Journals
From Elfi
Contents |
We ask all our students to keep a journal in a special section of our forums, and to make an effort to update it at least once every two days, no exceptions and no excuses.
Why should I keep a journal?
This is a question we often get, both from younger and more advanced students. It takes time to keep a journal, you have to go back to your thread and actually write up what you have been doing...it's cumbersome. And you'd like to be off doing something else. The truth is, though, that it takes barely any time to make a journal entry, and it is important. Here's why:
~1) To keep a record for yourself, so that you can go back a month from now, or two months, and see the progress you've made. It's so easy to forget where we came from once we've been doing this for a while, and really hard to see that we've made any progress at all if we don't have a journal to let us look back into time.
~2) To force you to think about what you are doing, to not only do the exercises but to process them, to describe how you are doing them and what results you are getting. Without putting this into words, without an attempt to write it down and interpret, all you can get from your intuitive work are impressions: pretty pictures and sounds and smells to hang on the wall. They don't mean anything, if you can't use them to find yourself the answers you're looking for. If you can't learn to explain in a few concise sentences what you did, and what you got from it, you've achieved nothing.
~3) To give your classmates a chance to see how you are doing with the same exercises they are working on. It lets you compare notes, and gives you new suggestions on how to do the exercise. It shows you where others get stuck at, so you can help them, and it may show you how they got past something you're having difficulty with. It also allows us teachers to look in on you and direct if and where necessary. If you don't tell us what's going on, we can't help you. If you don't want interaction with your group and teachers to help you with this process, you're in the wrong place.
~4) Proof to make this real to you.
What do I write in it?
Whatever you feel is appropriate. You don't need to write page long descriptions of how your day went, or include personal details at all. The purpose of your journal, as described above, is to keep a record of your intuitive work, and how it affects you. It can be 1000 words long if you feel the need to really sit down and work something out, or it can be as short as a paragraph. This is not High School, and we are not going to "grade your homework". Do what seems appropriate to you.
Your journal is where you can post your morning routine of exercises, so that you don't forget. It's where you describe your first attempts at doing the exercise of the week, and where you explain the things you felt/saw/sensed while doing it. This is also the place to talk about the difficulties you run into with an exercise, which steps you took and how that worked out for you, which things worked really well, and what you think your next steps are. Your next post can then be about your experienes in trying that next step, in finetuning the process.
You can also write about any other meta-intuitive topics you run into during your day. Was your mother expressing a Control Drama and did you manage to side-step it (or did you have trouble to)? Did you suddenly see energy around a tree in your garden? Could you tell what your friends were feeling? Did you sense something and are not sure what it means? Did you look inside yourself and find some pieces to help you along with your process? Anything goes.
What matters is that you put these things in words, to record them, as an exercise in structuring them, and to share them with others. Without it, it becomes very easy to lose focus on your process, and you will find it difficult to make any progress - or when you do, you won't realise it. A very important component in this is DecisionDisciplineDecidation. You Decide that exploring and finding your Self is important to you and that you want it. You find Disciplines like keeping your journal and doing your exercises as a process you can follow to get where you are going. And you work at it with Dedication, not slacking off because you get lazy or distracted, and keep at it.
Keeping your journal doesn't need to take more than 10-20 minutes once every two days. Anyone can do it. And anyone who is serious about their own progress should.
