More Thoughts on Being Kept

At last night’s workshop, Shawna and her students didn’t need to talk about resistance. They brought notebooks and pens! They also brought up some additional important points about keeping a journal, and they jogged my mind to come up with a couple others.

• Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, or penmanship. Just write.
• Writing in a journal can be a lot like meditation. It’s about observing and not judging. I suggested that one might avoid whining in a journal entry, but even whining can be therapeutic. You put it on the page and then you can see it, and maybe you can do something about it. Write about what you can do, too.
• You don’t have to write in a journal. You can draw, you can doodle. (A good book to help you combine the writing and doodling is Gabriele Rico’s Writing the Natural Way.)
• One student said she keeps a journal already, but that it’s boring. I think that my best advice would be when trying to change up a practice is, again, to start small. Imagine you’re drawing your entry. Describe an object using shape words and color and texture. Add one sentence about how the object makes you feel.
• When you have a lot of entries compiled, you might try opening your journal to an old page and using one thing on that page as a prompt for a new entry. An old dream, or something odd you ate that day months ago can trigger new thoughts.