THE ART OF JOURNAL WRITING

MICHAEL LEWIN shares his own experience of the value of writing a journal, including embracing imagination, feeling, expansive thinking, creativity, spiritual growth, self-development and much more.

- MICHAEL LEWIN

Similar to other art forms, journal writing can only be perfected in actual practice and nowhere else. Through this process of sustained commitment to self-exploration and discovery, a process of discrimination and refinement slowly surfaces to aid our learning and take us forward into new territories of language development and expression – an adventure into the heart of our existence. This has certainly been my personal experience, making me leave behind a rather cold, fixed, rationalist, analytical shell to embrace an imaginative, expansive, psycho-spiritual mode of feeling and expression, which has brought my life so much richness.

At times I have been so engaged with my writing, trekking into a wilderness of a previously unknown psychological life. It has involved learning, clarifying, refining, growing, and has allowed a self-forgetfulness to quietly and without warning descend upon me, dissolving momentarily all traces of the normal functioning of the ego-driven self to reveal an underlying spiritual presence. And in these moments of self-forgetfulness, I realize that I’m in meditation.

SUGGESTIONS FOR JOURNAL WRITING

In order to access some of the depths within us for our journal writing to be authentic, real and true, we need to cultivate prolonged periods of stillness and silence. Avoid the busy-ness of normal, everyday routines that contribute to a deadening of creative energies. This is not always easy to manage, but it is essential.