Journaling Practices
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.” – Anaïs Nin
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“Journal writing, when it becomes a ritual for transformation, is not only life-changing but life-expanding.” – Jennifer Williamson
“The journal is the ideal place of refuge for the inner self because it constitutes a counterworld: a world to balance the other.” – Joyce Carol Oates
“Having the courage to reckon with our emotions and to rumble with our stories is the path to writing our brave new ending.” – Brene Brown
“Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” – Mary Oliver
“We begin to sort through the differences between our real feelings, which are often secret, and our official feelings, those on the record for public display.” – Julia Cameron
“There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write.” – William Makepeace Thackeray
“Sitting for even five minutes with a journal offers a rare cease-fire in the battle of daily life.” – Alexandra Johnson
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” – Joan Didion
“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” – Flannery O’Connor
“The pages aren’t intended for anyone but me. It’s the most cost-effective therapy I’ve ever found.” – Tim Ferriss
“Journaling is like whispering to one’s self and listening at the same time.” – Mina Murray
“Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter. And lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.” – Jack London
“In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.” – Susan Sontag
INTRODUCTION
As part of the Lab, you will be asked to participate in a daily(ish) journaling exercise* – a low-stakes, but high-commitment endeavor. This is nothing you’ll be asked to share with the cohort; the objective is to simply cultivate a regular practice.
The resources posted here contain a few suggested journaling avenues, as dictated by writers and artists who have testified to great results achieved by this practice. Feel free to experiment with your unique approach, whether it’s writing three pages each morning, engaging with an art journal, jotting down a simple story per day, or otherwise.
The end goal of the journaling practice is threefold: First, there is the powerful act of establishing a commitment to yourself, along with an understanding that not only is a commitment to yourself important, but that the discipline of doing so is possible.
The second is an ongoing practice of working past your inner “editor”, and your ego, even, in order to leave behind—or work through—things that may be standing in the way of your creativity. What may happen, as a result, could be anything from a simple brain dump, to a deep dive into parts of us forgotten and ignored, or unknown and undiscovered.
Finally, this practice has the ability to help shift us away from “autopilot” mode into the driver’s seat of our own lives: Rather than mindlessly going through the motions, we can deliberately choose the direction we go, attentively notice our own scenery, and purposefully navigate our changing tides.
* If you're feeling stuck, each week I will post a page-full of “Breaking Blocks"– a series of questions specific to the current theme we are exploring. The mind loves questions. In many cases, simply letting your subconsious do the work yields powerful surprises in regard to what comes bubbling up to the surface. That said, you can always pick one or two questions that feel especially potent to you and explore them in your journaling practice.
Recommend Readings
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Excerpt from The Artist’s Way
By Julia CameronWhat are morning pages? Put simply, the morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness: “Oh, god, another morning. I have NOTHING to say. I need to wash the curtains. Did I get my laundry yesterday? Blah, blah, blah….” They might also, more ingloriously, be called brain drain, since that is one of their main functions.
There is no wrong way to do morning pages. These daily morning meanderings are not meant to be art. Or even writing. Writing is simply one of the tools. Pages are meant to be, simply, the act of moving the hand across the page and writing down whatever comes to mind. Nothing is too petty, too silly, too stupid, or too weird to be included.
The morning pages are not supposed to sound smart—although sometimes they might. Most times they won’t, and nobody will ever know except you. Nobody is allowed to read your morning pages except you. And you shouldn’t even read them yourself [at first]. Just write three pages, and stick them in an envelope. Or write three pages in a spiral notebook and don’t leaf back through. Just write three pages… and write three more pages the next day.
Although occasionally colorful, the morning pages are often negative, frequently fragmented, often self-pitying, repetitive, stilted or babyish, angry or bland—even silly sounding. Good!
All that angry, whiny, petty stuff that you write down in the morning stands between you and your creativity. Worrying about the job, the laundry, the funny knock in the car, the weird look in your lover’s eye—this stuff eddies through our subconscious and muddies our days. Get it on the page.
