Journaling Article
On the night of February 11, 2004,
I attended a journaling workshop taught by Allison Moir Smith, M.A., at Your
Soul's Work at 219 Harvard St., near Coolidge Corner, Brookline MA.
Why did I do this?, you might well ask. What is journaling? For that matter
what is Your Soul's Work?
I had interviewed Allison Moir Smith a couple of days before. The interview
had confirmed my sense (from the magazine Personal Journaling) that journaling
is a unique activity, guided by its own special set of ideas and rules The
ideas that struck me about journaling were the following:
· Journaling requires curiousity about the events in your life
· Journaling can offer emotional relief from bothersome subjects and
events
· One can be healed by the act of writing itself.
The main rule of journaling is called "wild mind" writing. This
means keeping the pen moving for 10 to 20 minutes, "where" said
Smith, "you don't judge what you're saying, you don't worry about spelling,
you don't worry about punctuation, you don't really read back what you say."
The other "rules" involve self-exploration: "filling out"
the event that caused you to pick up your journal, and then asking yourself,
why did this come to my mind today?
The result is the development of deeper understanding of ourselves, which
racing through our days, we normally don't develop. I was fascinated, and
I wanted to see journaling in action.
For the workshop that night, Allison Moir-Smith began by reading an excerpt
from a book called Coming Home to Myself, by Marion Woodman. Then we plunged
into "wild mind" writing. One young woman (call her Meg) said that
journaling had brought to mind something that had annoyed her at work, that
morning. Meg had started to explore this annoyance and was already feeling
somewhat relieved. Moir-Smith said that Meg was looking more vibrant than
when she came in. An older woman (call her Ada) said that she wrote about
a time in her childhood when she and a friend played pranks on the neighbors.
Moir-Smith suggested that Ada needed to access her devilish side.
This sounds a bit like therapy, but much of the workshop was about the process
of journaling, not the content. Meg found on question - Moir-Smith handed
out compelling questions for us to answer - was a jumping off point for another
subject altogether. Ada found that she wanted to frame an answer in poetry
rather than prose. Throughout the workshop, the resistance to journaling at
all kept coming up.
Meg concluded that she would always ask herself "why" and this would
lead her to another point in her journaling. Ada concluded that journaling
was like taking the lid off a box crammed tight with unresolved tensions.
Also, she said, the chemistry of the group mattered.
It was an illuminating 2-hour workshop, and at the cheap price of only $20.
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