 here we go. So welcome, welcome everyone to our first writer's lunch of 2023. And this topic today is journal writing for the new year. And how journal writing can support your writing practice. Maybe you can't see this, you can't see this look. No, I'm holding a copy of the book. I will put a copy, a link to the book in the chat space so that you can see what the cover looks like and see what the book is all about. But I encourage you to read it. It is a wonderful thing to dip in and out of. The authors have done a great job of curating other writers on the topic of journaling and how journaling is just so wonderful for your mental health and writing practice. I just wanted to ask you again to mute yourselves if you are just joining with us. Because we are recording the event and if you do not want to be seen or heard, please turn off your camera and your mic. All right, steaming through. Welcome again to journal writing for the new year. Our speakers today are Linda Monk and Eric Meisel. And my co-host is Cheryl B. Boutay. Hello. Hello. And they will be talking about their new book, The Great Book of Journaling, how journal writing can support a life of wellness, creativity, meaning, and purpose. And I think in 2023 that is something we are all looking forward to. So to tell you a little bit about Mechanics Institute and this beautiful library that I am sitting in, let's see. First of all, my name is Taryn Edwards and I am one of the librarians here. And Mechanics Institute is an independent membership organization that houses a beautiful library as you can see, which is the oldest in fact designed to serve the general public in California. It is also a cultural event center. We have been hosting talks like this since 1855. And we are also a world-renowned chess club that is the oldest in the United States. We host in-person events as well as virtual fun times like this. I encourage you to consider becoming a member with us. It is only $120 a year. And with that, you get to enjoy all of this and help support our contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area and wider community. Okay, so the Writers' Lunch is a monthly event that happens on the third Friday of the month. And today our speakers include my wonderful co-host again, Cheryl B. Boutet, who is a writer in our community and she regularly offers classes. So keep an eye on our calendar to learn more about what she might be offering next. We also have Eric Meisel, who is a retired family therapist and active creativity coach. He has written over 50 books. I will include a link to his website in the chat space shortly. We also have his co-author Linda Monk, who is a registered social worker, life coach, and the director of the International Association of Journal Writing. So, and I also include her details in the chat space shortly as well. I want to thank all three of you for joining me today. And Cheryl, do you want to say a few words? Oh, I just wanted to welcome all of the people out there in the audience for being with us today. So glad to have you and particularly honored to have Eric and Linda with us. And I do understand that each of them had some brief presentation material they wanted to share with us. So I guess we can start with that. So Linda, would you like to know? Okay, sure. I will dive in. I am going to share my slides. Hi everyone, thanks for being here. I'm just going to do a quick share of some slides because I would love to just say a few things about journaling. Journaling is something that is straightforward. We have a piece of paper and a pen and our computer if you prefer to journal online. And often people are surprised at how many things we can use journaling for in our lives. In our book that Taryn mentioned, we had a number of contributing authors and they all wrote about some different perspectives on journaling, things you can use journaling for like healing trauma and different ways that can support mental health, how we can use it to set goals. And many other topics are in the book, including ways journaling can help us with other writing projects. So I just briefly want to say a little bit about journaling and the difference between private and public writing. So some of you here may already be avid journal writers. Some of you might just be curious about it, how it might support you in 2023 and beyond. Some of you might be writers and maybe you don't journal at all. So I just want to talk about those things and how they can be interconnected. So first of all, I'd like to orient us to what is journal writing. And I love this definition by Kate Thompson. She says that journal writing is the way of finding narrative, constructing story, and of depicting experience and relationships in our lives. And narrative is a way of making sense of experience. And in the fullness of our daily lives, any type of practice that we can turn to over and over again, to make meaning in our lives, to make sense of our experience and be self-reflective has huge value, not just for ourselves, but for our relationships and all aspects of our lives. So I really think of journaling as a personal writing practice. And it's something that can also support other writing that we do. And people generally use journaling for a couple of primary reasons. One is to record the events of their day, that narrative and storytelling. Journaling is a storytelling practice. It's a way of capturing what's important to us and reflecting on that. And it's also often used to vent feelings and emotions. And maybe you yourself have used journaling in that way, just to get what's on the inside out and be able to unload it. Journaling can also be used for transforming our lives. And that's something that our book really tried to capture. And it's something I talk a lot about in our International Association for Journal Writing. How do we use journaling to actually really work with our own minds, our own thoughts and ways that can serve us well? How do we use it to feel the way we want to feel? So for example, we don't just want our journals to be dumping grounds where we put every stress and upset on the page. We can also use them to cultivate joy, for example. If we want to feel more joy, we can write about what brings us joy and of course do those things as well. And if anyone here is trained in cognitive behavioral therapy or the like, we know that what we think impacts how we feel and will impact them how we act. So if we're using our journals to really express our thoughts and feelings, that can have great bearing on the actions