My Journaling Practice
Finding Your Light
My journaling practice has brought beauty, meaning, and direction into my life. It has slowly evolved since it began in 2020, resulting in the practice described below. In Section I, I describe the philosophy of my journaling practice to frame your mindset when journaling. In Section II, I describe the details of the approach (in brief, it contains daily journaling, monthly reflection, and annual reflection to ensure continuous review of emotion, interests, and love over time).
Section I: Philosophy of Finding Your Light
The value of this journaling practice is emphasized by the passage I’ve copied below. I took this from a book titled Focus Your Day which contains 365 daily readings of wisdom. My Dad read this passage to our family on October 4th, my brother’s birthday, and I snapped a picture because I was compelled to copy it here. The passage is titled: Being Alive
Being Alive
For most of us, the sense of being fully alive does not come automatically. We gradually learn to do the things that cause us to feel alive. The learning experience is different for all of us. We have to discover for ourselves what it is that causes the sense of aliveness. We have to be willing to experiment.
Sometimes long habits of unconsciousness block out your memories of what caused you to feel alive in the past. Reflect on your past. What were the experiences in your life that caused you to feel most joyful and most awake? It also helps to experiment with new experiences in the present. This requires some imagination and a willingness to try something different, perhaps even to do things you have never tried before.
Being alive would include paying attention to what the present moment is actually offering to us. That alone would bring a richness to the present that we often miss. Much of our lives passes us by without affecting us because often we are only half awake.
We can deepen the sense of being alive, but only if we pay some attention to what we are feeling at the present moment, recapture what was good from the past, and broaden our vision as to what is possible in the future.
This passage made me think of a concept I had written in my journal a long time ago. Inspired by being alive, I refined my old idea here:
Our Life is like a Tree
Trees are a very special organism because their beauty reflects their sense of being alive. A tree cannot see where it should go, it only can sense which of its branches is most exposed to the light of the sun. By feeding resources to each area of light in its life, the tree forms its beautiful shape, its identity.
Unable to choose where it was born, the tree does not worry if there is darkness surrounding it. In fact, when a tree is born under the canopy of a forest, the slow growth of the cells allows them to stack tightly together, ultimately making the tree stronger as an adult. For a tree born in an abundance of light, it has to create its own adversity. People in an abundance of light may not realize the importance of challenging themselves. They can become lazy because they do not see the point in following the brightest source of light when, in reality, any direction will keep them alive under an abundance of sun. This is ignoring our own true nature, the same nature as the tree, which is to pursue the direction where we find the brightest light.
The result of living life in this way is a beautiful, uniquely interwoven geometry like that of a tree. The next time you walk through the forest, try and observe the trees from this perspective. See them as the resulting picture of a unique story - one of struggle, triumph, and commitment to light. Do this as you walk through the forest, and you will find you can also do it as you walk through a crowd of people. This is because our lives are like that of a tree.
This journaling practice is designed to help you find the light in your life so that you can find meaning as you move towards it. The first step is sensing where you feel the light, which comes easier for some than it does for others but needs to be developed by everyone. Writing down the things in each day that touched us most deeply will accumulate data for your future self to analyze when making larger scale decisions about what to pursue. This process may feel silly at first. You may say, “I know what I like. I know how to follow my light, my sense of being alive, so writing it down every day is stupid. It’s a waste of time.” I am happy for this person, because they have already excelled farther than many of us reach in our lives in knowing where to find joy. However, this journaling practice is not a binary ability. It is not whether you can or cannot do this. It is instead an ongoing practice that trains the subconscious ability of aligning your longer-term goals with your sense of being alive. As months and years go by, you watch closely as your sources of light change and evolve, and you notice the things that remain the same, taking you closer to the core of what ‘being alive’ means to you. This practice requires patience, because the insights that really blow your mind don’t come until you look back at the end of a month or a year at how much you have changed and evolved. That’s when the fun really starts to happen.
Section II: How to Find Your Light
The benefits of this journal increase over time. Therefore, the most important thing is that you don’t quit the daily journals. Life happens and you will miss some days, that’s okay. The important thing is that you come back to your journal again, and again, and again.
