The art of Journaling

I suspect every one of you reading has heard the suggestion, or are aware of the practice, of journaling for self-care. It is one of the best, practically free ways to process emotional material and deepen insight. For me it’s right up there with conscious breathing and body awareness as an essential part of any recovery toolkit.

However, journaling is not inherently healing any more than breathing is. There are some well known approaches to journaling and personal writing, such as bullet journals and morning pages, but that’s not what this essay is about (though I like both of those methods).

The following is based on my own practice, and what I have seen work best for my clients. It is flexible so you can tailor it to your own needs. I hope it can inspire you to create your own prompts, and trust that you have the answers you seek.

An introduction: why journal?

When we write out our thoughts, feelings, and observations, we are engaging in multiple levels of processing. We are putting our experience into words, we are reading the words as we write, and we are responding to what we’ve read. Because of this multilayer process, we have a heightened awareness of our tendency to circle back to the beginning of a thought when we reach a dead end or become unsure.
Writing slows us down.

Noticing repetitions invites us to pause, to reflect. And this reflective experience can lead to new insights that we might miss if we were only talking to ourselves (or a friend). We can also observe the body as we are writing.

We can pick up our journal after some time has passed and read back through previous entries. They become a time capsule, a window, and a record from a previous way of feeling and thinking. We remember how it felt then, and we notice how that differs from our experience now.
How do we harness this potential in our personal writing, to deepen our insight and awareness ?

There isn’t a right or wrong way to approach journaling. In my opinion.
However our approach will inform the results, and it useful to consider the benefits of different systems and identify what we intend to gain from the experience.

Reflecting vs Exploring

Are we expanding or narrowing our focus?

Reflecting includes the classic, diary style of journaling. Our writing captures what has happened since the last entry, or whatever is on your mind. This personal narrative can be quite illuminating. It offers focus on a particular frame of time and experience. For some this means it can also skew towards the negative or feel more like venting. For others it can feel banal, a recap without much insight. Reflecting is a beneficial practice for those who struggle with questions like “how I feel about this? or “what do I think about what happened today?” This style of journaling will help you develop a habit of asking yourself, what am I thinking, how am I feeling, how much of this relates to my experiences day to day?

Exploring is more topic-based, such as picking a theme or overall feeling from recent events and examining our experience over time. For example we may identify a theme of feeling anxious in that particular day, and explore its origins, its relationship to past experiences, and how we cope with it. Or perhaps we’re exploring dynamics of a relationship that is causing us discomfort, and we consider what is us and what is them, how do we feel, and how do we feel about what we just wrote, and what lies beyond that? This style of journaling can be expansive, wide-ranging, sprawling writing that keeps pushing deeper.
Exploring is helpful for those who have very active minds and can get caught up in their thinking. The gentle parameters of theme or topic help us to avoid becoming preoccupied with processing the day to day, and push us beyond our initial perceptions.

Do we want a structured or unstructured approach?

A structured approach could include prompts, pulling oracle cards or tarot cards, or keeping a journal for a specific purpose such as after a meditation practice or a dream journal. The benefits are that structure allows us to compare similar experiences over time, seeing connections we might otherwise miss. We can also bring structure by writing every day, and each day creates its own container.

Bringing in even more structure could include journaling alongside whatever you’re reading. Date your entries and use the medium of your current reading as a point to reflect from. What resonates for you and what doesn’t, what does it make you think about? How are you feeling as you engage? Are there any synchronicities between your reading and your daily experience? You could apply the same idea to any creative medium you engage with regularly.

An unstructured approach utilizes free writing, by beginning to write whatever is front of mind and allowing it to meander.
The stream of consciousness process offers the potential to go deeper into the unconscious layers, which are revealed as the conscious content is released onto the page. For those who wish to use writing as a form of connecting to intuition or guides, this style allows for us to stretch beyond what we think we know. Drawbacks to this approach are that such entries can lack context, becoming overly abstract or conceptual, missing the link to the embodied experience of one’s life. One way to remedy this is to implement a theme or boundary as a point of departure for unstructured, free writing.

I suggest keeping at least one structured, and one unstructured journal. I like to maintain a journal that is specifically for “venting” in a personal diary style, because I find that important but I also don’t want my most surface-level reactions to be my whole journal. Often when we are venting it is a time limited experience, just one version of how we feel. Keeping this contained allows us to honor our human nature— We access the benefit of using journaling to process emotions while acknowledging that it may not be a compete record of our experience. A hybrid version of this would be using a weekly planner as a journal, with just a 4-6 lines for each day as an ongoing record, inviting us to reflect on what we wish to highlight (what was really important?). I like to use an astrological planner for this purpose, and this constitutes my daily journal.

I use an unstructured journal for recording my thoughts and experiences after meditation, intentional Oracle/tarot card spreads, rituals, and interactive workshops. I only write in this journal after a practice or when I have something to say. The overall theme of the journal and response to a practice creates a small amount of structure, but I free write until I’m done and allow it to depart from the original topic as needed. These journals may span years before filling up.
I also keep a vigorous note-taking process on my phone where I can put all those random thoughts into their own little space. Sometimes these are the beginnings of essays, and sometimes they are isolated ideas.

What about prompts?

Lots of newsletters (mine included) will offer regular prompts to work with. Subscribing to a few will give you a regular feed to work with.
But you can also create your own!

Prompts are just questions to ask yourself. It is true that isn’t easy to write thoughtful prompts, but it mostly follows the same rules as thoughtful questions:

Prompts that are open ended, allowing for multiple departures into different areas (not yes or no questions)

Prompts that are specific. If you want to explore feelings about friendships, hone in on details of the relationship. Instead of “how do I feel about my friendships,” a more specific prompt might be “when I am feeling insecure or upset, what relationships do I trust to support me and why?”

Prompts that explore multiple layers of a topic or theme. This can include time, such as exploring the past, present, and future thoughts and feelings related to a theme. Or nesting questions that take you deeper into a topic (“what is an area of conflict I’m feeling in my life now, when is the first time I can remember a similar type of feeling, why does this matter to me now, what does this tell me about my needs in this moment?”) Or you can explore different qualities within a situation (“what is something that is calling for release, what is a quality I would benefit from cultivating, what is something I’d rather not experience but I’m still learning something from it”).

Prompts that relate to current events or cyclical experiences. Reflecting on how a time of the year has felt in past years can illuminate patterns in our awareness. Exploring our thoughts and feelings about current events can be a helpful way of returning to the body and understanding why we are responding a particular way. Comparing and contrasting similar experiences, such as breakups or starting new jobs, can also be used to illuminate patterns in our thinking and feeling, helping us to identify common elements and ways to validate our experience.

A few meta prompts about journaling:

What are your early experiences of journaling, including childhood diaries (if you had them)?

Feel into your body right now, in what ways were you aware or not aware of your body before reading this question?

What is the relationship between your mind and thoughts, and your physical sensations? Try toggling between mind and body as your write, reflecting that awareness.

Do you tend to gravitate to more structured or unstructured forms of personal writing?

What do you think you could gain by incorporating more structured approaches to journaling?

What could you gain by incorporating more unstructured approaches?