The morning pages are the primary tool of creative recovery. As blocked artists, we tend to criticize ourselves mercilessly. Even if we look like functioning artists to the world, we feel we never do enough and what we do isn’t right. We are victims of our own internalized perfectionist, a nasty internal and eternal critic, the Censor, who resides in our (left) brain and keeps up a constant stream of subversive remarks that are often disguised as the truth. The Censor says wonderful things like: “You call that writing? What a joke. You can’t even punctuate. If you haven’t done it by now, you never will. You can’t even spell. What makes you think you can be creative?” And on and on.
Make this a rule: always remember that your Censor’s negative opinions are not the truth. This takes practice. By spilling out of bed and straight onto the page every morning, you learn to evade the Censor. Because there is no wrong way to write the morning pages, the Censor’s opinion doesn’t count. Let your Censor rattle on. (And it will.) Just keep your hand moving across the page. Write down the Censor’s thoughts if you want to. Note how it loves to aim for your creative jugular. Make no mistake: the Censor is out to get you. It’s a cunning foe. Every time you get smarter, so does it. So you wrote one good play? The Censor tells you that’s all there is. So you drew your first sketch? The Censor says, “It’s not Picasso.”
Think of your Censor as a cartoon serpent, slithering around your creative Eden, hissing vile things to keep you off guard. If a serpent doesn’t appeal to you, you might want to find a good cartoon image of your Censor, maybe the shark from Jaws, and put an X through it. Post it where you tend to write or on the inside cover of your notebook. Just making the Censor into the nasty, clever little character that it is begins to pry loose some of its power over you and your creativity.
…Morning pages are nonnegotiable. Never skip or skimp on morning pages. Your mood doesn’t matter. The rotten thing your Censor says doesn’t matter. We have this idea that we need to be in the mood to write. We don’t.
Morning pages will teach you that your mood doesn’t really matter. Some of the best creative work gets done on the days when you feel that everything you’re doing is just plain junk. The morning pages will teach you to stop judging and just let yourself write. So what if you’re tired, crabby, distracted, stressed? Your artist is a child and it needs to be fed. Morning pages feed your artist child. So write your morning pages.
Three pages of whatever crosses your mind—that’s all there is to it. If you can’t think of anything to write, then write, “I can’t think of anything to write…” Do this until you have filled three pages. Do anything until you have filled three pages.
When people ask, “Why do we write morning pages?” I joke, “To get to the other side.” They think I am kidding, but I’m not. Morning pages to get us to the other side: the other side of our fear, of our negativity, of our moods. Above all, they get us beyond our Censor. Beyond the reach of the Censor’s babble we find our own quiet corner, the place where we hear the still, small voice that is at once our creator’s and our own.
A word is in order here about logic brain and artist brain. Logic brain is our brain of choice in the Western Hemisphere. It is the categorical brain. It thinks in a neat, linear fashion. As a rule, logic brain perceives the world according to known categories. A horse is a certain combination or animal parts that make up a horse. A fall forest is viewed as a series of colors that add up to “fall forest.” It looks at a fall forest and notes: red, orange, yellow, green, gold.
Logic brain was and is our survival brain. It works on known principles. Anything unknown is perceived as wrong and possibly dangerous. Logic brain likes things to be neat little soldiers marching in a straight line. Logic brain is the brain we usually listen to, especially when we are telling ourselves to be sensible.
Logic brain is our Censor, our second (and third and fourth) thoughts. Faced with an original sentence, phrase, paint squiggle, it says, “What the hell is that? That’s not right!”
Artist brain is our inventor, our child, our very own personal absent-minded professor. Artist brain says, “Hey! That is so neat!” It puts odd things together (boat equals wave and walker).
…Artist brain is our creative, holistic brain. It thinks in patterns and shadings. It sees a fall forest and thinks: Wow! Leaf bouquet! Pretty! Gold-gilt-shimmery-earthskin-king’s-carpet! Artist brain is associative and freewheeling. It makes new connections, yoking together images to invoke meaning…
Why all this logic-brain/artist-brain talk? Because the morning pages teach logic brain to stand aside and let artist brain play.
The Censor is part of our leftover survivor brain. It was the part in charge of deciding whether it was safe for us to leave the forest and go out into the meadow. Our Censor scans our meadow for any dangerous beasties. Any original thought can look pretty dangerous to our Censor.
