Ep 206: Morning Pages - An Exercise in Opening Up and Letting Go

Today, I’m introducing you to "Morning Pages," a transformative practice developed by Julia Cameron in "The Artist's Way." This simple yet profound exercise helps you tap into mental and emotional honesty. When navigating divorce, we often tell ourselves we shouldn't feel certain emotions or we pretend they don't exist. Morning Pages creates a private space to acknowledge everything without self-contempt. What emerges on these pages isn't "truth," just thoughts that need release. 

What makes Morning Pages uniquely powerful for divorce recovery is that it functions as both a mindfulness practice (clearing mental clutter) and a somatic practice (calming your nervous system). 

Letting go rarely happens in a single moment. It's a process requiring consistent practice, which is why incorporating Morning Pages into your daily routine may gradually release what you've been holding onto. 

In this episode you’ll learn:  

• What Morning Pages is. 

• How it’s a practice in both mind (mindfulness) and body (somatic regulation) 

• How to practice Morning Pages

• Letting go is a process, not a one-time event 

• How to have compassion with yourself as you get better at this practice

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Grief and trauma are the two biggest struggles women deal with as they go through their divorce. It's highly likely that you are experiencing both and don't even realize what you're feeling. I'm here to tell you that it's okay for you to grieve your marriage (even if it was shitty) and it's normal to be experiencing some kind of trauma (which is essentially a disconnection from yourself - your mind, body and soul). I can help guide you through the grief in all of the forms it shows up so you can heal. I can also teach you how to ground yourself in healing so you can ease through the trauma. Schedule your free consult by clicking here.

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1. Interested in the Divorce Betrayal Transformation? Learn more here.

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3. Want to work first hand with Karin so you can stop worrying about what your life will be like after divorce, and instead begin making it amazing today? Click here to schedule a consult to find out more about working 1:1 with Karin as your coach.

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Full Episode Transcript:

This is Becoming you Again, the podcast that offers you the tools to deal with the mental and emotional challenges you face as you go through divorce. You are listening to episode number 206, and I am your host, karin Nelson. Welcome to Becoming you Again, the podcast to help you with your mental and emotional well-being during and after divorce. This is where you learn to overcome the grief and trauma of your divorce. We're going to do that by reconnecting with yourself, creating lasting emotional resilience and living a truly independent life so that your life can be even better than when you were married. I'm your host, karin Nelson. Welcome back to the podcast, my lovely ladies. Of course, I am as happy as ever to have you here. I just want you to know that I think it is absolutely relevant to this day and so so important to teach as many women as possible their worth, to help them realize their worth and have an understanding of what that means. What that means is you are just as worthy, just as valuable, just as lovable as any other human here on this planet. You are incredible, and far too many women do not believe that about themselves. Far too many women believe that they are second-class citizens, that their only purpose here on earth is to be a mother, or to serve other people, or to make other people feel comfortable, or to be here as something, to look at something, to help with something, to provide life for something else, and as much as like being a mother is very important. If that is important to you, it is not your soul and only purpose. So I hope that you take the tools and the skills that I am teaching on this podcast and that you truly practice them in your life, because you understanding that you are worthy to be here as a human being, as an individual, here, living a life and having a human experience is important. You are worth knowing this, you deserve to know this, and I want to help as many women as possible, especially women going through divorce, because it's typically in those times of real difficult challenge when we kind of lose sight of who we are, we lose sight of our confidence, we lose sight of our ability to make decisions, we lose sight of our importance in this world, and I want to help you see that again. So that's just a little. I'm on my soapbox today just because of you know, the political climate that we've got going on in the United States right now, there's a lot of pushback against women and their importance and what they're here for, and there's a lot of pushback against women having autonomy, and I'm not okay with that. I want women to understand that they truly do have autonomy, as much as any man, as much as any other human being. So that's my soapbox for today. That's not what the podcast is about, but I felt like it was important that I get that out there and say that I love you guys.