and things we choose to do in our life. So it really is a practice that cultivates our personal growth, our wellness, our creativity. And it's a personal practice. Our journal writing is for ourselves. Ideally, we do it in as uncensored way as possible, where we are free to express ourselves honestly and authentically. And we're writing for ourselves. And it doesn't matter about grammar and syntax and other things that when we're writing for other people, do matter. And when we're writing for others, our personal writing can enrich our other writing. So when we're writing for others, there is an audience, there is a reader, all of the elements of writing craft do matter. So I just want to briefly say some of the ways I think journaling can help us as writers. And then I'll stop there just to get us thinking about how journaling can be helpful to our other writing. And then I'll also say how it can help us in 2023, but I'll pause so we can open up for discussion. So in my own writing, I'm currently writing an adopting memoir about my experience of finding my biological roots, including just this week, I recently, after a many year search, have found my biological father and met siblings two nights ago that I didn't quite have. So I'm doing lots of fresh writing. But one of the things is journaling shows us patterns. And we really can get better at noticing what matters most when we reflect on our lives through journaling over and over again, we see patterns, we see what we love, we see the challenges that we might face more than once. And it really helps us see what it is that's mattering to us. It also helps us to craft our point of view. And it's important to have a point of view in life and our relationships and our writing. We really get to see what do we want to say? What what voices emerging on the page? We can reread our journals for raw material for other writing. For example, in my adopting memoir, I was journaling in the moments before I met my birth mother for the first time, which is over 23 years ago now. In my memoir, I would never have been able to capture the raw detail of what was going on in that moment. But because I'm a journal writer, I actually have all of that to mine and work with in the memoir project. And it helps us become a better writer. So if in 2023 you have dreams of writing a book, journaling can really help you do that, because the more writing we do, the better we get at writing. It's like the more we do anything, the better we get at it. So with journaling, I like to think of what are some tips that can help writers as well. And one thing is to remember that whatever we write is right. Journaling is a very empowering act. You are the expert of your own life experience. It can be helpful to date your entries, so that you can find them and orient them through time. You want to write about your thoughts and feelings, not just today I did this and I picked up my kids and I got the groceries. You want to write about more of your inner world, what you're thinking, what you're feeling. And you can journal as a writer. So capture snippets of dialogue, capture what you see, what you're noticing, capture moments. And really write from your heart. You want to use your authentic voice as a writer. And journaling is something that allows us to really keep coming home to our own authenticity, our own inner truth. And that helps us in all areas of our life, including writing. Well, thank you, Linda. That is it. Yeah, stop there. Thank you so much. I'm very, very incisive and I'm sure it's going to prompt a lot of questions. I know it prompted some of me. So Eric, what would you like to tell us? Sure. Great to be here. Thanks for inviting us. I look brighter than usual because I have a new computer, so I hope I'm also smarter than usual. I want to connect up a few dots. When I work with writers as a creativity coach, one of the first things I try to sell them on is the idea of writing in the morning. And if we try to write in the evening, we're too tired by the end of the day, typically. Also, we're a little too blue by the end of the day because we haven't gotten to our real work. So we're a little demoralized by the end of the day. So I think there are lots of reasons to write first thing, but the biggest one for me is that we get to make use of our sleep thinking if we write in the morning. And that's an idea that folks may not understand so well. Everybody knows about dreaming, but they may not know that in other parts of the night, we think. Our brain is really active all night and in REM sleep we dream and non-REM sleep we think. And if we turn our thinking mind over to our book, then our book is available to us first thing in the morning and we can just take dictation. And that's a great bonus for writers to have used all of that sleep thinking time to work on their book. So let me connect that up. So if you were to go to bed with what I call a sleep thinking prompt, that is a question, a wonder. Like it can be a wonder inside the book, like I wonder what Mary wants to say to John in chapter three. Could be that kind of wonder. Or it could be I wonder why I'm having so much trouble completing the book. And let's take that one because that's such a typical problem for writers. They get to the 86% place of their book, but they have trouble finishing it up. So if you go to bed with that sleep thinking prompt, I wonder why I'm having so much trouble finishing my book. Your brain will work on that question. And then, this is the necessary extra part of the process, you then have to turn to that same question when you awaken and then process the night. And that's where the journaling comes in. If you were to open your journal and ask yourself the same question, why am I having so much trouble finishing my novel? You'll have an answer, typically, because your brain has been working on that problem all through the night. So that's one of the ways that journaling can help writers. It can help them solve their problems, whether it's problems inside the book or problems, some kind of process problem. Let me just go on for one more minute. And that is, I teach a focused journal method, taught it to places like Esalen. It's got many steps, but let me just give you the highlights. And that is, you can use your journal to ask yourself a good question. And by a good question, I mean something that's important to you, like why am I having trouble finishing my novel? And then the journaling helps you get to an understanding of why that is. And so let's say that the place you arrive at