I’d taken the old books out because we were talking about visual art and I was using the covers of some of my journals as examples. It naturally led into talking about the journals themselves. “So what do you get out of it?” I suppose it’s a reasonable question, but as with any practice, what you get out depends on what you put in. I can only speak to my experience. I came to journalling through Jackee Holder and to Morning Pages through Julia Cameron. That was 2017
Although I’d been walk-writing for several years by then and Clive had pointed out that it was something that I obviously ‘needed’ to do I hadn’t really paid attention to that word need. I hadn’t wondered about why I did it. I was just capturing experience, getting down the bits that the photographs didn’t show. The ‘why’ of it didn’t really enter my thinking, but if I had thought about it, I would no doubt have said I was just putting the pictures in their context, so I’d know where they were taken. I’m sure I didn’t realise that what was happening was the other way about…that the pictures were there purely to memory-jog the words into life. That it was all about the moment, the experience, the thought, sight, sound, smell, taste, touch that would never come again.
I certainly wouldn’t have pondered the idea that those moments might have been more than moments: that the point of the experience might not be clear until years later. I don’t believe that things happen for a reason. I believe that things happen and then we attach meaning to them. Even so, if we lose touch with the essence of the things that happen, the meaning dissolves as well.
2017 was when I consciously decided to make journalling “a practice”. For me it is precisely that. It is a spiritual practice. I can understand how the meditators and yoga practitioners among you will react to this. Journalling is too much in your head you will say. Spiritual practice requires you to get out of your head and into your body, into your breathing, into your heart. I don’t disagree with that, but journalling approached in the right way can help you do that.
At the very least, it can clear your head-space to enable you to do that, if that is where your practice requires you to be.
I’m going to take a step back though, and claim journalling as a spiritual practice in its own right.
As I continue my journey and step into other spiritual practices, the expression that comes up time and time again is that it is all about ‘intention’. Any practice is purely a physical exercise unless we imbue it with meaning. We get to choose what that meaning is. We get to choose whether we receive ancient wisdom through whatever route, or whether we create our own intentions and meanings. Either way, imbuing a movement of the body, whether it is the complexities of martial art or the flow of rope or dance or the simplicity of breathing, it has as much meaning, significance, and/or impact as we decide we want it to have. The addition or discovery of “meaning” is something we can choose to do or not choose to do or choose not to do. Choice. Meaning. Intention. Once there is intention there is potential. Our next choice is application, practice, discipline. With these the actions that were exercises become spiritual practice.
What is true of physical body work, and breath work, can also be true of mind work. We are always told to get out of our head and into our body, into our breath, into our heart…the mind can sometimes feel belittled in this process. But the mind is where it all starts. It starts with choice. It starts with the intention.
So my journalling is a spiritual practice because quite early on I specifically intended it to be so.
In case you’ve missed the link with physical body work (martial arts, yoga, breath work etc), let me point out that journalling is also a physical activity. I’m sure there are those who use their screens and their word processors and their apps and all their other technology to record their thoughts. Each to their own, but that does not fit my personal definition of journalling. For me it has to be physical. It has to involve that direct link between the mind through the hand and the pen to the page. It has to be flowing the way ink flows from the pen. It has to involve the deliberate transition from one move to the next as I lift the pen to create the space that begins a new word.
Also, it is not just about the words. Journalling (for me) includes snippetting and scrap-booking. It includes cutting out quotes and pictures and picking up leaves and feathers and adding them to the pages. I rarely draw, but if I did, that would go in there too. All of these things involve physical actions or sight and collection and cutting and pasting in the old-fashioned way that needs more than the click of a mouse, that requires the shrrrp of scissors through paper, the sticky-gluey fingers, the earthy scent of anything brought in from outside. It requires physicality...connection.
Of course it must be a daily practice. It cannot be called a journal if there isn’t something added every day. The very root of the word means, specifically, a day.
Journalling is a dance across a page, through a book. It is a life – mostly an inner life – rendered visible in retrospect.
For me now it is as essential as breathing. I cannot imagine a day that does not start with a hot drink, a pen, and the current book. I cannot imagine a week in which there are no days when I go back to the book at other times of day…late at night to capture something that for that moment feels important…or mid-afternoon because I’ve got half a poem nagging to be heard…or some other time because, there’s something I cannot see the shape of until I wrap words around it.
But that’s not how it started. It started with an intention to start every day with three pages of stream of consciousness writing. It’s surprising how the consciousness can go AWOL when you want it to transcribe itself. In those early books I know there are pages of repetition. Affirmations written again and again not because I believed that the writing of them would lend them strength, but because it filled up the lines on the page. I approached journalling and morning pages in particular as a discipline to be committed to, a skill to be learned. A practice.
There were days when I had nothing to say. There were days when I did not want to write. There are still days when I have nothing to say, but I write it down anyway. I write first thing for a host of reasons:-
It is a calm way to start the day. Whatever else may be scheduled or may land in the next 24 hours, I know that this starting point will be calm, inward and/or outward looking (both happen), quiet and a stepping into one of my own sacred spaces where no-one can expect anything of me, no-one can tell me how or who to be, no-one need ever know what I think or feel or hold true.
It is a place where I can explore my truth. Test it. Figure out what I really believe and what I don’t.
It is a place where I can ask questions, and listen for answers.
It is a place where the night-time dreams might be landed, before they fly forever, though mostly I cannot see what they mean, if anything at all.
It is a place where I can release my anger and frustration without it impacting anyone else.
It is an altar upon which I can lay my hopes and fears. It is a place to ask for guidance. Or forgiveness.
The more I wrote, the more I wanted to write. My journals are now more than morning pages. They are part work-book, part diary, part scrap-book, part sanctuary, part prayer, part moan, part wish-craft.
They are an extended letter to my self.
I do go back to them. Often, but not regularly, and always at random.
I go back a few days for things I knew would become poems or blogs or letters to others. I go back a whole year or two or more to see how I was feeling this time then, to see how far I have come (or not!). I go back to see if I said anything worth hearing.
The wisdom-to-words ratio isn’t great. There’s more rubbish in my journals than gems…but then isn’t that also true of diamond mines and gold-strewn streams? We pan for riches among the rocks, that’s the way it works. I simply choose to believe that my riches lie in words, in thoughts and moments captured. And I choose to believe that we don’t always see things straight the first time around – or we do, but don’t realise it. There is, of course, hubris and ego and arrogance in any assertion that anything we have written has value…but when we get out of our own way, we can see that maybe we weren’t ever ‘writing’ that we are always just snippetting, scrap-booking, catching the will-o’-the-wisps of our lives.
When we look back, we can see how the dots can be joined, and be reassured that we are still on track. Or alternatively see where the wrong turning was taken and the correction that will re-set our forward route.
The journals are a testament to my strength and my weakness, my ability to trust and my failure to do so.
They are both a picture of the road behind and a map for the trail ahead.
What do I get out of it? I get to know myself a little better.
