A Pause for Beauty:
An artist’s journal.
Nurturing the relationship with yourself and your interior world through meditation and journaling.
Within each of us, there is a silence, a silence as vast as the universe. And when we experience that silence, we remember who we are . . . It is a paradox that we encounter so much internal noise when we first try to sit in silence.
— Gunilla Brodde Norris
The ocean within you is the universal reality or essence that dwells within all beings. . . . Discovering this ocean is vitally important for the discovery of balance because it provides a place of peace for you to return home to despite all the chaos of the day.
- Joel and Michelle Levey, Living in Balance
Combining journaling and meditation is an act of self-love, self-referral and self-healing. Friendship with yourself, with your quiet interior, is the basis of resourcefulness. A friendship with your quiet interior allows you to better understand the patterns of your life. A special power comes from diving deep into that world and accessing the wisdom it contains. It is a place of wisdom and peace but our relationship with it requires nurturing.
Vague, amorphous insights emerge from deeper levels—important truths that are revealed only in glimpses. Journaling helps us better understand the symbols and messages that emerge. Writing down the thoughts that form can add clarity over time.
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 times of turmoil. Journaling techniques—which rely on quiet time, reflective time—can allow us to better understand the options open to us.
We may worry about death but what hurts the soul most is to live without tasting the water of its own essence.
- Rumi
The purpose of a journal is to explore – explore new concepts, new visions, explore fears and explore one’s relationship with oneself.
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 potential.
- Ira Progoff, At A Journal Workshop
An acorn contains within it the dream of a mighty oak.
A life journey, a creative journey, grows out of the seed of one’s song.
The notes above are taken from the early work on an upcoming book, the working title of which is “The 45 Laws Of Living Life On Your Own Terms”. The excerpts above were taken from the third chapter, or Third Law, which is on journaling and meditation. The chapter currently makes up over half the book and offers, I think, its most important insights.
I've also just added excerpts from my interviews of jazz singer Abbey Lincoln here.