YOU ARE WISE. Your inner being, soul, Self, intuition, psyche — whatever you want to call it — knows more than you realize. And journaling can be an effective way of tapping into this inner wisdom. But how does it work? Carl Jung is famous for having given us many of […]
DO YOU FEEL bored or stuck in your journaling practice, or have you had a difficult time starting or being consistent with your writing? Using the same technique every day, whether it’s morning pages or free-writing or writing prompts, can lead to writing that feels repetitive and shallow. Journaling can […]
Guest post by Sarah Cummings YOU’VE PROBABLY had the experience of sitting down to write — and nothing comes to mind. Even for someone who journals every day, there will be times when your mind feels as blank as the page before you. Other times you may have several […]
WHENEVER YOU FEEL overwhelmed, find yourself doing things you really don’t want to do, or just otherwise feel that life isn’t going the way you want, you are experiencing some degree of resistance. You may tend to react by ignoring your feelings and pushing through the resistance in order to accomplish […]
A WHILE AGO, while reviewing past journal entries, I realized that I hadn’t included much about what was going on in the world around me in any of my entries. My journal writing practice included explorations of everything physically and emotionally related to my life — family, friends, work, health, […]
WHETHER YOU’RE NEW TO JOURNALING or have been doing it for years, it’s beneficial to shake things up now and again — use a new technique or approach your writing from a new perspective. A fun activity is to generate your own journal writing prompts. What makes journaling prompts different from […]
DO YOU KEEP A JOURNAL? Do you ever watch videos about journaling? I thought not. I mean, who watches videos on journaling? And isn’t journaling pretty much just writing whatever you want on a page? It can be. But it can be much more and much less, depending on your reasons for […]
Last week I wrote about ways to get out of a writing rut. Shallow writing is a similar problem, but not as much about being stuck as wanting (needing) to get more out of your writing. Whether you’re journaling for personal growth or to improve your writing craft, the methods for […]
In every discipline and art form, it’s important to practice the fundamentals in order to keep them sharp. Years ago, I was a competitive ballroom dancer; yet, no matter how skilled or accomplished I became, my accomplishments were all built on the solid foundation of the fundamentals of each step: […]
Memoir comes in many forms, including poetry. Sometimes I forget this fact. To demonstrate how poetry can be memoir, I want to share with you a simple little poem I made in response to a writing prompt, along with the journaling process I used to write it. My journal is […]
Go where the pain is. I’m on a flight from Oakland, CA to Phoenix, AZ when I read these words in an article by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni*. It’s not that I haven’t heard this saying before. I have. Even Banerjee was paraphrasing a writing teacher she once had. Yet I […]
One of the reasons we journal is to hold onto significant events in our lives. If you also use your journals as resources for memoir writing, you’ll want to go beyond recording the basic event and your reactions (John and I had a big fight tonight. I’m sick and tired […]