is that you realize that there's a hard scene you don't want to write. Maybe it's a senior censoring in your own mind or just technically hard to write, but there's a hard scene to write. The next step of the journal method is to tease out an intention. Now you have an understanding. The understanding is, I'm not finishing my book because there's a hard scene to write. Now you tease out the intention. And the intention is, I'm going to write that scene today. That's what an intention sounds like. I'm going to write that scene today or write that scene right now. Or at the worst, I'm going to write that scene tomorrow. So you tease out an intention. And then there are two further steps and then I'll stop. One step is to then align your thoughts with that intention. You want to be thinking the right things that support that intention. So you might think something like, I'm going to do it today. That's a thought that affirms that intention. We need to be saying those kinds of things to ourselves because we're slippery creatures for human beings and we can form an intention and then still go do something else. So you want your thoughts to align with your intention and then you want your behaviors to align with your intention, namely, you pick up your pen and you go write that hard scene. So that's all by way of saying all of that work can get done in your journal where you identify some kind of problem you're having with your book and end up with an intention and thoughts that align with the intention and behaviors that align with the intention. And in that way, you can help your writing life through journaling. Great, great, great stuff. Wonderful. I want to pull back just a little bit, Linda and Eric, and ask the question. I wake up in the middle of the night and I write something on a post-it note. Sometimes I send myself emails. Sometimes I leave myself voicemails. Am I journaling? Well, you're working. You're doing the work. I'm not sure how Linda would answer it. I wouldn't think that that's journaling precisely, but I'll let Linda tackle that. Yeah, I think if it's journaling to you, if you feel like it's how you do your journaling practice, then yes, it could be journaling, but it might also just be making a list, staying organized, making sure you don't forget things. So the answer would be yours to answer. Sorry, I'm stepping over you, Linda, but that sounds like thinking. It sounds like your brain's working and you want to make note of what your brain is doing. And for writers, let me just piggyback a tiny bit for writers. We have to be unselfconscious as writers, because if an idea comes to you at the Safeway or at the bus station, you want to feel comfortable pulling out your notebook or whatever you're using and getting that idea down. You don't want to treat your ideas cavalierly. You want them to count and matter. So I think what you're doing is treating your ideas seriously when they come to you. And I think that's great. Yeah. Oh, sorry, Cheryl. Go ahead. You know what I wanted to do is insert that question from Fran, because I think it's a nice time to mention that. Fran asks, while we're talking about brains, she wonders if she's using a different part, if one is using a different part of the brain, when you write by hand versus electronically, and you have a couple of different essays that mention how writing affects the brain and rewrites your thoughts on paper and reformulates it in the brain. Do you have an opinion on what's more effective than what form electronic or on paper than the other? For me, it's about tactics, not so much about better. In working with writers over the years, I've discovered that when they accumulate too many handwritten notes, it's very difficult to move those notes to the computer. It's like its own task and its own burden and its own challenge. So that's not to say that doing it on the computer is better than handwriting, but we do have to be careful of accumulating notes and doing too much handwriting and then having the task of moving it over to the computer. So just on a practical level, on a tactical level, I really suggest to clients that they get especially comfortable working on the computer, comma, just one little comma, and that comma is between projects, I think working in longhand is the most expansive way to be, the most blue sky way to be. So to say that simply, I would work on the computer while I'm working on a book and then go back to handwriting between books. Yeah, and I'll just add that there's a wonderful book called Your Brain on Ink by Deborah Ross and Kay Adams, and it's all about the neuroscience of writing, and there's some great things in there about neuroplasticity. And there has been a study done, I always think the best way when it comes to journaling, and I am talking journaling, not writing a novel here, is to do it in whatever medium will get you doing it. Do it in the way, if you're more natural to use a journal app or to be on your computer because you want a password protected journal, that's fine. If you love, as I do, that pen and paper and sitting down with a cup of tea or coffee or a glass of wine later in the day, and just sitting and having that purposeful pause to go to the page and reflect and have some self-care through journaling, I really do that in my handheld journal because I spend a lot of time on the computer for work as many of us do, and it's just not as relaxing to journal online, and for me personally. So do what works for you when it comes to your journaling practice. And it is interesting to know that a different voice can come out. Many people have said that when they write in their journal on paper, they feel that something different comes than when they're journaling on their computer. So just bring that your own curiosity to that. And the other is, there's apparently some in your dominant hand that you write with, there are acupressure points that connect with emotional centers in the brain. And so in some of this neuroscience work around writing by hand, they talk about that. And because journaling is, you know, you're using it to process your emotions and express your emotions, there can be some support for writing by hand when you're doing that type of reflective work. So those are just some further musings on it. But I recommend that book. And you can look up journaling and neuroscience, you can look up journaling and neuroplasticity, and you'll get all kinds of interesting comments about it and research as well. Great. Wonderful advice. Is there a difference between journaling and