Keeping a journal will absolutely change your life in ways you’ve never imagined.
- Oprah Winfrey

…journaling changed my life and who I am more than any other thing I’ve ever experienced – and I’ve tried just about everything. I’ve spent years searching for the answer to my troubles. I am a recovering self-help addict; I’ve read every book, attended every seminar, and placed a few gurus on pedestals. I always hoped that the next book or seminar would have the answer for me. The magic pill would be revealed, change my life, and make me happy. Each book and seminar was a step on the journey, and many provided valuable insights that I still hold dear, but they never gave me my answers. Do you know why? Because only I could reveal my answers. I believe that you’ll also find this to be true. I am not going to impart some magical wisdom that will immediately grant you true enlightenment, but I will put you in touch with your own magical wisdom.

  Ultimately, writing in a journal is an act of self-love. Your journal is a safe place to get to know yourself and discover who you are. It can bring clarity in a confusing world that bombards us with messages and images of who we should be, what we should want.  A journal allows us to paint a picture of what we want our lives to be, and helps us love ourselves enough to create it. Your writings, musings, and doodles are a way to talk to your soul.
      - Sandy Grason, Journalution

I think you do it as a debt of honor –- if you’ve got that creative voice inside of you that has something to communicate, that just longs to tell its version of things or to entertain or to inspire or to try to be a part of the solution or just to be heard –- you know, to stop being a person who is silenced –- then I think you have to honor that or you’re just doomed.
- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, Some instructions on writing and life.

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.
- Kurt Vonnegut, from a letter to a high school class.

. . .

Underneath the conscious mind, the mind that figures out the compromises to make and those to avoid, the mind that guides us on our path among other humans – humans who are themselves trying to figure out a way forward, and who are themselves stumbling – there exists mysterious inner worlds. These worlds are independent of the influences human social interactions. They are your true self — that spirit, independent of others — which is seeking to use the gift of life to manifest. These worlds are the wellsprings of creativity.

I remember listening to an interview of David Lynch, filmmaker (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, among others) on the radio maybe twenty years ago. One thing he said has particularly stuck with me. When deciding on a new film project, he waits for an idea that grips his imagination on a visceral level. Then he waits a few months. If the idea still has a deep, emotional grip on him, keeps bubbling up from his inner world, he goes ahead. Meditation is a major part of his creative process for this very reason, and he’s written a book about that (Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity).

What is going on there? Lynch gives his mysterious inner world the space it needs to speak. That world is shy, resists being rushed. It meanders through our dreams at night. It thrives on quiet time. By journaling, we are honoring that process, allowing it to bubble up.

I spend all my morning with the muses; -- and they bless me also in my walks.
- Beethoven to his nephew Kurt, October 12, 1825