I want you to know how incredibly worthy and valuable you are right now, exactly as you are If you didn't accomplish or do anything else in your life. Right now, you are worthy and valuable and it's 100%, no matter what. It never changes. It doesn't change if you get divorced. It doesn't change if you get remarried. It doesn't change if you have children or don't have children. It doesn't change if you have an amazing, successful job or if you are on welfare. None of those things change your worth. You are worthy to be here, to live, to experience, to love and to be loved. So please, please, remember that.

Okay, I'm going to jump off my soapbox now. I'm going to jump into this episode where we're talking about morning pages and I want to teach you this exercise as an exercise to help you open up and to let go of some of the things that you might be struggling with. So it's going to be kind of a mix between a mindfulness practice and a somatic practice, because it's a little bit of both in reality. I'm going to walk you through an exercise. This is called morning pages. This is an exercise that was presented in the book the artist's way by Julia Cameron. This was actually introduced to me by one of my clients. I hadn't ever heard of it before and she had talked about it and I was like wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on. What are you talking about? I need to check this out.

So, although this is an exercise no-transcript in cognitive thinking because you're writing your thoughts down on paper, like pen to paper I am opining here in this episode that it's also a somatic practice, because once you write your three pages of streaming consciousness that I'm going to talk about in just a minute, but without a sensor, which basically means without judgment of what you've written and without reading it back over and without editing it or any of that stuff Once you do that, your brain and ultimately your body are open to flow. It's open to embracing what you are actually feeling inside your body and then being able to release and honoring those emotions. So that's why I say it's like a mix between this mindfulness practice because you're getting all your thoughts out on paper, but also a somatic practice to help you calm your nervous system, which I think is a beautiful thing, because our brain and our body are connected. They just are. There's no kidding around that, right? So to have something that can work with both of those simultaneously, I think is a beautiful practice. Okay, so, as I said, morning pages this was created by Julia Cameron and, according to her, it's not just a one-time practice.

She is recommending that you do these every morning. That's why they're called morning pages, and this can be true for letting go of something as well. So if there is something that you are wanting to open up to and eventually let go of, something that you've just been holding onto like something from the past, something that you might've said, something that happened, an experience, whatever, right, it could be anything but something that you just want to move on from. Perhaps this practice of morning pages can be something that you can adopt into your life for a little while, as you are working toward the act of being able to open up and let go of whatever that is that you are hoping to let go of. So the idea behind morning pages is to release the thoughts and the feelings, and this is going to help provide relief over whatever you might be holding onto this act of morning pages.

It also allows for emotional honesty, and that is really important, especially when you're going through divorce, because we tell ourselves we're not allowed to feel certain things, we don't want to feel certain things, we pretend like we're not feeling certain things, right. So we want to dig in a little bit to get to some of that emotional honesty, and so the idea behind these pages is to write without contempt for yourself and what you might be thinking and what you might be holding onto. Right, we don't want to hold contempt for ourselves, we don't want to be judging ourselves for what we're thinking or what we're feeling. That there's no healing in that, there's no understanding, there's no even awareness in that. So use these morning pages to just write and express whatever it is that is stored inside of your brain and your body in terms of your emotions.

Okay, give yourself permission to express yourself on these pages and the act of doing this every morning, for however long you decide you need as a practice for letting go. Give yourself permission to do it, give yourself permission to kind of follow this guideline, because letting go is not a one time. Okay, I thought about it and I've just told myself I'm letting it go and now I'm done, like maybe, maybe that could happen, like once in a blue moon, right, like not very often. For the most part, we have things that we are attached to, that we believe, and we have a very difficult time stopping that thing, and so integrating this into your life is going to allow the emotions in and let them flow through you and release, and not just the emotions but the thoughts that are attached to those emotions. Okay, so let's get into the actual act of morning pages so that, if this is something that you want to try, you'll know exactly what to do.