recording information in a diary? And how are both used, or can both be used in the writing, in the writing game? Eric or Linda? Yeah, I can dive in. A lot of people don't use the term diary anymore. It seems like journaling sort of taken over more in the language. You know, when I think of a diary writer, it's often that logging of one's life, you know, that dear diary. And we might think back to those little journals we had. I know I had one when I was a young child with the lock and key and it's very private and personal. And I think that, you know, people use whatever language works for them. But journaling in the personal growth space is often seen much more and journaling for mental health, journaling for wellness, that we're going to the page with certain intentions to know, grow, and care for ourselves through writing, through the act of writing. And that may not be the case in a diary. A diary may be more, you know, maybe tracking our stories so we could pass them on as legacy writing to grandchildren or children. It may be more, you know, we think of those in boxes of journals. I was just speaking with someone who inherited their mother's journals when she passed away. And she's learning so much reading the stories of her mother's life. And, you know, that's really a diary. People also have diaries and it's in the chat, Lisa, using it as a daily calendar, like more like a planner of activities and scheduling. So these, this language, journals, diaries, planners, calendars, they can sometimes, you know, they mean different things to different people. Right. Eric, any thoughts? We look at the real lives of writers. Writers get stuck a lot. They're often resistant to writing on a given day. They often block. These are normal occurrences in the lives of writers. And that's one of the places where journaling can really become important as a tool for self-awareness so that you understand why these things are happening. Freud said that all creative blockage was from self-censorship. And that's an overstatement. But there's truth in that, that a lot of writers are censoring themselves before they get their writing down on the page. They were already afraid of how the writing will be received, worried about criticism or reception in the marketplace and all of those issues that bother writers. And by getting clear on that by journaling, coming to the understanding that that's what's stopping you from doing the work, then you can bravely start doing the work. While we're still defending ourselves and not noticing why we're not doing the work, well, then we're stuck. But as soon as we turn to our journal and start asking ourselves the source of questions I mentioned before and trying our best to come up, to be authentic and come up with real answers for ourselves, not for anyone else, but for ourselves, that allows us to resume the writing, continue the writing. We're talking about for a novel, let's say 300 days of writing, 600 days of writing. There's a lot of time we're investing in this and there are going to be many days where we don't want to do the work. So we have to be as wise as we can be and as self-aware as we can be over that long haul. Very good. Sounds good. It seems that if you have something in mind already that you want to do as a writer or something you want to write, that the journal, journaling can propel you forward for that particular project. So what happens if you don't have anything particularly in mind? Have you had the experience of journaling and then it turns into something that you didn't know it was going to turn into? Yes, all the time. And how does that manifest itself? What actually happens with you and your thought process when you do that? Well, a few things come to mind is in a very practical way in life how I have found journaling has informed decisions I've made in life which wasn't my intent necessarily when I went to the page. So to answer your question has been surprising. So for example, I was living in the interior of British Columbia and I remember in my journal I kept writing about this desire to live near the ocean and it was nowhere near the ocean. And eventually because I saw it in the pages of my journal over and over again I decided to take action on that and at the age of 30 I moved to an island and I've been living there ever since. So there's times our writing can cause us to make decisions that we might not have otherwise made if we wouldn't have seen that inner truth coming on the page over and over again. And in terms of writing I've had times where I'm writing something in my journal and all of a sudden I decide that would make a great personal essay or that would make a great short story and I remember that happened when I was processing a lot of the emotions when I was watching my dad decline with Alzheimer's and now my mom with Alzheimer's there were things that were just in the pages of my journal that then became more public writing things I would write as a blog or you know other things that I would share out with people and that was never the intention when I was writing it in my journal but that took shape because it was you know kind of being crafted there and I've had all kinds of book ideas and article ideas and business ideas course ideas that have definitely emerged from the pages of my journal and I'm sure many of you here who who are journal writers have had that experience too. Great great. If you look at the sure if you look at the journals of well-known writers you see how ideas get elaborated they start from someplace if you think of Camus novel The Stranger for instance and Camus kept notebooks all all of his all all of his adult life and they're very interesting because there'll be notations that say something like the Arab that's all it says but you know that something's percolating and then the next day it's a longer passage about passage about heat and Morocco and the Arab we still he still doesn't know what it's about right it's not not just that we don't know what it's about he still doesn't know what it's about and then the next day it's casual murder or something like that and finally we get to the scene where the main character kills the Arab for no particular reason except it's very hot but but there's been a process there where the writer has been just just percolating with these ideas which don't yet connect but which by him staying with it eventually do connect into art so it's it's it's peeling the onion on your imagination yeah it that's right and it's when we get quiet enough to journal we get quiet