Journaling! A scary word to a lot of us and others already do it for years and enjoy it. You don’t have to be a journalist or had a major in writing or have ambitions to be a poet in order for you to journal and reap the benefits from it.
I used to hate journaling. I thought you had to have a special looking book and you would have to make an entry every day. So I tried that. After a couple of days of writing ” Had corn flakes for breakfast, went to work again, work was good, am tired now and will go to bed after I put this pen down.” I lost interest. I skipped a day and then I thought this is just not for me. I tried it again some other times and when I wanted to write something, I didn’t have my journal with me and then I was too tired in the evening to write it down, so I just gave up again. Other times I thought, ok, my vacation will be a good time to start journaling again, so I would buy a nice journal for the vacation and brought it with me on the trip. Half way through the vacation I realized I had totally forgotten about it after the first day where I wrote ” first day of vacation and I am journaling again. I am sooooo excited” and I felt I had failed and didn’t need to try to continue or catch up. Sometimes I would try to fill in the missing days with what had happened. I would make sure at least one page was filled per day. Another time I had lost my “journaling pen” which threw me off and I stopped journaling again. When I would meet someone who journaled and they would tell me how much they enjoyed it, I would ask them how they do it and tried to copy it. The result was what I would consider another failure. I came to the conclusion that I guess I was just not meant to journal.
Finally during a vacation where I ended up in the hospital and had a lot of time to look out the window and just “do nothing” I picked up a blank journal (one that I had bought again ahead of time thinking this vacation I would start journaling and had not opened it until now). I just started, and began to realize what it means to journal.
It means to put on paper whatever comes to your mind. There is no set format for journaling. You can start with events of the day, feelings you had, things you would have wanted to say but didn’t, or just things, sentences, words that come to your mind. It can even be pictures or sketches or “words” that don’t make sense to your mind.
Make it whatever you require and desire it to be!
The important part is that you put it on paper and get it “out of your system”. These might be the things you have been holding in, or those energies that require to just flow through you, or the things that come out when they are able to sneak by your ever filtering, changing, editing mind, that are deep truths inside of you.
You don’t have to have a specific dedicated “journal”, but it is not wrong to have one either . You can jot down something on a piece of paper or write it in a beautiful book. You can even get “crazy” and do both depending on where you are or when you do it. I do find it convenient to collect all the “journaling artifacts” so I can go back through them, but really that is not important whether you do it or not. There is no rule on how often or when you should journal. A good answer is: whenever it is convenient to you. It might serve you to make a habit out of it, you can start with a specific time or place when you know you will have your journal at hand.
Also don’t think it has to be a set amount of pages every time. One day it could just be one sentence or word, and other days or times (moments) it can be several pages.
You also don’t have to make a plan or beat yourself up over doing it, forgetting it or just being too tired for it. If you haven’t journaled for a while, so what, just pick up and write or draw something. I noticed the hardest part is just starting back up. But if you don’t make it a big deal that you had stopped for a while, it is not a big deal.
So how about putting something down on some paper and let it flow, see what comes out that is already inside of you, you might get surprised.