Journaling for Self Care

The past two years, I've gotten more and more into journaling.
I am a long time lover of stationery and have found that contrary to my previous beliefs, writing things down helps me get rid of negative thoughts and habits to an extent. In magic, in paganism, writing things down as petitions, with intention or as a magical focus gives them power. Its like you are writing that thought, wish, or goal into being. If you want to get rid of something you have to take an extra action step. Such as burning the page, burying, flushing it down the toilet, etc. So for awhile after I got into paganism and witchcraft, I was careful about writing down anything negative because I didn't want to give it power.

However, the last few years I have delved more into productivity, psychology and self care as ways of pulling myself out of depression. And yes, I had long heard of diaries and the fact that journaling has long been touted as a great tool for mental health issues. But, (1) I could never finish any diary I was given. I think I would write in it one day and then forget about it. I just had no use for them before. And (2) I never understood how dwelling in my negative thoughts could be helpful. So I never looked it up.

I did get into the habit of long-form journaling after doing divination, to help remember dreams and after some rituals though thanks to paganism. And if you have followed this blog you know I can be long-winded, lol. In the Bullet Journal community Gratitude logs and One Line a Day, are popular collections pages. You either write what you are grateful for each day or summarize your day in one sentence. Neither appealed to me. The Gratitude Log especially always feels like I am faking it to ignore the negative things in life.

Two years ago I got back into doing arts and crafts. Some of which I fell in love with like art journaling, junk journaling, painting, and collage. But it was when I came across the Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod that I realized this journaling thing might be for me. Journaling takes the thoughts off my mind. Remember Dumbledore's pensieve where he would take the memories from his head and put them in a bowl so he could see them better and they wouldn't get lost? Its almost exactly like that for me. Writing them down does give them a little bit of life but in a good way. For the positive thoughts, ideas and plans it definitely makes them more concrete and I can come back to them. I have a visual memory and so I can remember stuff I wrote down 10 times more often that if they were just thoughts in my head. Plus I can then revisit them over and over.

For negative thoughts putting them in a journal gives me something to work and also a pattern to recognize. Thoughts are nebulous things that come and go quickly. You often don't realize that many can become habitual until its too late. Putting them on paper gives me a chance to take my time working on deconstructing that thought and whats behind it. The emotions and prior self history that brought about that thought. Then I can put together a plan of action to make that negative thought lose weight and meaning. This is shadow work for me. Documenting this process is also helpful in case that thought or a similar returns in the future I can look back and see how I worked on it before. What conclusions I came to.

Now there are various types of journaling you can do as self care. I know I say write things down a lot here but that's not always what I do. Figuring out which one, or more than one, works best for you is a bit of trial and error. In my next post, I'll be sharing several of the types of journals I have come across, links and all, to give you a starting point. I wanted to share that here but this post is already very long. I hope this post give you an idea of how you can use journaling in various areas of your daily life.

~Lashette
  Scarlet Moon Creations