The Art of Journaling, Writing Your Script
The Art of Journaling, Writing Your Script
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August 20, 1971
Dear Diary:
Today was the last day of summer camp. We had a weenie roast and a talent show. Our team of 5 dressed like hippies and sang “Aquarius”. It was the best!! There is this really cute dude at camp. They call him “Jeep” (not sure why). I really like him, but he says he already has a girlfriend. Oh well, (yawn) goodnight!
REMEMBER a time, long, long ago, when your most cherished secrets were nestled into a tiny booklet filled with pages and pages of priceless entries that embraced the desires of your heart?
I have kept a diary, or some form of a journal since I was eleven years old. As I now thumb through the tattered pages, I am transported back to a time of innocence. the memories that emerge from the weathered entries give me a sense of peace and a welcome opportunity for self-reflection.
Sometimes you have to step back before you can move forward.
Writing (particularly in a journal) is something that doesn’t come easily to most people. Life events are much more important.
The immediate reactions to these life events are much more prevalent than taking the time to stop and think as a prerequisite to acting or responding. You see, the heart lends little time to reason. That’s the head’s job. Allowing the heart to rule over the head makes for disastrous results. Journaling requires the head (your thought process) to take precedence over the heart. With life events bombarding us ever day, that’s a difficult thing to do.
Many times we fail to capture in writing the many moments in our lives that mean so much. Maybe it’s because we’re not in the habit of writing down everything.
Maybe it’s because the experience seemed trivial at the time, and did not warrant an “entry”.
Or, maybe it’s because subconsciously we knew what we were doing wasn’t right, but we did it anyway, and honey, there was no way you wanted to see it in writing!
You might have seen it for what it truly was…A MISTAKE!!
THE PRACTICE OF JOURNALING allows you to see something for what it truly is, and to draw conclusions based on those findings. Your decisions at that point are based on a concerted effort between your head and your heart.
As a Journaling Practitioner, I escort individuals through the journaling process by helping them to identify the best form of journaling for them, based on their journaling goals. There are a plethora of journaling styles and formats. The style for you will be based on where you are and where you want to go.
Here are just a few examples:
Inner Dialog Journaling: This style of journaling provides an easy-to-learn system, a roadmap presenting clear steps that, when practiced, bring rapid results in understanding our feelings and behavior.
The Journal of Discovery: This style provides self-reflection in a way that reveals lessons learned through everyday occurrences that we may take for granted.
Proprioceptive Journaling: This advanced style offers a self-guided writing exercise that calls forth your imagination, your intellect and your intuition all at once to open your heart and clear your mind.
Your journaling practice will open your mind to revelations that, once worked through, offer the possibility of results that are quite contrary to anything you could possible fathom. Your mind becomes your companion, your teacher and your guide, as you begin to explore the possibilities.
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I journal myself, and have been doing so off and on since a young age. I love journaling because as you say it requires me to time and opportunity to process my feelings and then to hand them over to God. It also gives me an opportunity to plan, map and work through my present and future goals and vision. I can say that journaling has been a life line to receiving healing in so many ways.
I love journaling, too. Been doing it for decades. I am thankful for Pamela for providing me with this guest post. Thanks for commenting.
I’m one of those people who appreciate journaling, but don’t do it enough. I too have journaled or written in a dairy since a child. One reason I stopped was because of an issue with my hand and wrist (similar to carpel tunnel but with a different name). When I was in counseling many years ago I got my first computer and typed volumes on it (I get better mileage typing than writing). That was my way of processing things, and it helped tremendously. Now I keep a hand-written spiritual journal, but am limited by how much I can physically write.
Journaling helps me think through things, process them, and is wonderful for recording insights that I might otherwise forget. Thanks for sharing a post on this topic!
There is something about the process of handwriting that helps us to remember things (a brain function) but it also (experientially) helps us to heal our emotions. Thanks for your comment.