enough to do any kind of writing we're essentially reclaiming neurons you know we have billions of neurons but every time we have a small thought like the garden needs weeding we just stole a hundred million neurons from our brain with that little thought right so when when we journal we're getting to that quiet place we feel sort of like emptiness but what it's it's the opposite of emptiness it's the fullness of our brain getting ready for something to percolate up it's like a pregnant emptiness where something's getting ready to percolate up and that's the wonderful place that writers want to get to and that's also the place where many writers so infrequently get to and it makes them feel like they have no good ideas i've worked with so many clients with mfas and what have you who are demoralized and disappointed that they have no good ideas and for me what i always say to them is about not getting quiet enough not about ideas not about talent not about brain power it's that you're a little noisy inside is my hunch and let's just work on getting quieter so it was a long-winded response to that but i think that's what the journaling helps do is helps the writer get really quiet so that ideas can percolate up well let me that brings up another question i have for both of you um we talk about getting quiet inside how do you manage the quiet outside is there a certain physical space that helps you to do journaling in the way that you want to do it have you found that physical space i'm sure linda has a response to that but let me just jump in because i try to have i try to encourage all clients to have a room of their own to have a room of the door and a lock and have a place if they can if they can pull that off we i mean writers write all over i like bus stations bizarrely enough i like to write in bus stations but everybody writes where they like to write but everyone needs that quiet space without intrusions and with agreements in the household where from you know six a.m to seven a.m no one gets to bother you or people can make their own eggs or their own peanut butter sandwiches you you get that hour to yourself so i i think we do need to safeguard our space we need a quiet space all of that's very important thank you linda uh i really do think and we all know there's a difference between internal quiet next external quiet but how they can support each other so for example i have a regular meditation practice that accompanies in in quite often each morning with my journaling practice so i'll start the day and i'll make a coffee and i'll do my meditation and i'll journal and i'll rub my dog's belly but the quieting of the inner mind through the meditation and breath work and intentionally coming into a calm centered space supports me then to go to the page because we all know that when we're more relaxed we're more able to create that's why eric has books on anxiety management techniques for creatives you know there's science on that and getting that amygdala calm down so we can access our creativity and our imaginations and so forth so the external quiet you know i journal all over the place the quiet of the morning in my own home which isn't quiet what's my teenagers get up i love coffee shops for journaling and then there's writing retreats where you get to be in that you know space with other writers but i have found that the more i have cultivated my ability to have that inner quiet the external environment matters less because i can tap into that calm that centeredness that groundedness that quiet no matter the environment i'm in and part of that is working in a home office as well with the bustle of family life you know at the door to be able okay how does one get that that space whether it's a corner a room a moment to listen to them to themselves to their own you know their own voice and hence their hence their writing so i think if people have their ability to calm and within themselves they also can transfer that out and help to calm you know what's going on in the external environment and communicating with people you know when my door shut that's the time people don't come and knock on it unless there's you know some dire emergency we have to protect like Eric said those times for ourselves because no one else will do that for us no one will come along and say oh you really should take 60 minutes of solitude and silence to do your craft we must whether that's journaling or writing a novel or whatever it is um you know we have to carve and claim and honor those places and times and quiet for ourselves and help teach other people how to do that in support of us as well thank you so much we've talked about the internal quiet and the external quiet but there are times that writers need the noise i know when i write poetry i'm usually inspired by something that has happened externally that i have seen or heard or felt so how does that translate into journaling when you're sitting in that coffee shop and you're actually journaling about what you're observing and hearing around you how do you capture that i think everything sparks our creativity for paying attention you know if we think about art making and mindfulness practice for example it's all about the senses what do we hear taste smell touch what's bringing us to life what are what what are we noticing and all of that is a part of what inspires our our creativity so i remember for example i was working in a cafe and i was working on my memoir and some and i was writing about how um that my mother had me in her care for five days before she placed me for adoption and a woman came in with a newborn baby and i heard her friend talking to her and and the baby she said oh how old is she and she said she's eight days old and i remember and i was literally working on the scene in my memoir about being a five-day infant with my mother and that sparked a whole opening in my writing that wouldn't have happened if i wouldn't have saw that mother holding that little infant in her arms it just brought me into something um around empathy for imagine if that mother had to take that baby right now take her from her arms and hand her over and ever see her again and so it opened a whole part of my writing that may or may not have ever come in the book if in that moment that didn't happen you don't know but we're you know all of our creativity is in a relationship to the lives that we're living what we're seeing hearing feeling it's never in a vacuum and even if we're sitting you know in a on a quiet silent meditation for days we're still interacting