The only sentences/paintings/sculptures/photographs it likes are the ones that it has seen many times before. Safe sentences. Safe paintings. Not exploratory blurts, squiggles, or jottings. Listen to your Censor and it will tell you that everything original is wrong/dangerous/rotten.
Who wouldn’t be blocked if every time you tiptoed into the open somebody (your Censor) made fun of you? The morning pages will teach you to stop listening to that ridicule. They will allow you to detach from your negative Censor.
It may be useful for you to think of the morning pages as meditation. It may not be the practice of meditation you are accustomed to. You may, in fact, not be accustomed to meditating at all. The pages may not seem spiritual or even meditative – more like negative and materialistic, actually –but they are a valid form of meditation that gives us insight and helps us effect change in our lives.
Let’s take a look at what we stand to gain by meditating. There are many ways of thinking about meditation. Scientists speak of it in terms of brain hemispheres and shunting techniques. We move from logic brain to artist brain and from fast to slow, shallow to deep. Management consultants, in pursuit of corporate physical health, have learned to think of meditation primarily as a stress-management technique.
Spiritual seekers choose to view the process as a gateway to God. Artists and creativity mavens approve of it as a conduit for higher creative insights.
All of these notions are true—as far as they go. They do not go far enough. Yes, we will alter our brain hemisphere, lower our stress, discover an inner contact with a creative source, and have many creative insights. Yes, for any one of these reasons, the pursuit is a worthy one. Even taken in combination, however, they are still intellectual constructs for what is primarily an experience of wholeness, rightness, and power.
We meditate to discover our own identity, our right place in the scheme of the universe. Through meditation, we acquire and eventually acknowledge our connection to an inner power source that has the ability to transform our outer world. In other words, meditation gives us not only the light of insight but also the power for expansive change.
Insight in and of itself is an intellectual comfort. Power in and of itself is a blind force that can destroy as easily as build. It is only when we consciously learn to link power and light that we begin to feel our rightful identities as creative beings. The morning pages allow us to forge this link. They provide us with a spiritual ham-radio set to contact the Creator Within.
[pp 9-14]
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Excerpt from Writing Down the Bones
By Natalie Goldberg
The basic unit of writing practice is the timed exercise. You may time yourself for ten minutes, twenty minutes, or an hour. It’s up to you. At the beginning you may want to start small and after a week, increase your time, or you may want to dive in for an hour the first time. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that whatever amount of time you choose for that session, you must commit yourself to it and for that full period.Keep your hand moving. (Don’t pause to reread the line you have just written. That’s stalling and trying to get control of what you’re saying.)
Don’t cross out. (That is editing as you write. Even if you write something you didn’t mean to write, leave it.)
Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar. (Don’t even care about staying within the margins and lines on the page.)
Lose control.
Don’t think. Don’t get logical.
Go for the jugular. (If something comes up in your writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.)
These are the rules. It is important to adhere to them because the aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is obstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what your mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel. It’s a great opportunity to capture the oddities of your mind. Explore the rugged edge of thought. Like grating a carrot, give the paper the colorful coleslaw of your consciousness.
First thoughts have tremendous energy. It is the way the mind first flashes on something. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash. For instance, the phrase “I cut the daisy from my throat” shot through my mind. Now my second thought, carefully tutored in 1+1=2 logic, in politeness, fear, and embarrassment at the natural, would say, “That’s ridiculous. You sound suicidal. Don’t show yourself cutting your throat. Someone will think you are crazy.” And instead, if we give the censor its way, we write, “My throat was a little sore, so I didn’t say anything.” Proper and boring.
First thoughts are also unencumbered by ego, by that mechanism in us that tries to be in control, tries to prove the world is permanent and solid, enduring and logical. The world is not permanent, is ever-changing, and full of human suffering. So if you express something egoless, it is also full of energy because it is expressing the truth of the way things are. You are not carrying the burden of ego in your expression, but are riding for moments the waves of human consciousness and using your personal details to express the ride.
