I’m writing this post to share a new approach I’ve been working with personally to realize the aim of catalyzing self-growth through meditative practice. This particular method has helped me get to know myself better with a more compassionate and clear understanding of my past and is helping me to adopt a more trusting, optimistic lens as I vision toward the future.
What’s involved, you ask? It’s a two step process.
STEP ONE. Develop a regular practice of journal writing. Minimize distractions while journalling. Use a pen on paper rather than a computer. Don’t go back and edit. Write without censorship. Bestow yourself the gift of creative freedom. Grammar is unimportant here. You can speak from multiple perspectives. You can play your own devil’s advocate. You can address people; whether rehearsing for real-life encounters or, just for the fun of it. Try to push for a minimum of three, uninterrupted pages. Let your thoughts skip around. Go on extravagant tangents. Make a note if you need to remember to get back to something. Linear navigation is not required. Explore your dreams; articulate the details. Make space for your emotions. They can live out loud here, on the page, in their purest rage without insulting or affecting anyone. This is a safe place for healthy expression. Not to mention that getting our material out, languaging it in the world, it’s a liberating practice. It frees us from holding onto all of that excess vibrational matter that our thoughts and emotions can generate when unexpressed.
Once your inner-world has been documented, it is preserved. You can relax. Your preservation has been assured. Your thoughts can maintain their potential without any additional effort required by you or from you. Phew. You can revisit material when and if it’s useful without having to hold onto it’s full weight all of the time. You can throw the heavier things away; banishing them from inhabiting your internal space altogether; a ritual cleansing. Remember, there’s no judgment here. At the beginning, you might find yourself writing nonsense just to begin to flex the muscle of stream-of-consciousness writing. It may take effortful practice to prevent yourself from revising yourself. Stick with it if this is the case for you. Once you master the fundamental technique, the thought-stream will begin to flow easefully through you, you will feel connected to yourself, no longer outside of yourself observing, but embodying a direct expression of your essential being nature.
STEP TWO. Whenever inspired, or in need of guidance, revisit your journal entries with a highlighter or a different colored pen. Re-reading your own words can be a powerful learning tool. Underline the sentences that land with resonance. Circle themes. Bring the undertow up to the surface for inspection. Write down new reflections. With a little bit of distance from the immediate experience that was documented, by us, in our own words on the page, we can often recognize powerful insights that we may have missed in their initial expression/active feeling stage.
When I go through my old writing; I often discover beautiful, self-composed mantras to live by from the pages. I notice that my emotional experience was often suggesting incredibly useful perspective on whatever I was living through at the moment of writing. I can see the arc of my process over time and feel gratitude for all of the small accomplishments I made that brought me to where I am presently. In addition to facilitating getting to know myself more intimately and from more angles, this practice has helped me to more proactively integrate the learnings I gather over time into conscious, every-day actions and behavior.
In the end, I believe that this practice has had an enormous impact on my capacity to manifest many self-directed goals over the past year. If you put it down in writing, it is much more likely to happen. This is true of events we hope will take place just as much as it’s true for our capacity to grow out of patterns and behaviors that are inhibiting us from reaching our fullest potential. Writing regularly can also help us stay centered. From the center, more perspective on every moment that passes by is more readily available, and with all of that perspective gained, more flexibility and possibility emerge and therefore, more opportunities can arise.
In closing, I’d like to thank Karyn Kay (1949–2012) for encouraging my own and countless NYC teenagers’ journalling habits. You are dearly missed.