What would you write about your life or your thoughts if you knew that no-one would ever read it? What would you write if grammar, spelling and punctuation didn’t matter? What would you write about if you knew that the words you put to the page could influence nature and humanity, or your own happiness in a positive way?
Practically speaking, we all learn the same writing skills in our primary school years. But something happens along with that. Somewhere in amongst the words, we pick up other messages about how good our words are, and often how good we are. Or not.
Years pass and we hear about people who define themselves as writers, and by definition, we feel that we are not.
But we are. We are all writers, we are all artists. Each and every one of us.
The loss to us as human beings when we don’t value our words is immense.
One of the most significant tools we have when healing the necessary woundings of life is writing in a journal.
For many, facing a blank page is a daunting experience. The voice inside that has kept us from writing is triggered. It says ‘what if someone ever reads this’ or ‘my thoughts and musing are not interesting enough’, or ‘as good as hers’, or are ‘just a pointless waste of time’.
Before we even start, we are limiting the possibility we have in each of us to write in a way that is meaningful for us and our healing.
I am also a therapist, and I vividly recall a client who, for months, resisted the need she had to keep a personal journal. This was a forty-year-old woman who for most of her life had played a secondary role to the needs of others in her life. When we really sat with her inability to write for herself, a life-changing insight was revealed. Her resistance was part of a much grander theme in her life… her difficulty in making her mark on the world. Once she recognised that making marks on a page in a journal would be a step towards making a mark in her life, the real healing began. Her journal became her long-lost friend, as did her own soul’s longings.
What would you write if you believed that your own thoughts and ideas were of value? Could you sit and let the words pour out on to the page without seeking to make them right or acceptable? Could you let the truth in that moment be revealed in black and white, to be pondered or even transformed?
It does not require a special pen, an expensive leather bound journal that you are too frightened to ruin or a special place to write. With mindful intention, even a humble exercise book can become a repository for your greatness.
Journals make for honest friends. Just finding the right word to express a thought or idea can be healing in its own right. And if the word doesn’t come then a symbol or image might. There is no requirement that a journal be about words and using colour and shape to convey meaning is often illuminating.
In fact, there are no rules to journal writing. Write upside down, in circles and spirals, in colour. Write words and not sentences, doodle, draw, paste in pictures you like – everything is of value.
Write when the urge captures you, in snatched moments or as a regular meditation practice. Don’t make it hard or yet another thing to do on a list of seemingly endless tasks. You cannot fail your journal, you just simply need to show up and be there from time to time.
Psychotherapist Carl Jung was an avid journaller. His most significant piece of work, only recently released, was his Red Book, a reproduction of his inner work and drawings over thirty years. This book has an energy all of its own. To page through it is to see the evolution of a man and his work, an insight into the way he came to his most important findings of what it is to be human, his dreams and his fears. There is a sense that without his journal, Jung’s life would have been very different. This may be true for us all.
A journal does not need to contain your life story, although it may evolve in this direction. A journal is more a stream of consciousness, a present moment collected and given space to breathe.
When we journal we do more than write. We decide to live.
We say, ‘I can make my mark. My words are of value…and so am I.’