In Zen meditation you sit on a cushion called a zafu with your legs crossed, back straight, hands at your knees or in front of you in a gesture called a mudra. You face a white wall and watch your breath. No matter what you feel—great tornadoes of anger and resistance, thunderstorms of joy and grief—you continue to sit, back straight, legs crossed, facing the wall. You learn not to be tossed away no matter how great the thought or the emotion. That is the discipline: to continue to sit.
The same is true in writing. You must be a great warrior when you contact first thoughts and write from them. Especially at the beginning you may feel great emotions and energy that will sweep you away, but you don’t stop writing. You continue to use your pen and record the details of your life and penetrate into the heart of them…
Why else are first thoughts so energizing? Because they have to do with freshness and inspiration. Inspiration means “breathing in.” You actually become larger than yourself, and first thoughts are present. They are not a cover-up of what is actually happening or being felt. The present is imbued with tremendous energy. It is what is. My friend who is a Buddhist said once after coming out of a meditation retreat, “The colors were so much more vibrant afterward.” Her meditation teacher said, “When you are present, the world is truly alive.”
[pp 10-13]
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Excerpt from Storyworthy
By Matthew Dicks
...There was a point at which I realized that I'd need to start finding more stories to tell. I couldn't wait for the next time my heart stopped beating or the next time I was arrested for a crime I didn't commit. I needed to find these little moments, I needed to hunt them down. My goal was to identify the small stories that existed in my life already.
I've been a schoolteacher for almost twenty years, so it was only natural that I assign myself homework. I assigned myself Homework for Life. This is what I did:
I decided at the end of every day, I'd reflect upon my day and ask myself one simple question:
If I had a story from today—a five minute story onstage about something that took place over the course of this day—what would it be? As benign and boring and inconsequential as it might seem, what was the most storyworthy moment from my day?
I decided not to write the entire story down, because to do so would require too much time and effort. As desperate as I was for stories, even I wouldn't be able to commit to writing a full story every day, especially if it wasn't all that compelling. Instead I would write a snippet. A sentence or two that captured the moment from the day. Just enough for me to remember the moment and recall it clearly on a later date.
I also allowed myself to record any meaningful memories that came to mind over the course of the day, in response to either something I [had already added] or something that came to mind organically. Oftentimes these were recovered memories: moments from my past that had been forgotten for years but had returned to my mind through the process of doing Homework for Life.
To do this work, I decided to use an Excel spreadsheet. It works well for several reasons. First, it forced me to capture these moments in just a few words. ...My spreadsheet is broken into two columns: the date and the story. That's it. As a result, I don't allow myself to write more than the story cell allows. For a novelist who is accustomed to writing hundreds and sometimes thousands of words per day, the temptation to write was more great, but I believe in simplicity. I believe in strategies that are easy to apply and maintain even on our busiest days. This is the best way to develop a habit.
...When I started Homework for Life, I didn't know what the results would be. At best, I hoped to find a handful of stories that I might be able to tell onstage someday.
Instead, something amazing happened. As I reflected on each day of my life and identified the most storyworthy moments, I began to develop a storytelling lens—one that is now sharp and clear. With this lens I began to see that my life is filled with stories. Moments of real meaning that I had never noticed before were suddenly staring me in the face. You won't believe how plentiful they are.
There are moments when you connect with someone in a new and unexpected way. Moments when your heart fills with joy or breaks into tiny pieces. Moments when your position on an issue suddenly shifts or your opinion of a person changes forever. Moments when you discover something new about yourself or the world for the first time. Moments when a person says something you never want to forget or desperately wish you could forget.
Not every day contains a storyworthy moment for me, but I found that the longer I did my homework, the more days did contain one. My wife likes to say that I can turn any moment into a good story, and my friend Pablo has said that I can turn the act of picking up a pebble from the ground into a great story. Neither of these statements is true. The truth is this: I simply see more storyworthy moments in the day than most people. They don't go unnoticed, as they once did.
I discovered that there is beauty and import in my life that I never would have imagined before doing my homework, and that these small, unexpected moments of beauty are oftentimes some of my most compelling stories.
...All of this happens because I sit down every evening and ask myself: What is my story from today? What is the thing about today that has made it different from any previous day? Then I write my answer down.
