This past Sunday, I was asked to participate in a collage service at my Unitarian Universalist church all about daily habits and practices. A collage service is when a few people are asked to provide a reflection on a single topic.

Back in 2019, I began doing Morning Pages every day. I started with physical journals, but after a few years, they started piling up and now I’m pretty much all digital.

Even though I've only been going to this church for about 9 months, I found my ideas about religion and spirituality fit in quite nicely with the principles of UU, especially the 4th Principle — the free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

It wasn't until back in June 2022 when I was doing my daily ritual of journaling/Morning pages did I get into such a frustrated frenzy over wanting the same kind of regular gathering with people who liked to talk about different religions and beliefs with curiosity and compassion, far from judgment and condemnation. I remember my fingers flying across the keyboard as I brain-dumped my frustrations at seeing people use their religion to justify being … well, jerks.

It made me wonder if there was a church for agnostics. I don't know if it was the first time I had ever wondered that before, but for a long time, I assumed the word "church" was reserved for religions of deities and creeds. What would agnostics even talk about every week?

But I asked Google my question anyway — "church for agnostics," was what I typed in, and Unitarian Universalism popped up.

I impulsively decided to check out a service one Sunday and have been going ever since because I enjoyed it so much. (Not to mention the singing!)

When I was asked to be a part of a service about daily practices, I was surprised how quickly I knew I wanted to talk about my Morning Pages. I could have picked my yoga/movement habit of 4 years, or maybe even talked about when I taught myself to roller skate by doing a daily challenge, but I instantly knew I wanted to share my writing habit. One, because it initially led me to finding a church for people like me, and Two, because I know all the insights and benefits journaling/brain dumping/Morning Pages can bring and I hope to pass that on.

Here's what I shared:

The daily habit I’m sharing is journaling, specifically a practice known as Morning Pages. Every morning, usually after school drop-off or as soon as I can after waking up, you can find me on my couch with a cat or two pounding away on my laptop or in my car somewhere along the Housatonic River with my mini bluetooth keyboard that I use to journal with on-the-go.

My journaling usually starts with a brain dump of a to-do list. Once I’ve looked at what I have planned for the day and figure out a general plan of events, I switch off that “go-go-go, hustle now!” voice and do my Morning Pages, which is a concept by Julia Cameron who wrote the book “The Artist’s Way.”

She defines Morning Pages as …

“Three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness. … There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages. These daily morning meanderings are not meant to be art. Or even writing. … [Morning] Pages are meant to be, simply, the act of moving the hand across the page and writing down whatever comes to mind. Nothing is too petty, too silly, too stupid, or too weird to be included.”

Sometimes I’ll refer to these pages as Brain Dumps. I have ADHD and many mornings when I wake up, my thoughts seem to come at me like everything everywhere all at once. (That movie is one of the best ways I’ve found to explain to neurotypicals what it’s like to live in an ADHD brain a lot of the time.)

Morning pages and journaling give me a chance to unashamedly release the contents of my brain onto a nonjudgmental page. Expressing those big thoughts, emotions, and ideas through writing helps me see them for just what they are: thoughts. Not good, not bad — it’s not my job to label them as such when I’m brain-dumping. I’m simply writing out the flow of thoughts.

Julia Cameron suggests doing 3 pages handwritten, which I initially started out with. But I’ve since moved to digital and do most of my journaling on my phone or computer now. I tend to keep my Google Doc open throughout the day as a scrap piece of paper for any writing I have to do, like drafts of emails or social media posts, and really any writing project I’m working on. Just the daily ritual of waking up and putting words onto the page uncorks that creativity and joy of writing that I’ve had my whole life.

In the four years I’ve been doing Morning Pages, I’ve gotten to meet this curious, intelligent, creative, compassionate, amusing, and sometimes fearful person that’s been inside this brain all along. I’ve gotten to untangle that person more and more from messages and information I heard growing up that I didn’t necessarily feel was right for me.

There’s a scene in the Pixar movie “Inside Out” where the characters named Joy, Sadness, and Bing Bong are inside someone’s brain and they knock over two boxes. One box is labeled “Facts” and the other is labeled “Opinions.” The contents, these small tile-like objects, spill out and get mixed together.

The character Joy picks them up, examines them, and says, “I can’t tell which ones are facts and which ones are opinions!” And Bing-Bong, an imaginary friend of the person whose brain they’re inside, says, “It’s hard to tell” and goes onto say that people confuse them all the time. If you’ve watched the scene as many times as I have since it’s one of my kids’ favorite movies, you’ll notice as he picks them up, he absentmindedly places the majority in the box labeled “Facts.”

For me, writing Morning Pages is when I actually take the time to parse through those identically-looking facts and opinions swirling around my own brain, and maybe even question them. I like to become curious about where they came from and their effect on me. Before I even knew about Unitarian Universalism, I feel like I’ve been using Morning Pages as my own free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

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