Unblocking Creativity Through Cold Plunge: Full Transcript

0:00

day 14 of 31 days of cold plunging hello hello my dear in this video I'm going to share with you the ultimate morning practice that changed my life and unblocked my creativity and much much more I'm going to share with you the morning Pages something that has been around for decades actually developed by Julia Cameron who you'll hear me bang on about here and there because her program

2:00

the morning Pages let's get to it the morning pages are derived from the artist's way which is a 12we program which is a spiritual path to higher creativity this is a 12we program it's been around for over 25 years now and the backbone of this program well there are two actually the artist state is one of them and the other one is the morning Pages many people will never even finish this program I know this cuz I've talked

4:00

talks about God in a very broad way in a way that would probably not be upsetting to a lot of people but it would be to some people such as myself back in the day when I first came across a copy of this book um because any notion of God would piss me off back then and yet I still had changes come about from this book when I was still very resistant to doing it and to doing the pages I was a pretty big atheist actually throughout a

6:00

not I could couldn't stick to things I was so frazzled all the time you know my nervous system was all just disregulated and this is what happens you know a lot of us we have come from dysfunctional upbringings maybe trauma codependency we have gone through this trauma maybe that it's disregulated our nervous system so of course it's very hard for us to show up for routines to make decisions to trust our intuition

8:00

Journey if you're willing to take it if you're willing to put in the dedication and the effort nowadays I've realized I should not ever give my my copy I usually have an extra and I usually was giving them out for years to people I had this extra copy and whenever it felt right I'd give it and over the years I've decided I'm not going to gift this maybe anymore I think it needs to find its way to people in a different

10:00

the back pack with a couple pencils right I mean if you're going on a monthlong hike you might need to take the whole notebook but hey Pages burn you can always burn them like I do at the end of your hike and you don't even have to walk back with them I go through about four of these a year so I think it's around if I calculated it it's it's three months or four months that I use up one of these okay so I just

12:00

script along the way to tell you so and if there's anything that I didn't cover or you want to know about just pop me a comment below and you know I'll get to that and I'll give you what I know about it or my personal experience right so this is it's different it's not journaling and what is the point of this we are bypassing the negative critic when we're writing and you'll see there's going to be a lot of like things

14:00

don't do that like the pages are Pages affirmations are affirmations let yourself be negative if you need to be if that's what's coming out let me tell you most of my pages I would say are actually quite negative and nobody would know it because once I'm done getting out all of that crunk or whatever is in my brain I'm able to show up better in the world and it means that I don't drag that around the rest of the day

16:00

we can get blocked from our creativity depending on your personal history but in a nutshell there's this creative there's a negative critic everybody's got a negative critic your inner [__] I don't know what you want to call it the perfectionist some of us are perfectionists I hate to identify with perfection being a perfectionist but I would say I have a habit of being

18:00

now who knows I don't I but I think it's fantastic now it's promising more than promising it's a reality that we're seeing and that makes the college me just grin it makes me grin to think of all the times I was told like what are you going to do with that well I didn't know back in 2006 you know it was a different world now than it is now and so there's all these beliefs but

20:00

rattle off tons of things here right this all boils down too often that we have hardwired program negative associations in relation to creativity from an early age something that got patterned in and so we will go through this inner child journey and what I love about this journey is that it does it in a way we're we're put in a very tender journey and we need to be doing self-care along the way let's face it

22:00

hard for me to separate exactly quantify exactly what just the pages have done for me and the entire program because I have to look back into many many years ago when I first received the copy like I've told you about and did just a little bit of pages and then years later I did the program I've actually done the program twice and these days I'm also working on this which is a different different version a different kind of

24:00

this big fat brain dump onto the page you start to have a little bit less anxiety that's what happened to me I was getting a little bit less anxious less OCD which I'm going to dive into here and I started to feel much more centered I started to hear my own truth or listen to myself and what I was going through I was hearing different parts of myself well I still am till today as I'm doing them I'm hearing different parts of

26:00

far as to say that this definitely helped me get out of depression and I'm going to put a pin in it but I could really go in depth about my journey out of depression because I was chronically depressed most of my life and I no longer am but this was definitely something part of my path to get out of that rut because one of the things for example when we're depressed is that we struggle to make decisions

