The Joy of Journaling
The Joy of Journaling
If you’ve followed Mala and Mantra for a while, you’ve likely run across our Monthly Mindfulness Journals. We send these out in our newsletter each month with prompts to encourage reflection and creativity. Journaling can be enlightening, cathartic, and grounding, but it also can be hard to get started, especially if you’ve never journaled before. Whether you’ve been recording your thoughts your whole life or you’ve never picked up a pen, there’s no better time to journal than right now. Here’s why.
There are many spiritual benefits to journaling, and we’ll get to those in a minute, but one of the most compelling reasons to crack open a notebook and start writing is our physical health. Many studies have been done over the last two decades that show journaling can help to reduce stress, stimulate the immune system, and speed up healing from injury and illness. Some studies even show that writing about stressful or traumatic events can bring greater health benefits than simply writing about day-to-day activities.
Journaling works by translating thoughts and emotions into words, which effectively transfers those internal feelings to an external medium. We all know that keeping emotions bottled up inside isn’t healthy. Journaling serves as a conduit to process our experiences in order to gain clarity, wisdom, and freedom from them. Because of this clarity, wisdom, and freedom, journaling can be a powerful meditative tool that can be used as part of your overall mindfulness practice, and it’s really quite simple and inexpensive to get started.
Journaling has few rules as to the when, where, and how. You may choose to record your feelings in a Google doc, a diary, a notebook, or even on a napkin. The important thing to remember is that you can’t do it wrong. To get started, simply write for 10 minutes, and try gradually to work your way up to 20 minutes. You can enjoy the benefits of journaling whether you journal once a week or once a month, so give yourself grace and space to explore on your own time and at your own pace.
In my personal life, I’ve experienced great joy and enlightenment through journaling, which is why I wanted to make our Monthly Mindfulness Journal an integral part of the Mala and Mantra community. If you haven’t already, you can sign up for our monthly newsletters here, and our Monthly Mindfulness Journals will be delivered straight to your inbox each month. They include simple writing prompts designed to deepen your mindfulness and meditation practice. You can even use Adobe Reader to record your thoughts directly onto the PDF.
Until next time, happy writing!
JPC
