The Practice of Journaling

Why Journal?

To help your mind escape from the hamster wheel of conditioned thoughts that keep circling round and round in your head, faster and faster, draining your energy, exhausting your spirit, and imprisoning your mind.

To help you discover and uncover information about a challenge you’re facing, move forward, overcome that challenge, and manifest the vision you want to manifest.

Open your Being to receiving information that may suddenly and miraculously clarify and expand your original vision.

Where to Journal:

In as quiet and supportive location as you can find, where no one or nothing will interrupt your thoughts. This could be a private room in your home, a quiet spot in nature, or whatever other location most supports you.

What You Need:

Anything that supports your ability to document your thoughts: a pad of paper, a pen or pencil, your computer, whatever other tools best support you.

Consider food, water, tea, coffee, juice, if these will support you. If they will get in your way, leave them behind.

Clothes in which you are physically comfortable.

A block of uninterrupted time, just to sit and write.

How to Journal:

  1. Settle yourself comfortably in your chosen space.
  2. Make sure your phone is off.
  3. Let your thoughts flow uncensored through your mind. Uncensored is vital!
  4. Capture as many of your thoughts in writing as you can.

Things You May Notice:

  1. Your mind is going faster than your hand or your ability to type. Just do the best you can to notice and document your thoughts.
  2. Your mind may suddenly go off on a tangent. Just document where it is going.
  3. Your body and emotions may resist where your mind is going.
    1. Is your body tensing? Contracting? Simply notice and document.
    2. Are shame, fear, or rage suddenly appearing? Simply notice and document.
    3. If any of these emotions becomes so intense that you cannot go on, simply stop and breathe deeply.
    4. You are always in choice. If tears start flowing, you can give them permission to flow, cleansing your pain and grief, or you can stop the journaling for now and process what has emerged.
  4. You may think you have one issue and suddenly the focus shifts to another issue and another until you end up somewhere totally different from where your little left brain expected to go.
  5. The original issue is resolved.
  6. The energy has shifted.
  7. You feel you’ve made progress even though your mind may now be focusing on a new, challenging issue.
  8. Having moved through an issue once, you’re no longer stuck in it. You can move in and out of it anytime you want.

Other Words for this Practice:

  1. Stream of consciousness writing.
  2. Big Mind watching little mind (from Buddhism.)
  3. The Witness (from Buddhism)

To Learn More:

https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-stream-consciousness

https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/big-mind-suzuki/

https://www.ramdass.org/cultivating-witness/

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