Chapter 2 - Keeping a Journal to Support Our Healing Process

Keeping a journal is an prominent feature of this on-line course. During the course we will be using journal writing to examine an important part of our lives, our relationship with ourselves. We will be using journaling to :

• explore any reasons for not allowing time for ourselves
• explore our relationship with our Inner Healer
• keep a dream log
• communicate with parts of ourselves we have shut out and ignored

Tools for writing
There is no hard and fast rule about what you need to write.Here are some suggestions for what you may need:

1. A notebook lined or unlined (if it is unlined this allows for diagrams and drawings as well). Alternately you can use an A4 file if you want to print out the sheets from the course and keep them as a record.
2. Pens or pencils. Some people like to use a pen with colored ink. Others (myself included) like to use a pencil. You might also want to buy a penlight - useful if you wake up at night and want to write or record a dream.
3. Additional options : a small notebook or post-it notes to carry in your bag or pocket to record fleeting thoughts and insights which often appear spontaneously at inconvenient times. They are important as they are on the fringe of consciousness and need to be caught before we lose them again. Log them into your notebook or onto a post-it note and transfer them to your journal later when you have time.

How To Write

Writing in a journal is not the same as writing a piece of literature. Journal writing is about self expression and it means about writing down everything. We need to feel safe to do this so you may want to keep your journal in a safe place where other people will not disturb or read it.
Writing down everything and suspending criticism about what we write is very important. If you think of something that does not feel acceptable to write down, write that it does not feel acceptable. Then look at it and ask yourselves what are the feelings in me that make it feel unacceptable. We all have an inner critic that judges and censors our experience. This part of ourselves tends to screen out those things that do not seem perfect. But healing ourselves is not about being perfect. Often the things that we hesitate to put down on paper hold the key to transformation and change as they touch on our blind spots, those parts of ourselves that need to be noticed, acknowledged and healed.
So when we write we need to try to write honestly, noting down every thing that comes into out mind. When you have finished writing re read what you have written, without judgment, without comparison and with a sense of oneness and ownership. If we can do this we can begin to examine our lives constructively, and as we do this we will develop more acceptance and understanding of ourselves.

During this course you will be using journaling as a tool for exploring and recording your experience.
Each lesson has an exercise that involves writing in your journal.

Look for the green journal prompts that indicate when you need to do this