Time to check in…Journaling prompts for releasing old patterns
I first started journaling as a healing practice when I finished writing my PhD. I didn’t know that was what I was doing at the time. I just needed to write.
All the things I hadn’t said or been able to say in my thesis.
All the things I hadn’t said or been able to say in my relationship.
All the things I hadn’t said or been able to say in my life.
It was a lot.
I journaled. And I cried. And that was about all I did for the first three months post-PhD.
My thesis had been a big writing project - my biggest ever to date. A 60,000 word critical & creative exploration of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee from the perspective of Utopian Poetics - a practice I’d developed as an enquiry into whether I could write poetry that created a meditative effect and gestured toward the possibility of co-creation and interconnection, as I’d first experienced while reading Dictee. Plus four books of poetry and a co-edited anthology.
Every part of that process took me into traumas that I wasn’t ready or mature enough to face. I’m still undoing them.
The practice I turned to - as a writer - was journaling. Putting hand to page to witness and experience my thoughts and feelings.
What was moving through me?
As I wrote - and cried - I noticed patterns of thought and behaviour that kept coming up for me. Stories I held about myself, patterns in the ways I behaved and responded to others. Words and phrases that kept circling and returning. Needs, desires, feelings, projections and preoccupations.
I wrote and I witnessed. I heard and held everything that was moving through me, everything that was needing be seen.
Sometimes my hand wrote one thing while my mind was thinking something else. Sometimes I didn’t even know where my mind was going while I was writing - wherever it needed to go. It didn’t matter, I kept writing.
I committed myself to a practice of allowing and accepting all that was arising. Without judgment. Without self-criticism or blame. Just to notice. To witness and allow and accept all that was coming up. To let it exist. And to move it out of my body, through my hand and the pen, onto the page.
Breathing and feeling and healing and releasing.
What I found was that the more I did this, the more easily I could notice those behaviour patterns when they were arising in myself off-the-page irl, and the more easily I could let them go.
That doesn’t mean that it was easy. But that it was easier. There was more ease in my relationship with those feelings.
My sense was that these behaviour patterns and stories and feelings wanted to be seen. They needed to be heard. And they needed to be loved, accepted and allowed to exist. I stopped pushing them away.
I stopped rejecting these parts of myself and my life.
I started to accept them.
I started to accept myself.
This practice has become my daily routine and the foundation of all my writing processes. With those noisy thoughts and feelings out the way on the page, my other ideas and projects have more space to grow and freedom to flow.
Here are some journaling prompts & practices that may support you with a similar self-enquiry:
How are you feeling right now?
Where are you feeling it in your body?
What memories or stories arise when you feel into this?
Breathe
Release
No judgement
No criticism
No blame or shame
Awareness, acceptance, allowing, arising
Breathing
Writing
Keep the pen moving
What choices can you make now?
Breathe & release
Where is your power located now?
Trust your intuition
Write for as long as you need to. If you are writing for longer than 15 minutes, you may find that you go very deep. This is a healing process. Be gentle with yourself. Drink plenty of water and rest as much as your body requires.
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