That's it. That's all I do. If you do it, before long you will have more stories than you could ever imagine.
I know many professional storytellers, including some of my favorites, who only have a handful of stories to share. I ask them to perform in shows that I produce, and they tell me they can't. They don't have any more good stories.
I tell these storytellers that my current list of untold story ideas is more than five hundred items long. They think this number is crazy. They say it's impossible. I think it's crazy that they don't do Homework for Life.
But even if you're not in the story-collecting business, other remarkable things will begin to happen when you do Homework for Life.
I received one of the best phone calls of my life from a Homework for Life convert. When I answered the phone, there was a woman on the other end, and she was crying. My initial thought: Oh, no. Who is this? What terrible thing has happened?
The woman doesn't tell me her name. She's just crying. A second later she starts talking. She tells me that she took a storytelling workshop with me six months before. She had listened closely as I assigned her Homework for Life, and she started doing it that night. She's calling to tell me that she's fifty-two years old, and for her entire life, she'd never felt like an important person in this world. She'd always thought that she was just life everyone else—simply another face in the crowd—and that one day in the future, she was going to die and go out quietly. Unnoticed.
Then she started doing my Homework for Life, and within three months, it had changed her life. She says searching for stories in her everyday life and recording them has made her feel like an important person for the first time. She tells me that she has real stories—important and significant moments in her life that she had never seen before—and that she feels that they are part of a much larger story. She says she feels like a critical cog in the gears of the universe. Her life matters. She tells me that she can't wait to get out of bed every morning and find out what will be the thing that makes that day different than the last.
It's probably the best phone call I've ever received, and I never got the woman's name. She thanked me and hung up while she was still crying.
But it's true. As you start to see importance and meaning in each day, you suddenly understand your importance to this world. You start to see how the meaningful moments that we experience every day contribute to the lives of others and to the world. You start to sense the critical nature of your very existence. There are no more throwaway days. Every day can change the world in some small way. In fact, every day has been changing the world for as long as you've been alive.
You just haven't noticed yet.
[pp 41-42; 46-47; 52-53]
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Excerpt from Journal to the Self
By Kathleen Adams
There's a friend at the end of your pen which you can use to help you solve personal or business problems, get to know all the different parts of yourself, explore your creativity, heal your relationships, develop your intuition... and much more.
This friend, of course, is your journal. Empty, blank, smooth -- a beautiful gift waiting to be unwrapped!
Why write a journal? A dozen answers...
1. Discover the writer within you. If you've told yourself for years that writing isn't fun, give it one more chance. You'll find that your journal doesn't care if you spell words correctly, put commas in the proper places, or scribble in the margins. You can draw a picture, write in circles around the page, write big and sloppy or tiny and precise. Journal writing is a near-perfect hobby: inexpensive, always available, no special equipment or allotment. And for those of you who take care of others at the expense of taking care of yourself (you know who you are!), your journal can be a bottomless well of self-nurturing.
If you've told yourself for years that you can't write, give yourself one more chance, too. When you replace a “performance" expectation with an “enjoyment" expectation, you're likely to surprise yourself at how much better you like what you write!
2. Keep a record for the future of how your life unfolds. It is the nature of the human psyche to move toward wholeness and growth; each of us holds at our core a deep desire to become more of who we really are. Your journal will serve as a scribe throughout the journey of your life, obligingly recording your own uniquely forged path toward individuation, keeping an accurate log of the uphill trudge, the view from the summit, the ambling strolls through wildflower-strewn meadows, the terrifying descents into the abyss.
There is something very magical about going back into your life and observing it from the vantage point of a month or a year or 10 years later. Your journal will stand as a chronicle of your growth, your hopes, you fears, your dreams, your ambitions, your sorrows, your serendipities.