with violence we're interacting with you know our own thoughts our own breath we're never not in engagement with something when we create thank you let's paint a picture for a second if you're sitting in that profi house you really have two books with you right you have the book you're working on and you have your journal they're two different things and from my point of view if you're working on a book that's what you open first your you open your not use sit down get your cup of coffee vice first you get your cup of coffee sit down and then start working on your novel let's say but then when you come out of the trance of working because something's gone on in the cafe or something's gone on in your own mind then you have your journal available to process what just happened yeah so again from my point of view the novel comes first because you don't want to be just make you don't want to be just creating journal after journal never get to your book so from my point of view the novel comes first but both are available to you and valuable sort of side by side in that moment thank you wonderful so chair and do we have any questions in the chat we have some comments the one question that I see earlier here was a comment really maybe from Sheila about art and journaling and illustrating one's journal you have a couple of nice entries in the book about the role that art can play in journaling but I wonder if you have any interesting points to make on that topic I have a very strange response to that because of something that happened recently and for San Francisco Bay Area folks this will be particularly relevant I did a book called a writer San Francisco and we luckily got the San Francisco illustrator Paul Madonna to do the illustrations for that book he's sort of well known in the bay area for doing a series of panels called all over coffee he just was recently in a terrible head-on collision and we'll recover from it but just sort of sending out vibes to him as we're talking here and that was one of my happiest experiences was working with an illustrator on a book most of my books are words but every once in a while I get to do a book where there are words and illustrations and it's very enriching for the process so a little little thought for Paul Madonna at this moment and that's all yeah thank you he's a regular speaker at mechanics whenever he's got a new book out he comes and gives a talk so that was a tragic thing that happened but I'm glad to see that he's recovering nicely so any thoughts on the illustrating yeah there's wonderful resources on mixed media journaling and art journaling for example there's a magazine can you still hear me oh yeah I can't hear you okay Eric can you hear me yes yes I can't hear you yes okay I'll just know that you can hear me and I'll figure it out um wonderful mixed media journaling where people are like you know like scrapbooking type of things or using watercolors I've seen some beautiful travel journals for example where people are doing illustrations and and journaling so absolutely some people that's the only type of journaling they do is art journaling and there's a great magazine by that title art journaling that puts out I think a quarterly publication and it's just beautiful because there's lots of how-to art journal and then lots of samples of it so it's really inspiring if you like to get really creative with your journaling to say it in a funny way I think it's a bit of a genetic necessity to have words and pictures go together if you look at kids we have a six-year-old twin granddaughters and they'll you know they'll fold over six pieces of paper and staple them together and make a book and illustrate it and tell a story and do the drawings and no one's needing to tell them to do that I think that's built into our repertoire it's something we want to do so it we we may not be drawers we may not be illustrators but there's something in our genetic makeup about music and art and writing that's important to us it's among our life purposes I think great I teach a course on vision boards and journaling combined where we can bring these different practices together and the same like some people will use oracle cards and journaling and the ways we can combine things I just hosted a workshop called journaling the labyrinth where we combined labyrinth walking and journaling both contemplated practices so not only can we do art journaling we can allow our journaling practices to become very creative processes by partnering them with these other types of practices like I mentioned earlier meditation and journaling labyrinth walking and journaling I do a lot of collage making and journaling as two separate things but I'll make the collage and then I'll look at the collage and see what inspiration wants to come in the journal so we can do all kinds of creative things and make it make it your own there's no rules and there's some you know helpful things to do um I I guess I just wonder how people set the stage for themselves to start journaling if you have people that just have never done it before or they do it in the way that I think I'm doing it with the post notes of the voicemails and the emails how do you get the the discipline um and and set the stage for for journaling yeah I have a journaling facebook group and the most common question people ask is how to journal consistently and there's the how to start journaling and then there's the how to keep journaling maybe one starts and yeah that's kind of like gym memberships in january exactly yeah I always like to think it's helpful to think about something else that you do that you've created a habit with and what helped what worked so for example maybe you pick a time of day that you want to journal and you just commit that you know 7 a.m first cup of coffee you're going to journal for 10 minutes and you start to do that regularly and get some momentum someone mentioned the morning pages in the chat which many of you will know is from The Artist Way by Julia Cameron it's one of her artist practices that's an artist recovery program and where she teaches and she does not call that journaling she specifically calls it the morning pages at where we the practice is as soon as you wake up in the morning you fill three sheets handwritten of stream of consciousness writing whatever comes I'm cold I need to find my slippers so you know whatever and and then at three pages you stop and so for some that is their daily writing practice and they don't you know do any do anything else so it's about finding