Story Of The Day: I Tried Journaling 3 Pages A Day For 30 Days

During my depression, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Until a friend of mine gave me a book saying that I should journal three pages a day. Every single day. And that’s what I did…

At the end of 2019, I had a pretty tough breakup and ended up depressed. At the same time, I was going through a spiritual awakening journey. The breakup triggered the most daunting part of the spiritual awakening — the dark night of the soul.

According to Eckhart Tolle, the dark night of the soul is a “term used to describe what one could call a collapse of a perceived meaning in life. An eruption into your life of a deep sense of meaninglessness.”

That’s exactly how I felt.

My world was black and white with a melancholic cello playing in the background. I was meditating every day — which by night, it was the only thing I could do besides eating and sleeping. Meditation saved me from something worse.

I know I wanted to be that fun and the extroverted person I used to be. My soul was screaming for that, but my mind just wanted to stay in its cave hidden from the rest of the world until a friend of mine gave me a book called “The Artist Way,” authored by Julian Cameron.

The Artist Way is a timeless book, debuted 25 years ago. It’s a 12-week guide to self-discovery and recovering your creative self. But it’s just more than a simple book. As Julia says on the book’s cover: it’s a spiritual path to higher creativity. And I’ll explain that in a minute.

The 12-week course is packed with weekly exercises, but its premise is the “Morning Pages.” In a nutshell, the morning pages consist of journaling 3 pages in the early hours, every day. Yeah, you read it right, every damn day.

The goal is to unlock the creative juices and allow them to flow again. In the beginning, I thought it was a silly idea. “I don’t need to ‘unlock’ my creativity; I need to get the hell out of this black hole I’m in.”

However, this is a guide to self-discovery and journaling has so many benefits. Because I didn’t know how to handle my emotions, I decided to give it a try after reading a bit about the book on the internet. And Julia was right. This is a spiritual path guide.

I didn’t want to search for therapy; I wanted to learn how to heal myself and my own wounds. Nothing against therapy, in fact, I strongly recommend it if it’s something that resonates with you.

But I found my therapy in writing — and there’s no coincidence that now I’m a write.

Writing 3 pages a day, right after waking up, helped me understand the nature of my thoughts, get in tune with my emotions, and 3 months after starting journaling every day, I was back to myself again.