The Excavation
Starter Kit

A 7-Day Guided Reflexive Journaling Programme

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The Excavation
Starter Kit

A 7-Day Guided Reflexive Journaling Programme

This is not a self-help exercise. There is no affirmation to repeat, no vision board to assemble, and no promise that seven days of writing will solve anything.

What this programme does is far simpler: it gives you a method for listening to your own internal conflict instead of running from it. The premise is borrowed from real-world peacebuilding. In every divided society — every country split by civil war, every organisation fractured by rivalry — the conflict follows patterns. It can be mapped. It can be governed. And the same is true of the conflict inside you.

Over seven days you will learn to map yours. Each day introduces one concept drawn from the ideas in Your Civil War Within and Treaties with the Dead, gives you a writing prompt built around it, and asks you to apply it to your own experience. Your entries are saved here, on your device, and nowhere else. Use the Export button to save a copy of your work — if you ever clear your browser data or switch devices, your exported file is your backup.

Write by hand or type — either works. What matters is that you actually write. Thinking about writing is not writing.
Give each session at least twenty minutes. Less than that and you will stay on the surface. You need enough time to get past the comfortable answers.
Do not edit as you go. This is raw material, not a manuscript. Let it be rough. Let it be wrong. The accuracy of your feelings matters more than the accuracy of your grammar.
One day at a time. Resist the urge to read ahead. Each day builds on the last. The sequence is intentional.
No audience. You are not writing for publication, approval, or a coach. You are writing for the only person who needs to read this: you.

Today’s prompt

0 words

Write at least 30 words to unlock the next day.

You have completed
the excavation.

You have spent seven days doing something most people avoid for a lifetime: looking directly at the internal conflict you carry and treating it as something that can be governed rather than cured.

What you have written is raw material. It is the beginning of a longer, more deliberate process of self-mediation — learning to negotiate between the factions inside you, to notice where your dictionaries diverge, and to build agreements you can actually live with.

The question now is not “am I fixed?” — you were never broken. The question is: what do I do with what I have found?

7

Days

0

Words Written

0

Entries

What to do next

Change does not come from a single week of writing. It comes from building a sustained practice of honest self-governance. Here are four concrete ways to continue the work you have started.

Free — Do this first

1. Let it settle, then re-read

Put this away for one week. Do not re-read your entries yet. When you come back, read them as if someone else wrote them. You will see patterns you could not see while you were inside the writing. Mark what surprises you. That is where the next excavation begins.

Go deeper — The next step

2. The Excavation — Guided 6-Week Edition

You have learned the method. Now use it on yourself, properly, over six weeks. The Excavation takes twelve sharp questions — distilled from the ideas in both books — and walks you through them two at a time, week by week, each with a plain-language framing that shows you what the question is really asking and why it matters. Your answers are saved as you go, and each week opens the next layer. At the bottom, once you have dug through all six, you earn fifteen minutes one-to-one with me over Zoom. The Starter Kit taught you the language. This is where the real dig happens.

Start the six-week dig →

Community

3. Join WritingItThrough

Excavation does not have to be solitary. WritingItThrough on Skool is a growing community of people doing this work alongside each other — sharing what surfaces, challenging each other’s assumptions, and building the discipline of reflexive practice together.

Join the community → skool.com/language-and-emotion-6516

The full framework

4. Read the books

This programme gave you the starter tools. The books give you the full framework: the philosophy behind the method, the complete excavation process for long-term self-governance, and the deeper work of making peace with what you carry. Your Civil War Within is where the internal conflict begins. Treaties with the Dead takes it further — into inherited conflict, the arguments you did not start, and the debts you did not contract.

Your Civil War Within → drmarcusanthony.com/ycww

Treaties with the Dead → drmarcusanthony.com/treaties

“Your civil war within has something to tell you.”

The ExcavationStarter Kit

The ExcavationStarter Kit

You have completedthe excavation.

What to do next

1. Let it settle, then re-read

2. The Excavation — Guided 6-Week Edition

3. Join WritingItThrough

4. Read the books

Reset all progress?

The Excavation
Starter Kit

The Excavation
Starter Kit

You have completed
the excavation.