Category: evolution of your journal

Your unique path to maturity

Christina Baldwin, “One to One”, p. 58:
Asking is risk, and it is how human beings grow. To grow gently, respect your own process and pace, the uniqueness of your life experiences, and the reflections you have about them. There will be times in life when outside events cause you to grow with uncomfortable and dramatic swiftness. To have already developed a root of gentleness in your own writing will help you get through these times with as little trauma as possible and still enable you to learn what you need from them. This respect for process is the gift you give yourself, the safety you provide yourself.

No one has a prescribed map you can follow to maturity: we are all making it up as we go along and we learn to notice that the pieces of insight and information we need seem to be there as we need them.

A gentle self-guided process

Journal writing is, overall, a gentle process because it is self-guided.

the level at which you ask yourself questions and the responses that come to you are determined by what you are currently ready to know and deal with in writing.
This does not mean you will always be comfortable.

Writing for self-awareness implies the ability to increase awareness, and that means living at the edge of your current insight, choosing to ask for more insight.

Christina Baldwin, “One to One”, p.57

What is a journal? Responding to our own sense of growth

The journal is a way of responding independently to our own particular sense of growth, from a viewpoint of ourselves as healthy, evolving human beings.

Когда мы ведем дневник, мы сами свидетельствуем процессу собственного роста; мы видим себя и становимся видимыми для себя – как здоровые существа, у каждого из которых свой путь развития.

Christina Baldwin, “One to One”, p.58

Writing outdoors

“I do a lot of my journaling inside but I have found that when I link writing to an outside experience – going to the park, walking an outdoor labyrinth, even sitting on my own porch – it adds a level of sensory input that isn’t there when I am writing indoors, even with the window open”.

Deborah Ross, in “Your Brain on Ink”, p.97

Inviting novelty to journal-writing

“Give your novelty-loving brain something to engage it; it will help your brain to learn something new or deepen an existing positive memory. Write with a purple gel pen (Kay’s favourite) or illustrate your writing with a crayon border. Go to a coffee shop you have never been to before or write in the park. You can take novelty even further by identifying the personal relevance: How does this novelty choice relate to me? Why is this important? How does this feed my soul?”

Deborah Ross, Kathleen Adams, “Your Brain on Ink”, p. 94