Re-write your day!

Straight out of university, my first real job was teaching high school art and technology. I loved art and textiles in school, had no idea what I wanted to be when I started adulting and so I kind of fell into teaching. 

It was incredibly challenging as a very shy and quiet person, to stand up in front of a room full of teenagers and demand their attention. I was teaching woodwork to boys who were nearly twice my size! To say I felt out of my depth is a gross understatement. 

I woke up most mornings dreading what might happen that day and playing out all the worst-case-possible scenarios in my head. By the time I drove the 50 minute commute, I was already very stressed.

We all know how badly we tend to react when we are stressed, and kids tend to sense these things like a shark can smell blood in water! Usually it ended pretty badly. 

It was art that saved me. Well my desire to make art anyway. Artists can find it very hard to maintain their creative practice and I was stuck in a rut. By chance I found an amazing book called The Artist Way by Julia Cameron. I highly recommend it to anyone who feels stuck creatively.

One of the getting unstuck practices she teaches in this wonderful book is called "The Morning Pages".  Everyday, as soon as you wake up, she says, you write 2 foolscap size pages of free form writing by hand.  This is completely unfiltered, stream of consciousness writing. So whatever comes into your mind you write it down.

It was amazing to see all my fears tumble out onto the pages every morning along with all the other typical thoughts of worry and anxiety and general unease. This was the practice that first began to teach me what it was to examine my mind, to see it's habits and chaos, and to know we can achieve some control over it,  just like we do in yoga and meditation.

Over the course of months and years as I did the Morning Pages, I began to see patterns in how my mind works, how it tends to focus on negativity, and how most of the time my fears were not real and I was really just scaring myself by making stuff up!

Later on I also realised that I could choose different thoughts and they too could influence how I felt for the rest of my day. So I added another stage to my Morning Pages. I would look over what I had written, look for themes and worries and then change them into a positive opposite.

For example, if I was worried about not having enough time to finish a task I would write an affirmation like; I complete these reports easily and in perfect time. I might write it out 3 or 4 times or more and then move onto the next worry and find a way to make it positive.

The shift I felt when I started doing this was incredible! I was changing my brain to search for a new outcome. I was putting my attention on the outcome I desired not on the one I was dreading, and it worked!