Daily Journal (less than 15 minutes – maybe even 5)
Write down roughly three things that happened during the day that brought you a deep emotion. Write down a moment of deeper connection with a friend, or a solution you found at work for a big problem, or maybe witnessing someone else’s joy for something they achieved. We can also learn a lot through the things that bring us tension. Write down a conflict that’s really bugging you, or maybe a problem at work that just won’t go away, or a thing about society that just doesn’t need to be there. Don’t recap your entire day and everything you did. Only mark bullet points of the moments that felt special, moments that you felt light. Keep the daily journal short for two reasons: 1) Long write-ups make it exausting to review later on. 2) You can’t make an excuse to yourself to not do it because you always have 5 minutes to give out of your day. It’s inevitable that you will miss some days, when returning, don’t overwhelm yourself with trying to “catch - up” on old days. Those days are already an abstract summary in your mind, so jot down 5 minutes of the main things that happened over the missing time period and keep moving forward.
Monthly Reflection (1-2 hours)
Review your daily journal entries at the end of the week or month and summarize the moving themes in your life. When reflecting on the month, we find patterns and themes of stressors and exciting new pursuits and give them context within the rest of our life. This is when you get to write longer pages of written reflection where you discover the shape of your tree (your life story). The responses may examine the development of a new relationship: meeting a friend and reading about your first impression, then seeing that impression develop through deeper conversations with them, eventually realizing overall what that person meant to you for this month. A result from this for me is often sending them a text to show some gratitude. Another example is a recurring anxiety: doubting yourself on a difficult project, stressing every time you work on it that you can’t get it done, then finding you succeed in the end after a few weeks of consistent effort. A result from this is feeling proud of how much I accomplish over time even though day to day can feel like I’m spinning my wheels with no traction. There are many themes that can be noticed in this larger timeframe, and they will be different for everyone. I often break these reflections into three sections: Work, relationships, and health. Work and relationships are self explanatory, but I want to expand on the health category because it tracks physical health as well as spiritual and mental health.
The reflection process is itself a spiritual exercise. I often notice a newfound nostalgia and awe for the beautiful moments of my life when I see them written down throughout the month. The goal of the daily journal is to detect beauty in life so that you can use the monthly reflection to find patterns between the beauty. These ultimately lead you to understand yourself - your values, your interests, your priorities - so you can bring more of those things into your life. Aiming to manifest beauty in life can be conscious or subconscious. There are many interpretations of ‘synchronicities’ in life, where a coincidence is spawned in a seemingly divine manner. Regardless of spiritual beliefs, I find that these synchronicities appear more often in areas of life that are highly aligned with my values and interests. I therefore use them as a sign that I’m finding beauty or light in life. Interestingly, we can train ourselves to detect more synchronicities (or manifest more synchronicities) by observing them and journaling about them. By recognizing and appreciating the beauty in front of us, we will naturally maintain our connection to it. It’s important to use this journaling practice to find beauty in your life. This way you can train yourself to grow towards the light in the same subconscious way a tree does.
I say monthly, but these reflections are loose because they are an opportunity to write creatively and descriptively about your emotions, so they have to be somewhat inspired. Sometimes it’s better to summarize a phase of life or a new relationship than it is to summarize the month of February. I review my journal entries once a month if things are steady, but often I add documents to describe something specifically powerful that I want to capture and process. These all go into the same folder on my computer to be reviewed at the end of the year. The goal is to creatively (and concisely) capture the depth of your experience so that when you read these pages in the future you can be deeply moved.
Annual Reflection (full day – maybe two)
Carve out an entire day to read all of your monthly reflections and summarize the moving themes of your life. This one takes a long time because you have written a lot over the year. I can write up to 4 pages for a monthly reflection, meaning around 40 pages of writing at the end of the year. It astounds me to read about the things I felt passion for 12 months earlier. There are things I no longer think about as well as things that I still care for deeply. This teaches me about the core of myself. Watching the themes of beauty and struggle move through my larger timeframe of life naturally fills me with awe and inspiration. Stretching my perspective to a larger timeframe often provides me with goals and adjustments that I want to make for the new year. I realize that my life is only so many of these years. I find gratitude for the challenges and triumphs that I look back on. I think of ways to create more of the things in my life that bring me the deepest of beauty and gratitude. I set intentions for the new year. I notice the things in life that don’t bring me deeper joy when looking back. I often aim to remove these things, but sometimes I simply accept them as knots in my tree. In either case I find a way to see my life as a work of art, watching the beautiful tree as it grows over time.
Life should be lived alive. Use this practice to define what being alive means to you, then get better at doing it <3