The actual act of morning pages is you're going to wake up and you are immediately going to sit down and write covering three entire pages of paper. Three pages, that's what Julia Cameron recommends. Okay, you're going to write whatever comes into your mind, even if you're like I can't think of anything to write. This is so stupid. I have no thoughts in my brain right now. You are going to write that for three pages. You write whatever comes into your head. You just write it out. You stream it out onto these pages.

Anything you're thinking, anything you're feeling, you do not edit, you do not show them to other people, you do not read back through them, you do not judge whatever comes out onto that paper. This is really important. Okay, this is not for other people to judge. This is not for you to judge. This is not for you to go back through and fix, like you had to in school. This is not for you to go back through and read and be like oh my gosh, I can't believe. I'm thinking that I'm such a bad person. No, it's none of that. Okay, so I'm going to read those kind of guidelines again. You do not edit, you do not show it to other people, you do not read back through it and you do not judge what might come out on paper.

What you write isn't the truth. Okay, it's not the truth, because our brain tells us stuff all the time that is not true. So I want you to understand that what you're writing. It's not truth, it's just stream of consciousness. It's just what is trapped inside your head. There is no wrong way to do this, unless you're doing those things. Don't do those things, it's not wrong, it's just not going to help you. So there's not a wrong way to do this. Okay, just open up and let it flow in order to let it go. The more you do the morning pages, the easier it's going to become, because the more the thoughts are going to flow and you will be better at not judging and not censoring. So that's a good key thing to remember. Like I'm telling you, and Julia Cameron is telling you like, don't read back through it, don't edit it, blah, blah, blah. You still might have the urge to do that, right, you still might like read through the first page and then remember, oh, I'm not supposed to read this. Okay, like, you don't have to beat yourself up if you mess up in that way and you don't follow the guidelines perfectly, but do your best to stop yourself in the middle of it and have awareness around. Oh yeah, I wasn't supposed to read through that, or I would. I don't need to put a period after this. It's fine. You just be kind to yourself as you guide yourself through this process.

Whenever we try something new that we've never done before, it's going to feel weird. We're not going to be very good at it, that's not a problem, it's okay. We don't have to beat ourselves up for not being good at it or not being perfect. We don't have to beat ourselves up for going I can't believe I wrote that and then going oh no, I wasn't supposed to say that I'm so stupid. No, we just like go. Oh yeah, I wasn't supposed to like judge myself. Okay, I'll try and remember that for the next time. I'm going to try and get better at not judging myself. As I see what I'm writing, as I understand what the consciousness is. Right, we just take it as it comes and we just try and do better next time. We don't beat ourselves up for not being perfect. That's not the point of this. Okay, all right, I love you guys.

So if you are looking for an exercise to help you open up and let go, this might be the one for you. Try it, try it for a week, try it for two weeks, try it for a couple of days, whatever you're interested in trying it for, but I think one day is probably not going to be enough to tell you whether or not this is going to help you. So just maybe try it out, see if it, like if this idea kind of resonates with you, if you'd like to write, if you've always written in a journal, maybe stepping away from the journal for a minute and getting to these pages and then, after you're done, you just kind of shred them, you rip them up or you get rid of them or you throw them in the garbage can or you like burn them in a fire pit or something right, like, maybe this is the one for you, maybe try it out. So remember, with the grounding practices and the somatic practices that I teach you, it's often a matter of trying it a couple of times and seeing if it resonates with you. If you try it for a couple of days or a week or two and you're like, yeah, it's not really doing anything for me, I'm not really feeling it, then okay, maybe this one isn't for you, but maybe it will be, and you won't know until you try. Okay, all right, my friends, that is what I have for you today, as always, I love you, worthy to be here, you deserve to be here. Remember that I will be back next week.

Hi friend, I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening. I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life, with weekly coaching, real life practice and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to KarinNelsonCoaching dot com. That's W-W-W dot K-A-R-I-N-N-E-L-S-O-N Coaching dot com. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating wherever you listen to podcasts and for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married. Make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.