what works the other is having it with you having my journal is always with me it's in my backpack it's in my bag if I get a few minutes you know waiting for my boys after their basketball game I'll sit in the car and I'll journal I don't have to really think about because now it's a habit it's a law it's a companion practice in my life but to start you want to one decide you want to start get the journal get the pen decide when you're going to do it give it a shot for a little bit and and see how you go and it can be helpful to be part of a journaling community and most people don't think of journaling it's a solitary act but in our journaling community I host monthly writing alone together circles where I take people to the page to journal and having community support can really help us that's why having a gym buddy can help us and you know that kind of thing even though it's a practice for yourself it doesn't have to be done in isolation or alone you can access community and support and inspiration and in terms of what to write about people will say okay fine I've got the journal now what what am I what am I going to write and it can be helpful to just give yourself a little prompt so for example right now I'm feeling or right now I notice and just let a prompt bring you into present moment awareness and start writing questions are great great prompts inquiries like Eric said about sleep sleep thinking asking that asking that question before you go to sleep well you can just ask a question at any time in your journal and then your journaling you can you can make a list of what questions do I have in my life right now write down all those lists of questions and they could be profound you know should I stay in my marriage or you know should I go to Mexico for March break they couldn't be you know simple things and then let those questions become your journaling prompts so you literally can have your own list of prompts that have come from you that you can use at any time it can be a lot of fun well you know that brings up a question that that I see in the chat where someone is asking I think it's Jean asking about where do you where do you put a commonplace and story idea journals so you you have this stream of consciousness journal you know that I think we all can kind of grasp but what about the commonplace the story idea the dialogue the other kinds of things that may come to mind where do you place those in the in the in journaling yeah I can only answer that for myself but I'll just sorry my journal is propping up my computer but I just have an eight by eleven blank wow book that's my journal and when I'm journaling that stream of consciousness writing that kind of typical journaling we might think of when all of a sudden it becomes something that I think will be part of my memoir for example or part of an essay or part of a blog post I just go through and I highlight it so I can go back and find it I don't have like the story journal and the dialogue journal and the travel journal and the you know I just have one journal and I have ways to mark it so I can go find it if it's become a list of ideas or it's become a you know something else so I can go get it easily wow okay great Aaron oh I want to go back to something you said a moment ago you use the the dreaded d-word discipline and Pavarotti the late Pavarotti had a quote which I quote a lot which is people say I'm disciplined but it's not disciplined it's devotion and there's a big difference yeah I call it obligation yeah and I think I think devotion I would think if we think of journaling coming from that other place of devotion of our decision to matter that we we and our efforts matter then that gives us the motivation to want to journal if we think it's a white knuckle kind of discipline thing well we stop those things all the time we don't we don't learn French we don't learn the two but we just stop those things because we haven't decided that they matter enough so we want that that's the feeling tone that we want in our being is that the journaling matters to us as part of our self-awareness process it's going to help us with our life problems it's going to help us with our writing it's just going to be overall helpful it's one of those tools that really matter to us and if we can come from the devotion place rather than the discipline place then we'll want to do it yeah I can I completely agree with that and I often start with people why do you want a journal you know you've heard you know someone's recommended it a counselor a friend a doctor you've heard it's good for your mental health but why do you want to journal what do you hope to get out of it and that answer to the why is that motivating place and you know Eric said that very eloquently around the difference between discipline and devotion devotion has our passion it has our purpose it has our longing and those things keep us going they act itself isn't the thing that keeps us doing it and I and the things we do for the love of it you know not because oh I've got a journal now because it's you know I you know those moments where you get to go to the page even sometimes I are writing a book even though it may be difficult and we might procrastinate or you know have those obstacles as Eric said if we're truly devoted to it if we love it enough we'll find the way to do it because it will matter we and we will know why it matters we won't be trying to flounder and figure that out that's already you know with us well I also think that things like journaling are part of self-care and it's it's unfortunate but the reality is that there has to be a certain amount of discipline in self-care because of our lives I mean life gets in the way sometimes we don't all have the space to be able to just say I'm just going to do this when I feel like it so I think I think interjecting the devotion is very key to being able to to do this journaling and to write what you want to write and my my question is we we know the power as you just kind of talked about Linda of journaling for mental health but for both of you what is the core power of journaling for writing well Linda may have one take on this but for me journaling is about self-awareness and writers typically don't get their writing done most novels most non-fiction books don't get finished because the writer hasn't discerned what's in the way doesn't have sufficient self-awareness of what's going on it might be a problem might be a technical problem might be a psychological problem that they don't want this material revealed