28:00

journey so I started to know myself know thyself right know myself more because I'm spending this time with myself I'm spending my time right and after you know such and such amount of time that maybe I'd be complaining or listing something troubling right you do this enough times and you start to say like okay something needs to change because instead of going and complaining to your friend or

30:00

you live up to your fullest potential if you keep identifying with it because it becomes this like a victim mentality like this Badge of I have anxiety and life was so bad and you Linger on this the low drama triangle give it a Google I'm not going to pop an image in here the low drama triangle okay you linger in this victim mode or the persecutor mode or The Rescuer and it ping pongs it can

32:00

light over here now so maybe we'll have better lighting we're progressing right I'm sharing sharing this so This the OCD though I had really I had some pretty detrimental OCD it really held me back and as I started doing the pages like I'm saying I'm becoming less of a perfectionist I'm starting to decide on things more I'm just like doing art whatever okay the negative critic I'm

34:00

the negative critic will cling to anything that is important to you the OCD will cling to whatever is important to you and in this case it was meditation and my brain got locked on this sensor motor OCD where I was I couldn't stop focusing on my breath for about 3 days straight apart from when I finally did fall asleep after taking a number of sleeping pills which I would never take today but you know back then

36:00

same day that I thought that I saw Rainbow on my walk probably still have a photo or video of that rainbow because of course I took a little photo of it so as I started doing the pages again in the program what do you know the OCD started to dwindle more it was still really bad around that time as we know 2020 was a really difficult year we were having catalysts uprooted by the bucket

38:00

we're paying attention just try it out get yourself a paper and write on the paper something whatever comes out and you're focused on it you have to keep your focus on it and there's this delicious thing about being able to be in the present moment where you were just doing that thing even if it's parts of yourself bitching and moaning and complaining you're just doing that

40:00

it does something with the brain it does something so yes so they are mindfulness in the moment but a different variety another thing that morning Pages have brought into my life for the better is that they are a codependency Buster okay I could really really break this down in a lot of ways but and and you know there's books devoted to codependency right if you're

42:00

me venting whatever comes out and not relying on other people for that okay cuz let's face it I know this can sound really cold I went through times in my life where I felt like does anyone even care about me I could just die I could die in this apartment that I'm so lonely in and nobody would even know would my family even care or no cuz like everyone's so broken apart and all

44:00

itself that I could talk about at another time but that has been a cultivation for me to the point where it's you know as long as it's like I've already done my things for the day I've got a I've got the capacity as long as I've shown up for me I my my cup is more full I can show up for others this is not selfish I mean we could joke about just be selfish yeah be a little selfish do your practices right

46:00

needed to and so every time that I kept putting myself first with this I was actually able to commit to other things more I was building a sense of self trust these build self trust which is what codependent people es especially people with codependent patterns I want to say I hate to label people because I want you to know you can get out of this label you're more than this

48:00

Comes A Time In healing where you can't lie to yourself much you you see through your own BS and yeah you know so they're checkin of feelings emotions all of it I stopped complaining so much and I stopped complaining to others so much and I stopped Outsourcing to others I used to be a chronic advice

50:00

so so humiliating humiliating to because we are invalidating our own experience when we do this chronically and let me tell you it could say a lot about advice but often times people go around for advice because they just want a validation of what they actually will not validate inside themselves and this helped me take

52:00

capacity unlike people people just we don't usually have that capacity I mean you have to be like a monk or or a priest or Priestess or something you have to be a spacehero myself I wouldn't be able to hold space for them this is the capacity I pr is that I don't have I'm I'm just I'm suspending judgments we're human okay it's not an excuse for for causing suffering in the

54:00

connected with my higher self or with Source this helped me develop this and see my connection throughout the day throughout the moments and I started to enjoy just being alone with myself and doing other things Solitude is amazing it's not loneliness is it's um it can be really crippling I know the feeling and I rarely ever go through loneliness anymore and if I do

56:00

things I started to think maybe I want to try again and get treated for ADHD I don't want to go on a huge tangent about this I'll make another video on it because it's really important but I had really really bad symptoms of ADHD throughout my life and I know it's can be healed and I know that we can heal it I believe we can heal it without taking drugs but at the time I was not opposed to taking

58:00

good and so they put me on that and it was very effective I over the years I will share my ADHD journey in a different video and it might be very long like this one cuz it's dense right this is a journey but I gravitated away from from using medication I didn't want to use it anymore for particular reasons and one of them

