The Importance of Journaling

Transcript

Welcome to a beautiful thought how your life is already wonderful.

How to notice those aspects of your life to make them integrated into your perspective. To feel them more joyously and to love life and embrace all of its strange ups and downs.

I want to talk about the importance of journaling. I think about this every time I sit down in a cafe and pull out a notebook and write down a little title of what I might write about with the date and time and start to explore my own mind.

It’s worth marveling over. We have access to all of our life experiences. You might be 20, 30, 40, or 50 years old and you have all those years of experience which you will recall and reflect upon.

You have access to a lot of different aspects of that. You can examine your own motivations. What was I thinking going into this situation? What was I assuming but not fully conscious of? What was my objective?

Even if I didn’t necessarily know what it was. A lot of the times we do things like we might try to manipulate other people or manipulate ourselves. Or we might try to justify our behavior and we don’t even know that we are doing it.

Just about everyone does this in one form or another. We might try to deny things to ourselves and slowly, slowly by thinking through the situation and trying to be a bit more dispassionate about it we can start to reveal different aspects of ourselves.

There is that quote sometimes attributed to Albert Ellis.

It goes: we can only understand others to the extent and in the manner that we understand ourselves.

This does mean, it’s phrased in the quote as a limiting thing we can only understand. But this means literally the extent and manner to which we understand ourselves we generally can understand others.

Its so fascinating to think about in a recent interview I talked with a new friend and he talked about how he practiced self inquiry.

The technique or practice recommended by a certain spiritual teacher. Examining oneself, what the root of ones identity of oneself of what one might be.

Who are you if you’re not your body, your viscera. Perhaps you aren’t even you own mind or your own thought. Perhaps you’re not even this own idea of what you thought of yourself.

Interesting to note as a result he started to gain insight into what other people were doing, what their actions were like, where they result from and how they might respond to different stimuli.

How he might treat people in a certain way to open their minds or behavior, create more confidence or faith in themselves.

We can discover all these things by looking inside. We have access to this grand wealth of information. As I’ve said previously it contains more information than the grand encyclopedia. More information perhaps than can be contained and downloaded by the internet.

Visual data, sense data, accumulated over years. Now we have the chance to interpret it and reinterpret it, discover it’s wisdom.

Boil it down and find the essence of our own experience. That is what lies in front of us every time we pull out our notebooks and pens and ask what happened, what did it mean? Who am I?

They are even asking about the motivations and understanding of other people. Putting ourselves in their shoes as we do in neurolinguistic programming.

Perspective, repositioning asking ourselves what it would be like to be that person, what could I have understood from the situation?

What would another person understand, a third person looking at the situation from a security camera, what might they understand about the situation?

What are my pure motivations and what might be my impure motivations? So many times we discover in fact our motivations while we believe they are pure, there might be some element to them which is self serving which might neglect or ignore the needs of ourselves.

We can find those parts of ourselves, its quite miraculous that we might find through discovering our deepest motivations empathy even for our enemies, even for the people we assumed never could be helped. Perhaps they are closer to us than we might realize. Perhaps when we see those people and we feel hate, anger in our hearts or bellies perhaps we are noticing something of ourselves.

Perhaps that is another opportunity to explore and ask powerful questions without expectation of an answer, just to wonder with those vast open dazy weeded fields of our own minds to find what fertile soil might yet yield a new species of plant.

Thank you for journaling, thank you for exploring your own mind. Thank you for reflecting and introspecting and wondering just wondering, wondering what your soul might still hold.