in the world etc there are all kinds of different reasons why we don't get our work done and in order to get our work done we have to get under our own defenses and become more self-aware and understand what's stopping us so journaling is a way to get up is to deal with our defensive nature and have a frank conversation with ourselves that we may not have other ways of doing wonderful Linda I would add to that the importance of self-compassion because we can be very hard on ourselves oh I meant to journal but I didn't or I meant to take some time to care for myself but I didn't and it can get this perpetual self-talk that starts to feed the sense of failure or letting ourselves down or and it can become counterproductive and so I think there's that ability to keep coming fresh and to be able to say you know what can I do today in service to my writing or in service to this dream or this goal or in service to my self-care and to really have a non-judgmental self-compassionate energy with ourselves because we're more likely to thrive in what we're doing in in that you know support of an internal environment and also to be with other people who support and affirm uh you know what what we're doing so the um the ability to claim you know a lot of people don't get to things they really want to get to because they feel guilty when they go to try to do it because there's so many other things that need attention your children spouse life but we have to prioritize ourselves not at the expense of others but to prioritize our projects prioritize our our health and well-being and whatever else that we want to prioritize and then take a stand for it so I prioritize my journaling and there's times I might not do something else because I made that the priority maybe the dish to stay on the counter because I ran out of time in the morning to get them done and I'll get to them later because that was more important to me to take that time and start my day in a reflective you know grounded way than it was to to do that so we're always making choices with our time with our priorities and and with ourselves and um whether that's journaling or anything else we're trying to get to that has some value for us it's a constant um a process of showing up to to what we've decided matters and what's meaningful to us you know I love Eric talks about life purposes and how we don't just have one we can have many life purposes so you know right and but but how do we make those investments um Eric will talk about meaning investments and we spend a lot of time doing meaningless things things that just waste time social media schooling all kinds of empty vacant things that waste our time and but then when we talk about well we don't have time to exercise we don't have time to eat healthy we don't have time to work on our book we we're always making decisions about our time and whether we're putting high value activities in them or low value and each person has to decide what has high and low value but for journaling if you've decided it's a high value activity or writing your books a high value activity then we have to take a stand for it you know just you know we have if we have high value on loving our children we wouldn't say oh I don't have time to take care of you I don't have time to to listen to you because we've said we have we want we have high value on that we make the time and so we've got to take stands that's right here here I agree with that um 30 seconds each of you anything that I didn't ask you that you want to say just that if you start to skip days on your book then then you'll notice that weeks and months and years have slipped by so try to get to your writing every single day thank you Eric great stuff Linda just that there's a certain amount of you know self-care or engaging in journaling or creativity it isn't selfish it it it is um we have to unpack those things you know I remember years ago when my boys were little and we were just a quick story you know that one of those rushed times trying to get out the door for something and it was all stressful and my son was about eight at the time Jackson and he looked at me and he said mom I think you should take a minute and write in your journal and it really stayed with me because it wasn't just that I know it has value in helping me be the type of person I want to be but the people I love most at a young age had a connection that there was some connection between this thing mom does with journaling and and the type of mother she is you know whatever and so sometimes we think we've got these things in these selfish categories but in fact they serve how we love how we love others when we work how we get along with our our colleagues and and the people that matter so um I always like to say that anything we're doing that's good for us including journaling it's good for others too thank you so much both you Eric and Linda this has been absolutely wonderful and I hope that the audience has gotten a lot out of knowing why it's so important to to journal and how it can help you in so many facets of your life but also in your writing life thank you again thanks everyone wish you a terrific 2023 keep writing and thanks for being here thank you so much and I just wanted to plug my favorite my favorite point in the book plug the book again which you can't see but for some reason because I don't know my background it's an homage to the invisible man right it's one of thousands of other books that we have in our collection here at the Mechanics Institute but on page 66 Judy Reeves mentions one of her tips for getting started in journaling is to just write about one moment that mattered today and so I hope that this moment mattered today enough for you to get started on your your journaling practice um thank you Eric and Linda and Cheryl as always and I hope to see you next month on the third Friday of February where we will be discussing uh breaking into uh writing contests um and fear not about copying all the pertinent links in the chat I'm going to send all of our registrants an email shortly with the link to the video uh the important bits from the chat links to our speakers websites and books and also a link again to the great book of journaling where you can buy it or where you can borrow it from your local library and also I'd love for you to fill out the evaluation form which I will send you also in the email thank you again and I hope you have a wonderful journaling practice and uh afternoon thanks all thanks everybody all right see you next month happy weekend yes