Journaling as a Spiritual Practice. Part I

There are four pillars to the spiritual path of transformation: Experience; Spiritual Practices & Ritual; Reflection; and Integration. Together they weave the shawl that holds us as we surrender to the Call to Awaken. The first two, Experience and Spiritual Practices & Ritual, come more easily than the latter two, Reflection and Integration, and I think we often forget to take time to Reflect and Integrate. It's important to make time consciously to reflect on where we are and what precisely is going on in the inner realm of our spirit and soul. This is why I think of journaling as a powerful Spiritual Practice because it Records our Experiences, allows for Reflection and leads to Integration.

My sense of the spiritual path and of spiritual awakening is that the absolute essence of it lies in our experience of the Sacred rather than in any doctrine or dogma. Whether in prayer or contemplation, whether in nature watching the sun set or the beauty of a blossoming rose, whether in love, in sorrow, or in heartbreak there are infinite ways in which we feel  touched by the Sacred. We feel the presence of the Divine and sense something of the Otherworld breaking through our ordinary consciousness. Whether subtle or dramatic, these experiences give us a sense of what lies beyond.

I fully know that these Experiences of the Sacred are designed to transform us into our True Self. I’ve come to realise that they are conscious, and intelligently guiding us towards our Awakening. They are intentionally pushing us onto the path of inner transformation. That’s why it’s essential to make time in our day to commune with the Sacred whether in meditation, nature, or in whatever our chosen setting might be, so that we can let this Sacred Energy act on us and in us.  However, I also know that experience of the Sacred on its own is not enough to transform us and that we need practices of reflection and integration to support our inner awakening and transformation.

To my mind, the most profound practice we can do, (and do with ease and autonomy) to support the integration of our spiritual experience is a daily practice of spiritual writing in our journal after our morning sit, after our time in nature, or howsoever we commune with the Sacred. Spiritual journaling or writing is a singular support for the integration of our spiritual experience and our spiritual awakening and can itself become one of our central spiritual practices. I call it Scriptio Divina, (Latin for sacred writing) because the truth of it is, the writing we do after a meditation sit or other experience of the Sacred, is itself a sacred act. Professor Stephanie Paulsell of Harvard Divinity School coined the term precisely to capture the sacredness of writing that is itself expressing and recording mystical or spiritual experiences, no matter how subtle or dramatic.

Spiritual journaling helps to anchor, ground  and support our experiences. It’s a grounding practice and also an embodied one. We use our hands, our bodies, our eyes, our senses, to write about our spiritual experiences and that immediately grounds them in this realm, which is crucial for integration and healthy spiritual awakening. The risk of any deeply engaged spiritual life is that we could get ‘lost in the clouds’ unable to integrate our spirit with our material lives. So writing, as a healthy embodied practice, immediately anchors us back in this realm.

The ultimate beauty of spiritual journaling however, is that our journal becomes our own sacred text. I love the quote from Carl Jung who advised his highly visionary patient Christiana Morgan,

‘To write, record, paint her “visions” ‘in some beautifully bound book … [and that book] will be your church – your cathedral – the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal…. in that book is your soul.’

Could there be a more beautiful description of the significance and importance of recording our inner lives in the privacy of our journal. By writing down some details or description of our sit or experience, however short or long, however vague or detailed, over time we are creating a record of the twists and turns of the path we are actually walking, and this importantly allows for later re-reading and reflection.

Reflection is the beating heart of integration. Without reflection we just keep moving, never stopping to check where we are, how it’s going, what’s really going on in the depths of our spiritual or mystical longings. Unless we pause, check in, reflect, we can’t be fully conscious of what we are doing, where we are going, and if off track, how to get back on track. The record of what’s going on in our inner lives creates an immediate possibility for this reflective process and later integration.

I also feel that without recording some note or description of how it felt or what we experienced during our sit, or after the gift of a beautiful experience of wonder or awe in nature, in prayer, in sacred ceremony or ritual, that we miss the richness of what is going on. We think we will remember, we feel it is unforgettable, yet we do forget, and the brilliance of the sacred moment fades. So, to have it recorded in a journal truly keeps it alive for us for the rest of our days and allows it to act on us at a depth level.

Meditation and writing have been partners for millennia. People have always recorded, in the privacy of their journals and their writing books, the details of their spiritual lives and their intimate experiences of the divine. For many people, recording their spiritual or religious experiences has been the foundation stone of how they process their spiritual life. This is certainty true for me. Almost all that I wrote in my book, Light on Fire: Waking Up to Divine Love came from my journals; and all my mystical writing that I share on my website and in my e-book The Book of Love: Visions of the Rose comes directly from my journals.   

It’s a joy for me to begin sharing my own spiritual writing practice with others to support you on your spiritual journey, to help you to begin, or to develop, daily journaling as a rich spiritual practice that will help you to integrate your inner transformation.  

Photo, The Round Tower at Glendalough, Co. Wicklow, near where St Aedamar lived in the 5th century.