Journaling Your Way to Inner Health
Journaling can be a wonderful way to increase inner health, a way to be heard, a way to forgiveness for yourself and others, or a road out of a painful past into a future of fulfilled dreams. It is better than a magic elixir to lift the burdens of trauma, rejection, failure, and discouragement.
Sounds almost too good to be true, doesn’t it? Before I suggest that we are not meant to carry these burdens, I want to note that I have lived long enough to appreciate that the best life lessons come through these gates of pain, and a life that has no sorrow or loss tends to be a bit shallow and unfulfilling.
We all have a past that includes joys as well as pain. I celebrate the fact that my past has a pretty balanced mix of the two but that isn’t the case for everyone.
Sometimes our past holds painful memories and scars of neglect, abuse, and shame. Or perhaps there is a string of poor choices that we regret, and we have a hard time opening the door of forgiveness.
The problem with some of the articles I read about forgiveness and moving on is they often suggest that the answer is to “Just get on with life. Forgive the past and all will be well.”
Wouldn’t it be great if it were that easy!
This level of thinking fails to consider the actual, physical changes that take place in our body chemistry, especially when we are young.
Wiring in the brain gets short-circuited when survival is the main focus of a child’s life. And concurrent chemical (hormonal) imbalances affect everything including heart rate, vision, weight, energy, and sleep.
Yet what we often observe in ourselves and others are mood changes, difficult behaviors, and addictions. Fodder for judgment and shame if there ever was!
How do we get past a legacy of such challenges? Is it even possible?
I am going to be bold enough to enter this question with the hypothesis that if there is an answer to freeing yourself from the past, it may be found in reading, writing, and arithmetic.
READING
What have you been reading lately? Reading mysteries and romance and dystopian fiction gives us a context to think about our own pasts and ponder our future.
Some find a path in how-to books, some in lean into scripture, others may find the rhythm of poetry or even humor will lift them from a dark inner place and bring hope and possibility to a sense of despair.
WRITING
And if reading begins a process of freeing us from the problems of the past, writing is the second step. It includes creative writing like poetry and esssays, and it could include writing for publication— but the kind of writing I am referring to is much more personal, not meant for anyone else’s eyes. Journal writing fits this category.
What I like about journal writing is the ‘not meant for anyone else’s eyes’ statement.
When I have been wronged or harmed by another person I need to have a place to tell that story, to grumble or even rant at the injustice.
Sharing my feelings with other people may not be the healthiest route to take because that usually sparks a fire that feeds my negative feelings and I slip into ‘Poor me!’
If my goal is to hang on to my indignation and mete out justice to the offender then, yes, by all means, I could tell everyone what this horrible person did to me…and be faced with an even bigger act of forgiveness – this time for myself when I realize how I have defamed another person in the process.
If on the other hand, I want to practice forgiveness, I get myself a journal and pour out my feelings on its pages.
My inner wounded self needs to be heard, to have her feelings validated, to say things I would regret saying to someone else, even if they deserved it.
I find the best format is a letter, addressing it to my muse, to the universe, and even to God. And mostly it is made up of questions that all begin with ‘why?’
Dear Lucy (God, Hamilton, Great Spirit), Why…….
Reply from the above: Because………..
The thing about a letter is that it presupposes a conversation or dialogue. It is in the silence after dumping my thoughts and feelings and asking every ‘why’ I can think of that an answer often comes…and I write that down too.
Some people pay big bucks to have a therapist listen to their lament not realizing that healing comes from being heard, not in discourse or argument.
Let your journal do the listening. It is a lot cheaper. I am NOT saying to avoid therapy when it is needed. But I do suggest that we might not need as much if we have learned how to listen to our own inner voices. And journaling is one way to do that.
I have a suspicion that many if not most of the readers of TheReflectivePen are either people who journal, people who have tried it, or people who wish they could.
If you are one of them you may wish to check out a new website in which I will be offering short commentaries on many aspects of journaling, how to start, what materials to use, ways to break through resistance, and things to write about. You will find this resource at ardismayo.com. Be sure to sign up when you go there.
‘RITHMETIC
And the final path to forgiveness — arithmetic
If you are like me you are pretty good at addition and multiplication as you tally up all the reasons why you are a faulty, if not despicable, person because of something you have done or thought or believed.
The trouble is we forget to subtract. In bookkeeping it is as important to subtract as it is to add. To divide as well as multiply.
In my journal, there is a page of things I commit to eliminating. This is a page I wouldn’t want anyone to see! On another page, I am able to divide lists of everything I am grateful for because there is no end to blessings when I begin to write them down. If I divide them into categories I can remember them more easily and pass them on to others.
When I learn to divide my sorrows into small bites I can digest a lot of painful things and so I will write about tiny aspects of bigger problems and then listen for the why’s and write the responses from the universe.
Using a journal can become a path to forgiveness of self or others if you take a reading-writing-‘rithmetic approach.
Have you done your reading, writing, and arithmetic today?
If you would like more about how journaling can enhance your inner growth, you are invited to my new site, ArdisMayo.com where I will be posting articles and resources for your journaling adventure.
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