How to get your journaling off the ground. You want to journal, you’ve heard a lot about it, but how to start and how to keep going? From my class on transformative journaling, here are a few ideas and exercises to get you started and to keep you going.
Create your timeline based on personal events
- • Your relationships
- • Your career path
- • Your educational path
- • Your emotional path
- • Choices you’ve made
Are there obvious or subtle patterns in the mapping?
What do you see?
You may not see anything at all and this is a stupid exercise. Fair enough. Put the maps aside and experiment with another suggestion.
Mapping allows for a different kind of thinking – It gives us space to consider ideas and past ideas that either have served or have not served us. Once sketched out, what does this allow you to discover? To Change?
Mapping can help solve a problem
Mapping can help sketch out the future, what do you want, what are the barriers what can you do to get from point A to Point B?
Did you think you have “arrived” but are now not so sure?
Did you miss some scenic overlooks?
What about the roads not taken?
Do you need a new life or just a new car?
While we are deep into the map metaphor, write about one of the circles or squares on your map.
- • What were you thinking?
- • Who gave you directions?
- • What was their motivation to advise you to take the high road and not the low?
- • If you followed that advice then, would you have followed it today?
The intent is not to create a morass of grief, nor to wallow in the past. An exercise like this can point to your “shoulds”, your internal obligations. If you can identify those obligations, imposed internally or (often) imposed externally, if you can write them out and review them, maybe you can change how you regard them, maybe even move past them.
For the full workbook, email your request to Workbook cbramkamp(at)gmail(dot) com
Link to boot camp – Join us in Carmel this Fall – 2019 for Writers Boot Camp https://www.writingforlifeworkshops.com
Link to the Teachable class. https://story-university.teachable.com -#writing #journaling #writer #art #motivation #writerscommunity