Benefits of daily journaling

The benefits of daily journaling reach far and beyond and the best way to get a feel for the power of this type of creative therapy is to start. It’s one of those things where it’s easy to “think” that you’d like to try this, but putting it to work is another thing. The best place to start is to go out and buy yourself a journal and place it beside your bed then commit to waking the next morning and beginning.

The key to beginning is to not think about it, and don’t worry about what to write but to open the eyes first thing in the morning and just begin.

The wording does not have to be perfect, it can be as messy as you like, spelling mistakes… who cares! This is your sacred space for dumping all of your feelings, emotions, thoughts, ideas, “downloads” and more.

I say this is powerful because it is, and I don’t think you’ll realise this until you’ve actually experienced it for yourself.

It is the gateway to unlocking and unblocking the conscious, sub conscious and even unconscious thoughts, feelings and emotions that are stored deep within. It’s a way for allowing the “inner critic” to reveal itself … hard and strong. Let it run wild and free, let it tell you all that it needs to. All of these thoughts that come out are not the truth. They are not who you are.  It is the just the part of our brain, the logical thinking part of our brain, that likes to keep us safe.

This is where it can get very interesting, our lovely inner critic, our friend from the shadows, the voice that loves to express itself with fear. The voice that tells you you’re not good enough, that’s a stupid idea, who do you think you are? Getting to know this part of ourselves is the turning point for shifting our whole consciousness and bringing about a personal transformation. It’s the inner critic that holds valuable information, like where our resistance is, how it shows up, why it shows up. It also helps us to visit our deepest fears.

A lot of the time we can be completely unaware of how much this little friend loves to sit on our shoulder and voice its opinion numerous times per day. But once we get to know our inner critic and fearful self a little better we begin to break through those walls of fear that have long been holding us back. All of this reveals itself when we journal down our thoughts, we start to see the patterns of our own behavior, we get an insight as to where our head is at. We start to get a better understanding of our relationships, our fears, our goals, our passions, our dreams.

I personally find this to be a deeply healing and transformative way of healing and therapy, as it allows us a place to go beyond the personality self, where our unconsciousness can be expressed and communicated. Where we get to dig extremely deep and go to the roots of our issues. And while it all may seem murky and muddy at first, if we keep pushing through, we also get to find the treasure of inner insight and awareness of what is really going on for us. Guidance begins to reveal itself, insights are clear and new ideas play out right in front of you.

When we begin to unlock ourselves we allow our creative self to freely be at the reigns, and while the inner critic still remains what we’ve eventually done is shine a light where it was possibly before considered dark, we’ve acknowledged that shadow part of ourselves and by acknowledging we are gradually taking away its power and control over us.

While doing our daily journaling try not to read back over it for a few weeks, let whatever needs to spill out onto the page spill out. None of it has to make sense, but over time when we begin reading back our pages there will be gold, revelations and clarity. There will be concreted ideas to move you forward. You’ll discover your world of possibility where your wildest dreams and creative potential plays out right in front of you and gives you a platform for your ideas to be grounded into reality.

So enjoy, have fun and remember there is no wrong or right.

Rachel Holm~ Hanako Therapies