brain.
There are two things that have worked to keep me writing, though. Morning pages and Presently, a gratitude journal app. (I think this app just outed me as an Android user. I’m sure there are 900 gratitude journal apps for iPhone users, but this app is available for Android.)
Presently is a beautiful and simple daily gratitude journal. It’s free, open-source, and ad-free (this is not an ad, just an endorsement of a truly superb app). From their website: “Presently encourages you to celebrate the richness of your daily life, helping you focus on what really matters.”
Each day at 9:00 pm, around when we’re winding down for the day, I get a notification that asks, “What are you grateful for today?” I don’t always remember to write something, even with the notification, but I do more than any time I’ve tried to keep a physical gratitude journal. Sometimes I only manage to write one word. Sometimes I am so filled with gratitude that I have to hold myself back from writing a novel. Either way, it reminds me to pause for a moment and reflect on what the universe has given me. When I’m having a hard day or a hard time remembering the abundance of my life and my journey to contentment, I can scroll through past entries. The entries I wrote the day I gave birth to my beautiful baby and the day that I lost my dear Prexy dog are short and to the point—simply their names—but I can conjure up those feelings of elation and grief in an instant.
Today, I am grateful for being able to share my love for this app with the world.
The other practice that has kept me writing is “morning pages.” This concept comes from The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron. Essentially, morning pages help to clear mental clutter through stream-of-consciousness writing. It doesn’t matter what you write as long as you sit and write three full pages.
This is a fairly new practice to me and I am currently using a field notes sized notebook so instead of three pages, which would be incredibly short, I’ve been setting a ghatika timer (24 minutes or approximately 360 breath cycles…vedic time rhythms are worth a deep dive) and writing until it ends. More often than not, this leads me to write something else that has more of a purpose: a blog post, an email I’ve been putting off, a yoga sequence or nidra script, etc. Even if I don’t write more, my head is clearer and I can set aside the wanderings of my mind to focus on what I need to get done.
A key part of morning pages is that they are for you only. There’s no need to share and no need to read back through what was written. Set it aside, let it go, use it as an inspirational tool, and do it again tomorrow.
I always feel conflicted about getting rid of my half-used journals. Won’t I want them when I’m 80? But my plan with my first full morning pages notebook is to burn it (in a very safe and controlled manner…I live in Colorado, after all). I can truly let it all go and let the results of decluttering my mind be what I look back on.