Leigh was pregnant with her first child when she began her journal journey, and her entries consisted exclusively of letters to her unborn son. “When Tucker is 15 or 16, and we're going through all the teenage trauma," she said, “I want to be able to be able to go back to these journal letters and share them with him. I want my son to know how much his father and I loved him and wanted him even before his birth. Somehow I think that will help to ease any temporary disruption all of us may be experiencing. What a precious gift of communication and understanding!...3. Get to know all the different parts of yourself. Psychologically as well as physically, each of us is made up of many different pieces; we are human jigsaw puzzles. The Italian psychologist Roberto Assagioli called these different parts of ourselves “subpersonalities." Our subpersonalities are like a wardrobe full of mental and emotional costumes; we “dress up" in one or another to fit the changing situations and circumstances of our lives. One of the goals of psychosynthesis, the therapy Assagioli developed as his life's work, is to integrate and synthesize the various subpersonalities into the larger and deeper whole, the Self.
You're undoubtedly familiar with some of your own subpersonalities. Recent literature in the Adult Children of Alcoholics movement identifies several subpersonalities that people who grew up in an alcoholic or other dysfunctional household typically develop. These include the Lost Child (the part of you that wants to hide in a corner when conflict arises), the Scapegoat (the part of you that protests against family chaos by acting our or getting into trouble yourself), the Family Hero (the part of you that wants to be perfect), or the Mascot, Joker, or Comedian (the part of you that tries to distract attention away from family troubles by being comical, cute, or appealing).
If you have children, you undoubtedly have both Loving Parent and Stern Parent subpersonalities. Most of us have some variation of an Inner Critic or Perfectionist subpersonality that unrealistically expects us to do everything without error....
There are other subpersonalities with which you may not be very familiar. Assagioli called these the “shadow" subpersonalities, because the light of your own awareness has not yet touched them and allowed them to come forward in recognition and integration. These may be the parts of yourself that deal with anger or fear or sexuality; you may even think that they don't exist at all.
Your journal can serve as a magic mirror which you can gaze and see reflected back to you the various parts of yourself. And as you come to know and love your many parts, as you learn and how your subpersonalities have helped you meet your needs and stay safe, as you learn to ask the gentle questions “How can I help you?" and “What do you need from me?" you will find that more and more of yourself is integrating into your Self.
4. Take advantage of a “friend in need" and a valuable tool in the therapeutic process. Certainly one of the most important uses of the journal is its tremendous potential as a therapeutic tool, whether in a program of counseling with a trained expert or in a self-designed program of personal process.
In 1987 I conducted a study on journaling as a therapeutic tool. Every one of the respondents said that one of the reasons they wrote a journal was because “I can talk to myself on paper and work myself through my problems." And 93 percent said that their journals were “valuable tools for self-therapy."
Each respondent listed three words or phrases that described his or her relationship with the journal. Fully 87 percent of the responses described the journal in terms of the qualities of friendship and/or therapy: close, intimate, trusting, caring, honest, nonjudgmental.
My own experience tells me that when a journal is used in conjunction with a program in therapy, in most cases the client moves through issues more quickly and integrates new learnings more readily. Some therapists and clients agree on journal “homework" to be completed between sessions... You may not want to seek the professional services of a therapist or counselor. You may not have the money or the time or a therapist who is available to you. Sometimes the issue you're working on is a short-term situational problem that doesn't really merit a lengthy counseling relationship.
That's when your journal can really shine. You can learn to act as your own therapist, working yourself through problems, coming to new levels of discovery, asking yourself questions and letting yourself answer them....
5. Heal your relationships. If your relationship conflicts involve people who are active and present in your life, the journal can provide a safe forum in which to ventilate strong feelings that may not be appropriate for direct expression.
In other words, in your journal you can cuss out your boss, scream at your mother, and yell at your spouse to your heart's content. This discharges the emotion and leaves you sane and sensible for an actual conversation, in which you'll likely find yourself able not only to state your wants and needs in an assertive manner but also to listen to the other's point of view, as well.
If you are haunted by what Elisabeth Kubler-Ross calls “unfinished business" with someone who is no longer available to you (through death, abandonment, or simply moving on), your journal can help you sort through the conflict and pain....
