Journaling opens the door to your deepest truths in your heart.
There is no right or wrong when it comes to journaling. In developing my coaching approach, I have defined and considered a few threads influencing our life path, decisions, and future. That is where the juicy stuff is.
Writing helped me make peace with health emergencies and complications I’ve experienced, centering me and connecting me to my creative core. I’ve had several health emergencies and surgeries. Unbelievably, I’ve had two ectopic pregnancies — it’s a miracle I’m here! It was devastating the first time, but to have it happen again 10 years later was unfathomable and almost cost me my life.
Recently, I’ve had six surgeries over six years. I was so disheartened, feeling like my body betrayed me. That it was letting me down. You can believe my journal was on the nightstand, ready with a pen as I lay in bed after those surgeries.
There is no way I could have processed those heartbreaking times without journaling.
I could pour my heart out and cry and scream on paper because I was trying to hold it together in front of everyone else. Whether it is an accident, illness, or you are not happy with your body, writing about it allows you to find acceptance and compassion for yourself.
Health
Family
Over the years, I’ve helped my parents while also raising a family. My dad eventually went to live in a nursing home because of his Alzheimer's. I am so grateful to have been close to them over the years and to be able to be there for them. It has also been hard to witness and to come to terms with their decline. Sadly, my dad was in a nursing home when COVID rocked the world. Our access to him was limited for the last eight months of his life. Only seeing him through a window and not being able to hug him felt unfair.
Without being able to journal about how I felt, I’m not sure how I would have handled my dad’s failing health and death.
I wrote out my sadness, my frustrations, my memories, and my joys, and the page kept it safe for me. Your relationships with parents, siblings, children, extended family, or chosen family, you name it, are there to explore and uncover. To cherish, to celebrate, to release, and to heal.
Place
Writing about how place has shaped me helps ground me with a perspective more sensitive to its importance. Focusing on writing about place, how to bring it to life with words has made me appreciate the nuances even more.
The landscape, the rhythm, and the seasons of place and its influence — it’s all helped me understand others better, such as my husband, who, as a farmer, lives by the land and the seasons.
Before we married, I was a planned and rigid person — but his sense of place bent my personality a little. By journaling and coming to a deeper understanding, I have realized it’s impossible to plan when you’re ruled by the land and Mother Nature.
Your hometown, school, bedroom, the corner you lived on, the beach you escaped to, or where you live now, writing and reflecting about place in your life is vital to a full understanding of your journey.
Writing is my meditation
My notebook and pen are my best friends who listen to me.
Positivity
My personal journaling practice and my coaching is not from a place of wounds. I stand for how writing can impact your life in a positive way. How it can help you. Benefit you. Shape your life. Journaling has been a friend to me during trying times. It helps me reflect and dig deep, but it also dings me like a light bulb flashing when I have an idea. And writing gives me a surge of adrenaline when I’ve finished a piece or seen my byline in print.
Journaling offers guidance, inspiration, and encouragement. And that is just the beginning. I believe that when you journal, you can write your own story - script the future.
You can manifest your dreams using the power of putting pen to paper. It sounds wild, but it’s surprising how often this has happened to me. Then again, you must act and believe whatever is meant will come to be. But let me tell you, writing it down is like lighting a match that sparks the idea, wish, desire, and plan.
Manifesting
I was in France for a writing workshop, and I went to lunch with a new friend. At that time, I had a one-year-old, a three-year-old, and a 14-year-old, plus a husband who farms a lot of land and is busy working most of the time. I told this new friend about my difficult year and how I wished I could work part-time to spend more time with my family and also have space for myself. I wrote in my journal about our conversation, about my desires.
Amazingly, a part-time position opened in my English department—which is unheard of in a rural town like mine. The day I was told I was granted the part-time position, I happened to see my journal from my time in France. I looked through it wistfully remembering I’d been there the year before at this same time. As I looked at what I had written, I felt a zap go through my body as I read about my wish to work part-time — it was a year to the day that I had written that! I know it came true because I wrote from my sincere heart. My family is what and who I value most in life, and the universe conspired to give me more time with them.
Imagine the possibilities if you wrote from your heart.
Get out of your head and into your heart
What happens when you journal…
understand what you absolutely value in life
stop spinning, trying to please everyone else.
focus and gain an understanding
improve your relationships as you write about the highs and lows
better your mental health, opening the door to see what’s working and what isn’t
become more present as you take time to write each day, centering, grounding and reflecting on the past, and as you plan for what’s truly important to you in the future