60:00

and then part of me is like [__] you I'm sick of feeling dependent on this I'm sick of feeling dependent on it and I know that this is really conflicting for people to hear and I'm not telling you dump your meds if you take them or any of this okay I'm sharing my path my story but I'm also on to say that I do also believe that that form of Western medicine was actually crucial to my

62:00

of something or something is bothering us right or we re we're putting out our priorities again for the day and it's you we're realizing like oh no I've got to push a before c and C's got to come after a you know we're showing up in so many ways and with this like reflection right and that means that we are inre we are increasing our self-awareness which is very important for ADHD for everyone really it also I want

64:00

ego the ego's judgments Etc I want to emphasize again how the morning Pages help me build routines I mentioned earlier about how it became a commitment to myself and help me they have helped me build self trust right but in terms of ADHD many of us who have this understand or have read that you need routines in your life and if you're where I am where I was

66:00

online and check how many people have what did they say outside validation Outsourcing your belief system whenever we do that so much we take away from our own intuition that blocks the intuition it's it can be scary to follow our intuition especially if we've lived a lifetime where we're not following it and so it's a risk we start to take

68:00

to my higher self started to develop let's dive into some of the resistances that you may have to doing the morning Pages let's go let's start off with something like maybe it seems really silly or stupid or very basic why would that be effective something so basic let me tell you a little something about rituals right cuz this I consider a ritual it's something

70:00

it running into that lover that past lover that I want to cut the cord with and then I'm going to stand up after I'm done and I see those cords and I stand up and I chop it and you know what that little ritual was actually very scary for me to do scary especially to do with certain lovers and when you're reading a ritual on paper it can seem very basic so basic that you're like that's not going to

72:00

earlier find a way to get up earlier you know you have to find the thing that works for you for example I remember reading years ago that um Jr R toian he would stay up late really late after grading all of these papers you know like and then it was his time to work on his writing so where there's a will there's a way and yeah it means that we're doing extra work sometimes but if you're a creative person and you're not

74:00

choice though and I had to get up early and I still to get up earlier to do pages I would do it because of all the things that I've shared with you it's worth it it's proven it's worth it to me and now I'm at the point where it's like oh yeah I've been doing these for like four years and six months and I'm just it's natural for me to just do them in the

76:00

a little pointer put them right beside your bed that way when you wake up in the morning you can't really ignore them put it right there and then you can do it right after that let's face it morning piss that everyone takes the other thing about doing these the resistance that can come in also is that maybe you started off strong or whatever and then who knows down the line like all new habits you're going to have a

78:00

the the defeats the failures all that it's not actually important that's not what's going to make you is how many times that you get back up to the plate that's what matters just get back up to the plate just get back on the horse and gradually what happens when we just keep getting back onto something is like it starts to Snowball the routine

80:00

with people and of course I was doing my morning pages but it was not the same as me being in solitude doing them you got to be alone to do them I want to say but you try it out see what you think you know but so this crawling out of the bed with you know in your lovers in the bed and you don't want to leave them but it's a commitment to yourself and like I said so I had this

82:00

pages it's really helped me repattern this codependency that I had that was dictating my life I was conditioned with these destructive patterns that conditioned that that were detriment to my life and perhaps you're trying to break that crap too it's possible another resistance let's see maybe you're going on a hike like I said at the beginning you don't want it to weigh

84:00

of our painting of everything of all of the Little Steps along the way right we remember the phrase Rome wasn't built in a day it wasn't built in a day our we we tend to especially when we're blocked creatives we tend to look at the comparisons of the with the Masters as Julia says in the book we tend to look at especially with visual Arts the byproduct of the painting the one that's the byproduct

86:00

look at that there was butterfly in there every time I'm at a new point of my journey where I'm really changing I get a butterfly somewhere on the ground and I'm getting a lot of them these days this one is still alive hey buddy I'm going to put him down here on this rock fly he's too wet oh no well maybe he'll make it we'll see well thank you for joining like this

88:00

element I need to mention that if you are going to do the entire program do not burn your pages because you will need them for week seven not to uh spoiler alert you but don't throw them away this is um we'll say highlevel artist way is burn your pages PS speak speaking of synchronicities I filmed this video on the 14th right and 2 days later I was fulfilling a role of being a sanctuary