The Benefits
A few thoughts on the powers you can indulge and cultivate through journaling...
1. Journaling allows you to slow down your mind and sensing and look at your past and present consciously.
"There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting."
- Milan Kundera
No matter how fast the world around you is spinning, journaling gives you the opportunity to stop and examine it at the speed of your choosing. By unraveling the charged or baffling moments of your life, their grip on your psyche is loosened; You extract their wisdom and become more free.
The journaling process honours and articulates feeling, intuition, insight and imagination. When combined, these nonlinear powers act as an inner compass and help us locate both our sorrows and our true, life-expanding joys. We can begin to get clear on which thoughts and beliefs are our own, and which are inherited and don't lead to our flourishing.
You are down-shifting in order to strengthen self-understanding and to build trust with your inner world. These capacities, which invite clarity and compassion, will serve you in every area of your life.
2. Journaling cultivates present-moment awareness and insight.
"Try to be someone on whom nothing is lost."
- Henry James
There are handful of of people I've known who seem to vibrate with aliveness and presence. They come from very different backgrounds and enjoy diverse passions, but share a keen, almost animal sensing of the world around them. They observe surface features in detail, but also see in and through them; Their gaze penetrates to the very heart of a person or moment.
Attention, awareness, noticing, curiosity; we were all given these tools as a means of survival. Our living conditions might have changed since the Palaeolithic era, but our primal sensing of them has not. We're simply less skilled at translating what we register into direct knowing and decisive action. The glut of sensory information we take in and suppress is often felt internally as generalised, free-floating anxiety or physical tension.
Conscious journaling - stating what you notice, what it does to you bodily, and what it means to you on a deeper level - is a form of active attention that crystallises your sensing, and refines perception and discernment. By naming your intuitive nudges alongside your felt experience, you are not just looking 'at' the world, but in and through it, possibly getting a glimpse at deeper truths. Over time, both your present-moment awareness, and your record of it, become more sharp, engaged and insightful.
3. Journaling allows you to savour the ridiculous.
"Be master only of yourself, and all the world will be your home."
- Samurai proverb
By keeping a journal you get to be a spy in an absurd and chaotic world full of exhausting characters. You get to make them your subjects instead of your tormentors. You get to live through every awful experience knowing that it will make for richer pages and better stories.
When I'm somewhere I really don't want to be, a part of me opens up once I start looking at the moment through the lens of the journal. I'm suddenly on the hunt for the most novel experience, the weirdest conversation, the most insufferable personality. I say yes. I engage more playfully, and with more curiosity. I become more receptive and resilient, more trusting of the fact that, whatever I'm given, I can make of it a little magic. On a good day, being open and game can take me all the way to empathy.
In such situations mental freedom is crucial to maintaining sanity and good humour. Knowing that I'll be able to write about it later, no holds barred, lets me dedicate myself to the present moment instead of surrendering to my pissy inner monologue. It's all grist for the mill, and I get to practice being the author and heroine of my own experience.
The promise of a journal session helps us orient within and take a more autonomous stand toward reality. This is journal as sanctuary. "To survive, you must find yourself," writes Laurence Gonzalez. "Then it won't matter where you are."
So play hard, write hard, and stay free.
