re-center by listening to your inner whispers
ellipses… issue #055
Ellipses… a small, special character. Used by writers to slow down, create a pause, and indicate thinking.
Journaling often gets a bad reputation because it feels ego-driven—what I did that day, how I’m feeling, what drama I’m experiencing. Often, we need to trudge through the slop that comes out of our brains so we can start to make sense of all that lies below. Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages, or the act of writing 3 pages longhand as a stream of consciousness, can help us sift through the onslaught of thoughts and find inevitable gems and diamonds.
I’m just here to attest to the fact that, when you take space/time/energy for reflection, important things begin to pop up. Put critical self-judgment aside, find a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted, and take a few belly breaths to settle in.
You probably know how to journal and protect your time, but if I’m assuming incorrectly, just let me know.
Re-centering
Onto the good stuff.
The world today is sloppy. Anger-inducing. Overwhelming.
Too many emails and texts and DMs and badges and pings and boops and bills and political phone calls and trying to remember to take food out of the freezer to defrost for tomorrow’s dinner.
Our attention gets pulled in every direction, stretching like Silly Putty and taking on debris and dust from everything we touch and are exposed to.
Journaling can be a place to rehash all of the overwhelm. (Believe me, I know; I often spend many pages complaining and procrastinating and re-living drama and trauma and wishing my bad behaviors would go away.)
Journaling can also be a place where we drop all of that and ask ourselves:
What do I really want?
There are the big questions:
Where do I want to invest my energy?
What do I want to see happen in 5 years?
What is my ultimate goal?
What the heck do I do about X, Y, and Z?
And there are the small questions:
What do I feel like doing right now?
What do I want to avoid doing right now?
Even something as tactical as:
I have too much to do—how do I pick what to do first?
In asking these questions, you’re turning to a higher power. This higher power doesn’t have to be God or the universe, either. A higher power can be the best version of yourself, whether that’s your inner self right now or a version of you that you can envision in the future.
You might not get an answer right away. Sometimes, even just writing down the question on the page will get things churning in the background, to be answered the next morning or with an inclination that seems to come out of nowhere.
Pay attention to your inner whispers (or shouts). Write them down the next time you sit down with your journal.
This is the way we re-center through writing in a journal.
Ask questions.
Pause, listen.
Take note of the answers.
If no answers come, keep at it. It might take days or weeks or months to chip away and find what you need. Through the habit of keeping a private journal, you’ll find more and more moments of self-discovery and grounded clarity.