Some years ago, Multiple Sclerosis kidnapped my body’s right side. I had to learn to write with my left hand, so I took up journaling as a way to practice writing.
Right on time, The Universe presented me with The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron, a book about reconnecting with creativity. One of Cameron’s basic recommendations is to write what she calls Morning Pages: three handwritten pages of daily stream of consciousness whatever. NO thinking, NO old English class rules. So I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. For weeks and weeks and weeks.
Then strange things started happening. Interesting words, phrases, and rhymes appeared. I began to write poetry for the first time. I started remembering pieces of my childhood. I began to FEEL I was alive.
After a time, I modified my Morning Pages practice, making it more a dialogue and less a data dump. I asked my pages questions: “Where do these feelings come from?” “Who told me that?” “What’s the logic of that fear?” With journal writing, I get answers not only in my notebook but in the shower, at the supermarket, in my sleep.
It’s become the Morning/Mooring/Moaning/Mystical/Magic Pages, and I practice it faithfully still.
Before journal writing, it was like Carly Simon wrote, “Suffering was the only thing that made me feel I was alive.” These days, with my journal fully active, I “haven’t got time for the pain.”
Journal-Writing helps me make sense of my personal universe: accomplish my goals, solve problems, and cure my diseases. With journal writing, I transform my life. I explore my past, expand my present, and envision my future.
Therapeutic Journaling helps us move out of our head with its highly critical, over-thinking, anxious worrying and return to living in and communicating continuously (on a first name basis) with our body. The more we journal, the more pointers we pick up on how we participate in the creation of our diseases. No, disease doesn’t just drop down from the sky arbitrarily. My journal is my number one health resource, my primary care provider, working hand-in-hand with me to achieve my goal of Perfect Health.
What a gorgeous site. Congratulations on your 51st Journal. I use Staples one subject notebook (and the subject of course is Me! Me! Me!)…I love its flexibility. I get a lot of questions about what’s the “right” way to Journal, what’s the “right” type of Journal, pen, time, etc. I tell people there’s only one “right” way to Journal…their way! WriteON!