6. Access information stored in the subconscious and unconscious minds. Jungian and other transpersonal psychologies reach that the human mind is made up of four parts: conscious, subconscious, unconscious, and superconscious (or collective unconscious). To get an idea of their relationships to each other, imagine yourself on a beach. Closest to you, the waves that crest into the air and crash against the shore can be thought of as your conscious mind -- that part from which you actively perceive and remember. As you shift your focus a little further into the distance, the water below the surface that builds to form the waves can be considered your subconscious mind, where you brain stores memories and information that can be brought up and over to consciousness. Looking even further in the distance, the water that stretches out to the horizon is like your unconscious mind; it is vast, and it touches other lands, lives, civilizations, cultures. But if the tides are pulling a certain way, this water can be worked to the subconscious, and then the conscious, level.
The journal is like the moon, emitting a magnetic tug that draws information from your subconscious and unconscious minds and brings it to the surface, where you can work at the conscious level.
7. Access information from your superconscious mind--the collective unconscious or your “Higher Self."Returning to the ocean metaphor, the water that extends down into the depths of the earth is like your superconscious mind. This level has a life and energy all its own; it is home to entire civilizations, and it constantly feeds each of other other levels in turn. It is at this level that you connect with the unity of the ocean and begin to sense that you are indeed one drop of a vast wholeness, blending your individuality with the individualities of infinite other drops to cocreate the All-That-Is. What has popularly become known as channeling or automatic writing comes from this level of your mind.
8. Explore your dreams in the journal. Many techniques used in dream therapy (such as Jungian active imagination, Gestalt identification, and Freudian free association) can easily be translated to written form; any technique that you would use for a situation or relationship in your waking life can be used for its dreaming counterpart. Let your journal serve as a scrivener as you venture down what Freud called the “royal road to the unconscious."
9. Recognize the symbology of your life and develop your intuition. Intuition, your “sixth sense," does not communicate to you in the same way as your other five senses; your life symbolically, as a series of outer events with potential for inner meaning, is at the heart of intuitive living and allows us to “glimpse...the reality that there is indeed a link between us all, between us and all living things, between us and the universe," as Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen states.
....According to Dr. Bolen, synchronicities, those marvelous serendipities of “meaningful coincidence" where outer event and inner meaning are fused, may be like waking dreams: we may each have several of them a day, even if we don't recognize or remember them. In the Tao of Psychology she continues, “Synchronicity, like dreams, invite us to participate at the symbolic level, where we sense there is underlying meaning."
Synchronicities, symbols, life metaphors, and miracles are all like four-leaf clovers: You'll never find one if you're not looking. Get into the habit of asking yourself, “How is this situation a metaphor for another part of my life?" or “Where is the symbolism in this?" Then let your intuition answer. (Incidentally, it's a very common experience to feel as if you're “making it up" when you write intuitively.)
10. Maximize time and business efficiency. Many of the most popular speakers on the motivational circuit tout journal writing as one of the best-kept secrets of success... Contrary to what you might think, the time you spend on a business journal can be very cost-effective. When you're focused, you can accomplish an amazing amount in 15 minutes or less, a and yo may just find that writing in your business journal is the most productive and profitable time you spend during the day.
11. Explore your creativity. Write a poem. Add some music; sing a song. Doodle out a short story. Paint a picture with words or tempura. Your journal is a forgiving canvas for expressions of creativity that you feared were dead and buried.
Remember when you were a tiny child, drawing mysterious shapes and hieroglyphics with crayons? “That's a cow in the snow, " you would proudly proclaim, “and that part says, I love you, Grandpa." Draw a cow in the snow.
12. Track the cycles, patterns, and trends in your life. No longer need you be subject to the mercy of your “moods"--with a little forethought and a commitment to chart yourself for a few weeks or months, you're likely to find amazing information about your personal patterns. Over time, you'll begin to notice and plan for your down times, your creative times, your introspective times....
Among other things, the journal can help you get (and stay) in touch with your feelings, develop spontaneity, develop self-discipline, try on new behaviors and beliefs, imagine your own possibilities, or make your fantasies real. It doesn't matter which reason you choose. Just remember to have fun, try new things, and enjoy the journey.
[pp 14-23]
Sources
Adams, Kathleen. Journal to the Self: Twenty-Two Paths to Personal Growth. Warner Books, 1990.
Cameron, Julia. The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. TarcherPerigee, 1992.
Dicks, Matthew. Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling. New World Library, 2018.
Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Shambhala Publications, 1986.