Meditation and journaling are tools in the creation of a life.
Below the push and pull of our everyday lives there exists a vast reservoir of experience and wisdom. The challenge is accessing that wisdom. Combining journaling and meditation are important tools of self-exploration and self-discovery.
Your inner world guides you without you knowing it. Our thought patterns determine the quality of our lives. Journaling can help us understand patterns that have been associated with times of deep peace and accomplishment, and patterns that have repeatedly been associated with setbacks and turmoil. Journaling techniques — which rely on quiet time, reflective time — can allow us to better understand the options life presents.
The process is one of nurturing. Our deeper wisdom holds the lessons of our successes and failures, and it holds something else — a potential, a gift, a uniqueness — that is seeking to manifest. It often won’t communicate in words. It offers feelings, images, moods, colors — the vague shapes that seemingly arise out of nowhere. It wants to guide us. It waits. It is reticent, shy. It responds to relaxed silence, not to demands. Journaling can help us better understand the symbols and messages that emerge. Writing down the thoughts that come from this process can add clarity and logic to what otherwise may seem random thoughts.
Your subconscious mind is trying to help you all the time.
So many journal entries are dead ends but you don’t know until you write them down and think about them.
My main influences in the whole idea of keeping a journal were, oddly, Henry David Thoreau and Tom McGuane. The latter used to keep his on tiny dime store notebooks, which he would toss in a box. The best and most influential journals for me where those of Dostoyevsky, with Flaubert coming in as a close second, also Loren Eisley.
It’s important for a writer not to put too much in a journal for fear of losing the energy and attention that should be left for the work itself.
Your subconscious mind is trying to help you all the time. That’s why I keep a journal –- not for chatter but for mostly the images that flow into the mind or little ideas. I keep a running journal, and I have all of my life, so it’s like your gold mine when you start writing.
- Jim Harrison, (novelist, Dalva, Legends Of The Fall). The notes above are from his journal while writing Dalva.
The private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being
It is easier to sail many thousand of miles through cold and storm and cannibals ... with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being.
- Henry David Thoreau, in his journal
Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to me as my own thoughts.
My journal should be the record of my love. I would write in it only of the things I love, my affection for any aspect of the world, what I love to think of. . . I feel ripe for something, yet can’t discover what that thing is. I feel fertile merely. It is seed time with me. I have lain fallow long enough.
- Henry David Thoreau, in his journal.
If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers, you can determine the identity of any person.
- Thomas Merton, My Argument With the Gestapo
Most of us have a strange inclination toward that which is counterproductive in our lives. If we pretend those patterns don't exist, they keep recurring. Written down, they can be seen, and addressed.
The juice, the truth of a human life, hangs out in the contradictions — the differences between what we believe and how we live, between who we are and who we want to be. The contradictions can be a verbalization of a vision seeking to be born. That is the territory a journal explores. Some of the questions it raises are interesting. Some are fun. Some are hard, and if you do it right, some of the answers will be difficult to accept.
A connective thread has been forming beneath the surface of our lives, carrying the meaning that has been trying to establish itself in our existence. As we recognize and identify with it, we see an inner myth that has been guiding our lives unknown to ourselves.
Man does indeed know intuitively more than he rationally understands. The question, however, is how we can gain access to the potentials of knowledge contained in the depth of us, how we can achieve increased capacities of direct intuition and enlarged awareness.
Just as an acorn contains in its unconscious the dream of the oak tree and that dream expresses the coming into being of the oak tree, working with a person, we have to have a method of drawing forth what is in the seed of the person, the unlived potentials.
- Ira Progoff, selected excerpts from At a Journal Workshop
Carl Jung, Swiss psychologist, on the most important question we can ask ourselves:
What is the myth you are living?
. . .
Life is a desperate struggle to be in fact that which we are in design.
- Ortega y Gasset. . .
Zen Mountain Studio: Books, journals and a Substack.
Books and Journals from Zen Mountain Press
Nurturing The Song Within explores the inner work out of which creative work and a unique human life evolve. It contains key insights from hundreds of interviews Heron Dance founder Roderick MacIver has conducted over the last thirty years of people who choose their own path in life, and persist through the challenges and setbacks to make their dreams real.
Hardcover first edition with dust jacket. $87. Order here.
PDF $9.99 including tax. Order here.
More information here.
The Pausing For Beauty Poetry Diary
This beautiful undated diary contains dozens of poems selected to inspire thought about the nature and meaning of life and our connection to the natural world. The poems are accompanied by dozens of Roderick MacIver watercolors, some in full color, some watercolor sketches and delicate washes.
The Poetry Diary contains plenty of room for your journal notes and own poetry.
114 pages in total.
$44 print version. Order here.
$9.99 PDF. Order here.