I love journaling. Sometimes I write about my day, random to-do lists, people I’m grateful for, worries I have and every now and again, unexpected but helpful inner wisdom. I remember being gifted a fuzzy blue journal (so 2000s) as a youngster and I’ve been journaling ever since…
Personal reflection is a quiet time to pause, slow down and get busy thoughts or a random stream of consciousness out on paper.
Sometimes writing down something that is causing me stress and leaving me scatter-brained helps anchor my mind to something concrete and real – in this case paper – and it helps me reel in my thoughts, clear my head and on occasion get the clarity I need to go to bed with a smile on my face. Sometimes I write when I am bored, oftentimes when I’m overwhelmed or anxious. Journaling doesn’t always give me a eureka moment of clarity, but it certainly gets my attention focused on writing and helps me feel centered and relaxed. I’d be lying if I said I journal everyday, I typically get in a good journaling sesh a few times a week at best, a few times a month during my busiest days.
Sometimes journaling isn’t something I am totally committed to doing, even though I know it’s a positive exercise for my mind. Sometimes journaling can feel a little cumbersome when I’m feeling too busy or distracted, or a little daunting when I have questions about my purpose and path in life. When I do it though, I almost always get one nugget of inner wisdom, hoorah of self confidence or permission to release some negative shit I didn’t even realize was weighing me down and symbolically stinking up my life.
I wish more people would journal. I feel like the world would be a better place if people consistently checked in with themselves to reflect on what’s going on with their life, what’s working and not working, what they’d like to change.
Journaling allows us time to sit and gather our conscious or unconscious thoughts and process them with the wisdom and intuition we’ve acquired from all of our individual and collective experiences thus far.
While a simple practice that sometimes just results in me bitching about my grocery list and all the bills I have to pay, I can honestly say I believe it has been a transformative practice in my life since I was a tween, though I may not have realized it until becoming an adult.
For this reason I like to call journaling a sacred practice.
I know sacred has a religious connotation. And if you’re religious than maybe you’ll get my thinking here. If you’re not religious, but perhaps into spirituality, inner peace, achieving that feeling of feeling grounded/centered, into personal development, not feeling stressed or feeling mentally okay and have the capacity for creating meaning and love in your life, then yes, journaling is a sacred, special, ritualistic practice that I think everyone can wrap their heads around with a bit of an open mind. It deserves the the care, the pause, the focus, the attention, the surrender and courage to just do it without over analyzing why you are doing it, or why you don’t want to.
If you make a conscious effort to just write, even if it’s a stream of consciousness and nothing profound, respect the time you put in to doing it, even if it’s just for a 2 minutes.
It’s okay to acknowledge the discomfort that writing can sometimes bubble up, especially if there are feelings you start jotting on paper that have been bottled up for a while. We’re human and wired to feel things, let that shit out so you can let it go! If you’re just writing out your to do list, respect that time as well and surrender those action items to paper… sigh.. weight off the shoulders. Being in the moment with writing unlocks a little door into your mind and helps you release some clutter that’s been causing traffic jams up there. The more you do it, the more permission you give yourself – and the easier it becomes – to reflect, clear your mind, visualize, dream and have the mental space to implement positive changes in your life.
montage of life 