Maintaining a journal

Matthijs Cornelissen
last revision: 17 August 2023

Why maintaining a journal?

Maintaining a journal is widely recommended as something that helps making progress. For work in the field of consciousness-centred psychology there are some additional reasons to do it. The first is, that in consciousness-centred psychology one uses one's own nature as an instrument for making psychological observations, and maintaining a journal creates a perfect occasion to train this capacity. A second reason is that it helps to look at one's own progress not only as a private, individual project, but also as part of a collective process of evolution. In other words, good self-observations are not only valuable for oneself, but they can also help in theory formation and the development of know-how that is useful for others. Finally, if one maintains one's journal in a systematic manner, it might produce a trail of slow, long term changes that escape notice while happening, but that can provide valuable insights both in one's own nature, and in the more generic processes involved in long term change.

When to write?

In most of us, our short term memory fades surprisingly fast, so it is best to make entries as soon as possible after the psychological events one wants to describe. One can see how often one can manage to do this. During an intensive course on consciousness-centered psychology one should do it at least once a day, but more often is better. Good times for making a short entry are immediately after a class, a meditation, a dream, a conflict, a sudden insight, any event of interest. You will see that the sooner one does it, the more details one can collect, and it tends to be the fine details that make the entry interesting. If one doesn't have time to write, one can try find at least a minute or two to be silent and describe it in one's mind for later recall.

As a whole it is strongly recommended to write the journal as if you will be the only one who will read it, ever. This makes it much more easy to be fully honest. One can decide later how much of it one might like to share and with whom.

Adding tags to the journal

It is not essential, but adding tags to one's journal entries helps in two ways:

1. while writing to remain aware of why one actually writes
2. afterwards, to quickly find back all one has written on a certain subject
   For example, if one has tagged all relevant passages as "childhood", one can quickly find all what one has written about one's past, or if one has used the tag "tool", one can easily find back all the tricks one has used to help in one's growth.

Tags can be given while writing the journal, or, if that disturbs the flow, they can also be added later. One can see how many different tags one wants to use. There are arguments for small lists of main categories (say: event, tool, plan, evaluation, overview) as well as for long, or even unlimited lists. It is ok to use different tags for one single passage (for example, "tool" and "silencing the mind"). For most people it works best to start with a short list. If a tag gets too many entries, one can always split it up later.

Headers

How much structure one wants to give to one's journal depends on the one hand simply on one's personal preferences, and on the other hand on what one intends to do with one's journal afterwards. If one wants to use one's journal (or any other text) for subsequent qualitative analysis, it may be useful to add, besides the simple tags, also some kind of headers. If one adds headers, it may help to structure them for example in three parts: the date, the type of entry, and the issue at hand. A fourth part could indicate the value or importance of the entry.

For the type of entry, one could think of tags like:

• highlight (peak, memorable, super): something beautiful, deep, important, special, something that one would like to remember, foster, cherish, something one would not like to forget, the best thing that happened;
• issue (work, difficulty, defect, atavism): something that needs work, something one would like to transform, change, or get rid of;
• potential (opportunity, gift, power, siddhi): something one would like to develop further, foster, grow;
• insight (idea, theory, thought): some idea that came up which one might like to use, check, develop later;
• illustration (example, story, image): a perfect example of some inner process or psychological concept;
• tool (process, technique, method, know-how): something that has worked and might be useful at some other time or for someone else;
• warning (danger, oops!): something that has definitely not worked and that one should try to avoid or be careful about.

Here are two examples:

• [date] potential: dreams ****
  an entry on what happened while training one's capacity to remember dreams
• [date] issue: anger **
  an entry on how one managed (or failed!) to prevent an outburst of anger

Headers like tags, can be added before writing the entry or (much) afterwards.

Whatever you do about the tags, do write your journal, in as much detail as you can manage, and always give the date of the entry!

Individual, yoga-based, first-person mini-projects

The usefulness of the journal gets multiplied many times if combined with an "individual, yoga-based, first-person mini-project".