I quote this sentence from Ralph Waldo Emerson, “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matter, compared to what lies within us. I used to give out a Permission Slip, which allowed my students to make any drawing they wanted to; all “mistakes” were permitted. Maybe I need to continue that practice; some people in this new group are reluctant to step out and experiment with a new way to enhance their written journals and put their right brain to work.

More later.

The first thing is to draw a image of your demon; what does it look like? What color is it? Or write about it’s countenance and the color of it’s hair. That is something you can do in your journal — face the demon. Do as Ram Dass said,” Invite them in for tea.” Describe them and get to know them and they become like relatives who come to visit once in a while. If you run and hide from them, then they are able to work on your mind and increase your anxiety.

Then, try to journal one word each day. Date your entry and write the one word that describes your current feeling, or that summarizes your whole day if you journal at night. Add one swath of color, the color of your feeling.

Then, after a week, move on to one sentence; and after a week to two sentences and so forth.

And you can always sign up for the weekly newsletter and get word and sentence prompts to write about.

Go Forth and Create.

Multi-tasking has become the norm; consider texting while driving. Dangerous and illegal for some but done by many; I guess even punching the “Talk” Button could be construed as texting. Your mind (a single- task machine) is trying to drive the car and run your thumb muscles by switching back and forth; seems like two tasks to me. Cognitive scientists like Dr. David Mayer,(and the law) say that this operation slows down the overall processing and leads to mistakes. But let’s switch our discussion of multi-tasking to another venue.

Two new syndromes, collectively called Absent Presence, are now being studied:
• Continuous Partial Attention (CPA) when you are trying to listen to someone in the office and continue to text (type, email, tweet, etc.);
• Surfer’s Voice when you are on the telephone talking or listening to someone while surfing the Internet via the keyboard or IPad.
We need to return to being a Listening Presence: the singular task of listening – to others, to ourselves, to the feelings in the words and yes, even to the silence between the words.
Stephen Ministers use a SOLAR acronym for listening to others, whether face to face or over the phone, to show others that the S.M. is paying attention to them and also to let the S.M. shut out the “other noise channels”:
• Sit slightly forward
• Maintain an Open, relaxed posture
• Look into the other person’s eyes
• Pay such strict Attention to what the other person is saying that you are able to –
• Reflect what the other person is saying.

For most of us, we consider listening as passive; so, obviously, there is plenty of extra time to do another task. But if you devote your energy to the SOLAR process, especially the last two steps, you may never hear words from a companion in the same way again. Listening to a person over time will reveal fragments, pieces of the puzzle of their life that allows you to appreciate the journey of their life. And listening to them is also a gift to them; every one of us wants to be REALLY heard.

Keeping our ears open for feelings, the stirrings of our heart, is the tough part of listening. The Bible says, “Listen with the eyes of the heart,” but this requires a careful and diligent application of the head. Allowing silence to be part of your listening language will open up space for reflection by both parties: you for time to reflect and the other for time to hear the echo of their words and reflect on them. “Silence is how we nurture our capacity to listen,” says Kay Lindahl, founder of The Listening Center.
When you develop your skills of listening to others, it will become like a language:
“What do I do?” asked the new hospital chaplain,
“You listen,” his supervisor told him.
“But what do I do?”
“You listen.”
And then you can transform that language into your journal with assurance that you really have heard the words.

The Journaling Newsletter and this web site will be adding information on incorporating drawings and images to your journal because transforming an abstract notion or feeling => graphic form allows you to SEE the truthful meaning of the words. Words & letters are, after all, only graphic symbols that we draw and we have trained our left brain to interpret them as text. So ADD SOME DOODLES to your journal or find some crayons/pencils and devote the right page of your journal to an image that makes you think of your writing.

Try them; they’ll work for you, Bud.

They say that most people rarely write and miss out on one of the greatest
forms of communication and self-expression. And, I submit, that applies to most
men who don’t take even-a- little time to document their lives in a Journal.

A Journal, whether pen strokes on paper or
keystrokes on a computer, allows us a safe way to explore topics with
ourselves. They are, in fact, a reflection of our soul on the mirror of life
and as such contain the record of our honest and vulnerable journey with God.
We can record what God’s been doing in our lives and we can spiritually share
ourselves with Him and examine ways for spiritual growth. Journaling is one
important spiritual disciplines to employ to achieve a grace-centered life.

Some more specific types of journals are:

• Logs, a regularly kept record of performance like a ships log
  recording navigational details. This factual account of events over time
  is usually kept in a format or even in a table for easy examination of
  trends and patterns. In summary, a log is a chronological journal, focused
  on the recording of a specific category of events of our lives and our
  reflections on those events – a temporal ordering that is familiar to us.

• Diaries, “a daily record and a book for keeping private notes
  and records” according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, are filled with
  everything private and personal. They are filled with feelings where logs
  are aimed at recording facts. Anything is fair game as a “subject” for an
  entry and spontaneous; “free writing” is the method usually employed.
• Journals then, are a “service book…for accounts of daily
  events, a record of proceedings and a periodical dealing with current
  events,” according to the dictionary. Or they can be thought of as
  containing the superset of entries from logs and diaries, but they are more
  importantly used to record our innermost personal reflections, thereby
  becoming a living document describing our being.

Some of the most common classifications of
journals:

• Daily gratitude’s,
• Progress towards goals,
• Past events and doors opened,
• Prayers,
• Letters to God or others,
• Dialogue with God,
• Responses to Reading Scripture.

But the one “face” of Journaling not mentioned
above is one that I feel is perhaps the most important, the Personal Goals and
Growth Journal. By writing down your goals, whether daily, weekly, or whatever
and then reflecting on the progress toward achieving those goals; that writing
can be a terrific source of increased inner potential and development. As a
place to sustain our inner personal growth and enhance our professional career,
a journal should never be an end to itself but more like practicing the piano –
the more you do it, the more natural it becomes.

Nor should journal keeping become an obligation
or a chore; it is a tool and may fit your “hand” better than some other tools
fit. As May Sarton said in her journal, “Perhaps we write toward what we will
become from where we are.”

What kinds of retreats and workshops have you been at and felt really good about them? And did you think you got what you paid for?

I’m taking a survey. Thanks.