When my Body and Pen Knew Before I Did
A Gentle Invitation to Aliveness The Scribbled Truth That Became a Lifeline
Some mornings the pen doesn’t just write — it remembers. It reaches into the places we usually avoid and pulls out truths we weren’t ready to name.
One ordinary morning, during morning pages in The Artist’s Way, the words arrived uninvited and unpolished:
Reaction. Clinging to old rules under stress. Monotony as the price. Denial so deep we’d rather lose our entire frame of reference than face our own weakness.
They weren’t pretty. They weren’t hopeful. They were a mirror. A quiet, unflinching map of how most of us quietly die inside while still breathing.
For years I carried a mantra I had scribbled quickly for a course exercise — Live → Love → Listen → Laugh → Learn → Leverage → Liberate → Luminate
I said it, wrote it, felt something stir when I spoke the words aloud, but I never truly understood why these eight L’s had chosen me. Until I went back to that raw page of free-writing. And the two pieces — the problem and the phrase — locked together like bones finding their socket.
The scribbles had named the disease with brutal clarity: We react instead of adapt. We deny instead of look. We pay with monotony, numbness, and the slow theft of our own light.
The mantra — without me consciously engineering it — was already carrying the cure.
Live
Refuse the fade. Start every day with the fierce, quiet vow: I will not settle for half-alive. This single word is the rebellion against autopilot. It asks: Am I really here? Am I choosing presence over numbness?
Love
Make safety the foundation. Self-compassion first — because you cannot grow while at war with yourself. Love is the only soil deep enough to hold both your shadows and your becoming.
Listen
Stop defending. Start receiving. In the pause, the body speaks. Life speaks. The quiet voice inside speaks. Listening is where reaction ends and clarity begins.
Laugh
Let joy crack the armour. Laughter is the fastest solvent for denial. When you can smile at your own stubborn clinging, the grip loosens. Humour is not frivolous — it is revolutionary.
Learn
Turn “I’m broken” into “I’m learning.” Curiosity replaces shame. Every weakness becomes a doorway instead of a wall.
Leverage
Move from knowing to doing. Take the insight and make it useful — creatively, playfully, practically. This is adaptation wearing work boots: real change in real time.
Liberate
Lay the old rules down. Not with drama, but with dignity. Release is not loss — it is reclaiming space for who you are becoming.
Luminate
Let the light that was always there pour through. When we stop blocking ourselves, radiance is not achieved — it is revealed. This is not the end of the path. It is what the path was always leading toward.
How to Make It Yours
You don’t have to do all eight every day. Some mornings three words are enough.
Whisper the sequence with your first breath or your first sip.
Write it out and underline the L that hurts or calls the loudest today.
When the old stuckness returns — the flatness, the reaction, the denial — simply ask: “Where am I right now? What would the next L invite?”
Let it be simple. Let it be kind. Let it be yours.
This path did not arrive fully formed. It was born in messy ink on an ordinary morning, carried half-understood for years, and only later revealed itself as the exact medicine for the exact wound it first named.
That is the quiet miracle of morning pages: sometimes the answer arrives before the question is fully asked. And when you finally look back, you see it was waiting all along — patient, faithful, ready.
So if something inside you is stirring — even faintly — try it. Speak the words. Write them. Live them.
Not because they are perfect. But because they are true.
And truth, when we finally let it in, has a way of lighting up everything it touches.
You don’t have to wait for permission. You don’t have to be ready. You just have to begin.
The light is already inside you. All that’s left is to stop standing in its way.