On Journaling

In Fall Head Over Heals in Love With Yourself I read a post about journaling. At the time I was also working my way through Kathleen Adams' Way of the Journal. It isn't that I stopped journaling but I wanted to use this workbook to sample some journaling exercises I hadn't tasted in a while. It is also a good thing to occasionally step beyond a comfort zone even in journaling. It is so easy to write day after day the same thing without making much emotional progress.

One of the exercises from the book I didn't like was the AlphaPoem. I didn't feel that the exercise afforded me the writing freedom to get too deep with my topic. Here is an example of what I wrote:

Violent, the world shifts.
Everything moves and I
Reach for the wall,
Toppling a lamp as
I land unharmed, then
Get up slowly
Only to fall again.

This is an actual experience from my early vertigo days. The lamp, thankfully, survived my fall.
In her post, Aqsa Vareen says that writing our thoughts in a journal allows us to objectify them, to step back and recognize that what we wrote is not true. This reminded me of what Maggie Edson said at the conference, about the tradition of taking a stone and leaving it at sacred places, these sacramental stone pillars and mounds marking emotional memorials.

There is something sacred about approaching the page, especially when our intention is to somehow explore the truth, our own truth especially. That we then can look at what we have written and see how even our own truth changes in incremental ways is not a coincidence. The very act of writing is transformational.