Mindful Journaling for beginners
So you’ve made to decision to start your self-care journey by taking care of your mind by mindfully journaling. But where to begin? How to get started? What to expect? All great questions, and, lucky for you, we’re here with the answers you need to get started.
So you want to start mindful journaling
Most of us have journaled at some point, even if it was required when you were in school. Where the challenge lies is when you have written down your innermost thoughts and feelings, because it may bring up strong emotions — that your mind may resist. To a beginner, mindful journaling might initially feel a little foreign, perhaps even challenging, but that’s okay. People have been journaling for around 3,700 years, and many have doubtless experienced the same worry or wonder that first-time journalers often feel.
Maybe you want to start mindful journaling because you want to be less reactive to what life gives you, feel stress less, or be more focused. Maybe mindful journaling is part of your personal development journey. Or maybe you’re looking to improve the quality of the relationship with yourself and with those around you. Whatever the reason, training the mind through mindful journaling is training in self-awareness, and training in self-awareness offers the potential to unlock your potential and transform your life.
Our daily existence is experienced through our thoughts and our feelings. Our thoughts and feelings can dramatically change once we begin mindful journaling. Being inspired to start mindful journaling is very different from actually doing it, however, and you’ll only feel the benefits of mindful journaling by beginning and maintaining a consistent practice. In order to get mindful journaling, you need to do mindful journaling. In order to strengthen your mind, you need to begin by embracing your strong emotions.
Mindful journaling is easy to learn and involves some fairly straightforward techniques. Before getting started, let’s take care of a few practicalities and answer some everyday questions.
The experience of mindful journaling
When you write down your thoughts and feeling (whether on paper or via digital), you should expect your mind to be racing, easily distracted, and unsettled, even more than usual. Just because you’ve chosen to write and mindfully journal doesn’t mean you’ll suddenly experience strength, in the same way, you’d never expect to have six-pack abs overnight.
The process of mindful journaling is simple and easy: simply take a minute to write down your thoughts and feelings. All you have to do is write, stay focused on your feelings, and let your mind guide you. This is the one skill where you don’t have to strive to achieve something — just write.
There is no such thing as a wrong or right way to mindfully journal; there is only self-awareness or non-awareness. The moment you realize you’re lost in thought, that’s self-awareness, and that’s when you return to the object of focus and become an observer of your thoughts and not a judger. This is all you have to keep doing — return from your distracting thoughts and put them down as you reflect, all the time honing your self-awareness. With consistency, the periods between self-awareness and distraction will begin to become distant.
Mindful journaling doesn’t promise to solve the challenges you face in life, and there’s no guarantee of continuous happiness. Life, with all its problems and uncertainty, will still occur. What mindful journaling can do is change how you choose to respond to life, and change how you view the circumstances that you are in. It offers hope of strength amid all the outer challenges. With a consistent practice — daily mindful journaling — the change it brings about is gradual, subtle, and undeniable impactful. It involves a growing sense of self-awareness and understanding of yourself and others that can ultimately change the way you feel and act about yourself, others, and the world.
