Journaling as a Spiritual Practice. Part II
Journaling is not an add-on to our spiritual life, not something extraneous to our inner transformation – but integral to it. It’s a practice that contributes significantly to the ongoing process of inner transformation even if we cannot materially track it. I was meditating and journaling daily for years, before I realised that my journaling was itself a profound spiritual practice. Some people might wonder what they could write in a journal, what type of thing they should record. The answer is, everything that is in your heart. Everything that’s connected in any way to your awakening and meeting with your inner divinity. Everything that has to do with your relationship to Divine Love. All the mess and joy of life goes in. As Richard Rohr says, “Everything belongs.” There is nothing in your heart that doesn’t belong in your journal.
Having said that, I remember, about two years ago, starting a new journal at a time when I was really despairing about something in my spiritual life. I opened the journal but left a few pages blank and only began writing about 5 or 6 pages in because I couldn’t bear to ‘sully’ the opening pages with this litany of pain and despair. I wanted it to begin with something nice and shiny — clearly ashamed of my feelings and my struggle. The next day or some few days later I went back and wrote on the opening pages and fully saw the significance of what I had done. I had felt the opening pages would be desecrated somehow by the markings of my turmoil. I felt the problem was too big or dirty for the opening page of my nice new journal —clearly ashamed of my despair. My later understanding of what I had done showed me the need for radical self-compassion and comfort. Our journal truly is a safe space, there is no need to hide anything from our journal – yet that is exactly what I had done, but I learned from it.
Each of us walks the spiritual path in our own unique way. Whether it’s SBNR (Spiritual But Not Religious), a mystical path, or a path within but also beyond traditional religion —we all face similar challenges. The religious background is too narrow, too doctrinal, too earthbound — not mystical enough. Alternatively, the spiritual landscape is too vast and uncontained — we can’t get our bearings, not sure where we are headed. For both of these scenarios, and others, having your own personal, contemplative, spiritual practices in which you are sovereign and autonomous in your relationship with the Divine is invaluable. We are living though times of profound change and chaos, institutions and cultures are disintegrating, the support one might hope for to guide the spiritual search or path cannot necessarily be found with ease.
Spiritual directors sound like the answer but in my experience, five out of the six I’ve had occasion to sit with were scared of mysticism and of my mystical experiences. (You can read about some of these encounters in Light on Fire.) Many people I sit with and speak with tell me similar stories of the relief of finding someone who understands what they are living though, someone in whom they can confide about the pain of a barren spiritual life that fills them with despair, or tell of the wild longing in their heart for the Sacred. Journaling offers catharsis for these agonies as much as being a container for our joy when it arises.
Journaling allows you to make your spiritual path your own by recording it: the struggles and joys; the week to week vacillation between positivity and negativity; the long dark nights of the soul pierced only occasionally by the light; or the vibrant and life-giving visions and locutions that may arise. We anchor and ground all this by writing it into the sacred text of our private journal. It’s a freeing practice that has no rules; no right or wrong way to do it. The only criteria is to do it. It’s a simple but profound practice. If you can commit to daily or weekly journaling, by the end of each month and year you will have a wonderful record of the path you are on. Slow re-reading, allows for intentional reflection which lets your patterns emerge, shows the still unresolved pain points, and hopefully sometimes reveals successful resolution of other issues. The parts where you read of your sometimes joy-filled relationship with the Divine will set your heart on fire as if experiencing it for the first time.
The practice involves sitting to meditate in your chosen way, and as soon as the sit ends you pick up your pen and begin to write. It may be that some days you write with ease and the words flow. Other days you may have nothing to say, the blank page stares at you but commit to writing at least three sentences, even if it’s only to say that you do not want to write. I suggest the same approach I used to take when I was doing creative writing which was to ‘write through the blocks.’ Name the blocks on the page, list the challenges, pains, frustrations and just keep writing. More often than not a solution, an insight, a eureka will just write itself onto the page. But it can’t write itself onto the page if we are not actually writing or journaling. When you commit to the practice it becomes a stream through which wisdom flows into your heart.
There are three parts to the practice. Firstly, the practicality of having your journal and pen ready before you meditate. Second, is the act of writing some amount each day or week. Third, is the later act of re-reading and reflection to let it all integrate and transform you at a deep level. One of the most revealing things I learned when researching the 13th century mystics Mechthild of Magdeburg and Gertrude of Helfta, is that sacred writing, scriptio divina, acts on us to transform us.
As time goes by and your completed journals pile up you can create a special altar-like shelf for them somewhere in your home. As Jung said, these become your sacred texts. They are yours to pick up as the years go by and marvel at the riches of your own awakening story. Read the details of your spiritual path recorded by yourself in your own words. Your journals house the wisdom of your own heart and soul and offer a compelling corrective to the culture that teaches us to live in the head and rely on reason to figure everything out.
Journaling is a practice that over time becomes a process and then a path – I call it the Via Scriptoria. The Way of Writing (WoW!)
Photo, Josephine Doyle, Síoraí Photography. Rath Daingean Stone Circle, foothills of Croagh Patrick.