Three Pages

About ten years ago, Santi, 37, moved from being a car saleswoman to a full-time cartoonist. She said it was finally time for her to do what made her heart sing. There was just one problem though: her agent thought her drawings had no soul.

Technically, they were excellent — Santi could draw beautifully — but something wasn't making it from Santi onto the page.

But that's not why Santi came to see me. Santi wanted help with her haemophilia, a condition where the blood doesn't clot properly. One of the issues she regularly faced was bleeding into her joints. Targeting inflammation meant less sugar (directly increases inflammation), less salt (to prevent swelling), and more water (eight glasses daily, nothing caffeinated). Regulating Santi's weight was important too, to avoid additional pressure on her joints.

But, as you know, I'm always looking beyond the physical. What was happening in the rest of Santi's life?

In the metaphysical framework I use, blood disorders are sometimes explored through themes of joy and expression. I found that fascinating for someone who had supposedly followed her joy.

So where had it gone?

Who wants to talk about rediscovering joy, especially when that might mean talking about why they're not joyful in the first place? The good news is, I'm not a therapist. I don't need to spend hours dissecting what happened in your childhood, marriage, or career. I am interested, however, in how we get you back to being joyful again.

When dealing with blocks to joy, I use a variety of techniques, but none quite as powerful as Morning Pages — an exercise found in Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way.

What I had Santi do was to write three pages, every morning, immediately on waking. No editing, no censoring, no pausing to think; just writing longhand. And when she finished, she would rip them up and throw them away. Nobody would ever read them.

By adding a few modifications to this original technique, this is how we began clearing the debris in her mental and emotional bodies. Getting those innermost thoughts out of her head and onto the page began to reveal things Santi hadn't even realised were there — making all the lifestyle work we were doing that much more effective.

As Santi did her Morning Pages, she realised something: by turning her passion into her career, she had made it vulnerable to all her old perfectionistic tendencies and her need for external validation. And so, somewhere along the way, she had closed her heart.

She finally understood what her agent meant.

Six weeks on, Santi was no longer hobbling around on account of the pain. She had also lost 2kg and felt truly joyful for the first time in years. She had even created a new character.

Twelve weeks on, Santi's smile said it all — and it may sound really trite, but it reminded me exactly why I love this work as much as I do.