journal prompts


Back to Journaling Basics 8

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: […]


Blogtalk: From Journal to Personal Essay

Sheila Bender’s recent series of posts over on The Heart and Craft of Writing blog demonstrate how freewriting can help you get started writing personal essays. Like the journaling prompts I offer here, Sheila’s essay writing prompts ask us to open ourselves to exploration. She explains that writing an essay […]


Writing Through Gratitude: What it Means 6

A FRIEND recently told me that she keeps a journal only during the tough times and that she finds it difficult to write when everything seems to be going well. And she’s not the first person to have told me that. I’ve noticed that when things are difficult, we’ll write […]


Blogtalk: Finding Your Rhythm 3

EVERYTHING has its own rhythm: the ocean, earth, moon, and planets all have ebbs and flows of direction, contraction, and growth. And, just like these larger things around us, we have natural rhythms — some corresponding to the physical rhythms of the earth and sky, and some that are unique […]


Why Write? Emotional Healing 5

A HEALTHY PHYSICAL PROCESS means that we take in food and water from our environment, process it for nutrients, then expel the wastes. In the same way, a healthy emotional process means that we take in our life experiences, process them for nutrients, find what we need to grow and […]