Sleep Program Main Page
Journey
Over
Unknown
Roads to
Nothingness
Allowing,
Letting go.
Insight
Nearing
Grace<
Journaling is useful for many reasons. People journal to keep track, to doodle, to write out what is inside of them, to keep pictures, to list ideas and tasks, and to create.
Journaling can be done in many ways. You can try a single way or mix and match the ideas and come up with your own. The structure of your journal can also be part of your self-discovery process. Some ideas of kinds of journals: three-ring notebooks, coil bound notebooks, lined paper, unlined paper, clip-boards, scraps of paper filed in a folder, artists sketchbooks, and the many varieties of blank books that are found in bookstores.
Logging: I grew up thinking that a journal was like a ship’s log. You just entered the facts of the day such as: wind from the southeast and drizzle, at 14:35 we heard the West Chop fog horn and a school of bluefish swam by. Translated to my daily life, it was really boring: "It’s too cold to go outside and play, besides Julie is mad at me. I did two drawings at school and later my teacher sent me into the closet because I’d been talking." It isn't necessary to log all the mundane aspects of life, and keeping track of events can provide a great resource for family history. One of my clients brought in about ten pages from an ancestor's journal during a crossing of the North American continent in the early 1800’s. The entries were usually quite brief, perhaps a paragraph, or even a sentence or two. But they spoke of the events and hardships that journey entailed. The brevity of the entries spoke more than words about the difficulties.
Reflecting: In her book The Artist Within, Julia Cameron recommends that people take time each morning to write drivel for three pages. This, she says, never has to be reread, but it serves to open up the creative energies. I've found that these also help to relieve me from the mass of confusing thoughts about my life and my feelings. Just the process of putting them on paper releases the mind from having to dwell on it all. Reflecting can be a purposeful activity in which you might list pros and cons about a situation, or just note down your thoughts and feelings about a particular problem.
Drawing: Doodling or keeping track through drawing pictures can be a powerful way to capture a memory, a mood, a thought, or just practice. Many people combine drawings with captions or names or explanations of thoughts and feelings or events.
Pasting: Clipping pictures, words, or phrases from magazines and creating collages or just including them into your written journals can provide powerful ways to express yourself.
Creative writing, stories and poetry: Sometimes making up a poem or a story about a situation can bring in into focus better than pages and pages of reporting style of writing. It's harder to put the feelings into a poem form, it forces you to dig down deeply inside to get the right words and create the right feeling tone.
Letters to real and imaginary people: About 10 or 14 years ago Alice Walker’s The Color Purple came and taught me about writing letters, even love letters in my journal. Why, I could even write to God if I had a mind to, after all, one of her characters did, why couldn't I? A tried and true therapy method is to write letters that you don't send. This helps show some of the thoughts and feelings that you have been hiding because they are hurtful or inappropriate. Then rip up the letter. No one says you have to keep everything you write! Writing to imaginary people gives you the opportunity to really let your imagination take off. When your imagination is loosened up, your journey to find out what is causing a problem is made easier, more effective.
Imaginary conversations: Sometimes you may want to make up conversations. You may want to create a dialog between yourself and another person, or even an inanimate object. Or even between two objects - for instance between your bed and your feet. Do not get side-tracked by trying to edit the conversation until you have finished. Often these characters or symbols will have some news to tell you and you can let them do so by temporarily suspending the inner critic long enough to get the message out. Write the conversation as if you were writing a screen-play. Later, after the conversation has been written, you can either invite the inner judge/critic when you are trying to understand what you wrote means, or you can keep it in your journal until some time in the future.
A word on the tendency to critique your writing while you are writing: You need the inner critic, it has an important part to play in making good decisions in your life. However, there are times that the critic barges in that it is not only not needed, it actually gets in the way. Useful, readable writing comes when the critic is taking a nap. It comes when you can let yourself go and flow with whatever seems to be wanting to come out of you and onto the paper. The critic is useful later when you want to make sense of what you have written, or if you want to polish it up and show other people or even try to publish.
This site is created by and belongs to: Iris Publishing
email: Webmaster@Iris-Publishing.com
Regular Mail: P.O. Box 1092, Coupeville, WA 98239
Phone: (360) 678-6409
Copyright 1996-1998 Sarah Richards