Write and reunite with your deep Self
How journalling helps to create a life that is clear and true
It’s been a busy time, with income-generating work, book-related events and bringing a long-dreamt-of service into the world. It’s a busyness that I have chosen and continue to choose AND delight in.
But, for someone who is used to spending big wads of time on my daybed, dreaming, mulling or reading, it’s been quite a lot!
At our weekly writing group, which gave me a few welcome hours to land, to press pause, I had a mental image of running on a treadmill. (Please note that this irrational activity has NEVER and will never, occur in my life. It’s simply a useful metaphor.)
The treadmill has been set a bit fast for comfort, and I’m so busy trying to keep up with the speed of this relentless motion machine - even though I know there are interesting things unfolding in the room behind me - that I can’t look back.
(Note to self: Must remember that I’m in charge of choosing the speed and the elevation settings. And that I can press that big red Stop button at any time.)
One of those ways for me to press Stop is to take a quiet moment and turn to the page. At first, my monkey mind jumps about, swings from a rafter, pricks her ears at a sound outside.
But as I faithfully follow my pen across the page, I begin to feel more in my body, more embodied. As the words form, there’s a surge of enjoyment, of savouring this inner conversation as it appears on the page. It gives me time to land and listen.
Journalling helps me to sink beneath the choppy surface level of Doing to the deep lake of Being-ness. And what lies beneath is vital to me - it’s where my real truth lives and breathes. It’s where the big Self, the part of us that feels connected and supported and guided, lives and breathes.
Because life unfolds through us like a bright cotton line threaded through the eye of a needle. We are the needle, and journalling can help to unspool all the knots and snags in this colourful thread, so that the life we create is clear and true to who we are.
The big Self waits for me to dive beneath all the busyness of the surface world to listen to her siren song. It’s only by listening, again and again, that I can ensure my actions above the surface and in the world are in line with her magic call.
As I write and reunite with my deep Self, a breath of utter relief at how much I needed this, breathes me.
Because we can feel tendrils of spring shooting forth in the valley where we live, I felt the urge to do a bit of spring-clearing.
With the support of my lovely husband (who helped keep me focused, otherwise I would have spent hours surrounded by piles of papers, reading old birthday cards and scraps of poems) I decluttered my working space this weekend.
One of the unforeseen benefits was finding my journals from the past few years stored in a box with other papers under my desk. I was finally able to sort these handwritten books out according to date and stack them neatly on my bookshelf. And I can’t stop marvelling at how lovely they look!
And I don’t mean aesthetically, but just looking over at my bookshelf and seeing this messy record of a life lived over the past few years, my little and big Selves all intertwined, a record of my intentions and longings, my plans and dreams, makes me feel quietly happy.
Knowing that I’m on the right track for my deep Self, that several of the bullet points (like little black seeds of ink) that I’ve listed over the years under headings like ‘What I long for’; ‘What I want to create’ have germinated and are now beginning to bud, gives me a quiet sense of trust.
Seeing my journals of the past few years ranked on my bookshelf makes something in me breathe bigger, deeper. As though a puzzle piece that hadn’t been sitting right has shifted and now fits perfectly.
That’s what it feels like when we honour our creativity, dig our dreams out from a dusty box and slide them onto a shelf so that the morning light catches them just right.
I LOVE your super-power of doing nothing! Probably THE most important self-care practice... And we need a word that's the equivalent of being 'absent-minded' for the body... those times we check out and aren't present in our bodies, recognising when our emotional inner world is flooding us with 'too much' and we feel that pull to 'leave ourselves'...