Want To Figure Out Your Calling? Try This 10-Minute Exercise

For most journalers, the page is a place we try to gain control over our lives. We journal to clarify and set our intentions, map out steps we might take to manifest our desires, plan how we might arrange the world around us to our liking. But being creative and producing work we're proud of isn't just about having control over everything. Big creativity requires space for new ideas, for experimentation, play, in order to take shape. If our work is to have a life, it needs space to breathe, so to speak. Thus, it's equally important to be able to give up control and get out of creativity's way as it is to "have our shit together" if we want to manifest our true desires. Here's a simple journal exercise you can do daily to practice getting into a mindset of allowing.

The way I see it, the point of drawing mandalas daily as Jung did, isn't to "decode" the cryptogram you create but simply to create it, witness it, and accept it. The result, just like Julia Cameron's morning pages practice, of this exercise functions to (as she said) "render us present in our life. Obsessing over our pages renders us self-centered—so I believe in "write them and let them go." The purpose is in the process. If you want to start your own morning pages practice, I recommend reading The Artist's Way.

Just like our relationship with the moment is our relationship with life, our creative projects aren't individual isolated creations; they're small projections of us. Allowing yourself—whatever state you're in—to come wholeheartedly to your work, starting with the help of your journal, will make your manifestations all the more substantive.