Guest Post by María José Bianchi I STARTED JOURNALING when I needed my truth the most. It was a time in my life when I felt stuck, lost, and miserable, but I didn’t know why. At the time, I supposed my unhappiness had something to do with my career. Five […]
Life as we knew it is over — at least for the next few weeks. This was the first sentence in my March 15, 2020 journal entry in what happened to be the start of a new journal. Several months ago when I impulsively purchased it from an artist at […]
I’VE BEEN THINKING BACK (a sometimes dangerous thing to do) — journaling and reflecting on the activities, achievements, and failures of this past year — in fact, this past decade. After all, what better time to look back with perfect hindsight than year 2020 — a number that doubles as […]
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 […]
AS IF LOSS ISN’T ENOUGH by itself, another painful emotion that grief awakens and amplifies is guilt. Guilt that accompanies grief can come in several forms and each is not exclusive, meaning you may experience more than one kind of guilt at once. Telling yourself (or someone else telling you) […]
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 […]
“Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we […]
Chase down your passion like it’s the last bus of the night. ~Terri Guillemets HOWEVER YOU WANT to describe it, when you follow your heart — do what you love, live your passion, live the life of your dreams — you are engaged in activities that fill you with a sense of […]
IN MY EXPERIENCE as an editor and writing teacher, people often begin writing their memoir in a linear, this-happened-and-then-this-happened way. Or they try to cover too much ground, explaining a lifetime’s worth of events or relationship dynamics all at once. All of that is okay as a starting point for […]
THE ART OF KEEPING A JOURNAL has evolved over the years. There was the simple daily diary we wrote in when we were children, capturing a few events or activities from our day. Later, we embraced Julia Cameron’s revolutionary Morning Pages (freewriting 3 pages a day). Then, we moved on […]
“I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light.” ― Helen Keller ADULT FRIENDSHIPS are qualitatively and quantitatively different from those of our youth — even when those friendships are holdovers from that earlier time. And they are as important as ever. Friendship helps protect us […]
I RECENTLY RE-WATCHED Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s 2010 TED talk on “The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory,” which is about the difference between what he calls the “experiencing self” (that part of us that experiences life moment by moment) and the “memory self” (that part of us that remembers our […]
