New Years, Old Years

I traded posts with Mari L. McCarthy today. Please visit her site to read mine. — Sharon

As an advisor in journaling, I emphasize journaling for therapy, or what I call Journaling for the Health of It ™. I've discovered the extraordinary truth that journal writing can help you accomplish just about anything you want. As I proudly proclaim on my Create Write Now Facebook page, "Daily Journal Writing Therapy to become whole and healthy both inside and out is just about the coolest thing I can think of!"

Nonetheless, the actual practice of journaling often involves good old memoir-type writing. Not always, by any means, but at times looking back on your past with your pen in hand can be extraordinarily productive.

Since it's the New Year, I'd like to suggest a simple process of reflection that will help you turn again to the future with renewed confidence and faith.

First, flipping back through your past, identify the times that stand out as having been exceptional, better than other times. Choose one single year of this kind on which to focus.

Write "My Best Year" at the top of a new page in your journal, and then, remembering as many details about that year as you can, begin translating them to the page. How old were you? Where were you living? What was environment like? How did you spend your days? What were your involvements? Who were the others in your life at the time? What exactly happened to make it such a good period of time for you?

Stretch your memory to describe one day or incident from that time in as much fine detail as you can recall.

Now read over your journal entry and consider how this special time was formative for you.

Did the conditions and events of the time cause you to change in noticeable ways? How did that wonderful year influence who you have become today? Suppose you could go back to that same happy year. Is there anything you'd do differently the second time around?

For the payoff, bring the story of your best year into your plans for the coming period. What parts of that time past can you bring into your present? 

If you've allowed yourself plenty of time for this exercise, you're likely to be surprised by the possibilities it suggests. Life is cyclical, certainly, but with close attention, we can often raise the overall vibe by intentionally learning from our experiences. And your personal journal is just the tool to make the job delightful!

Mari L. McCarthy owns and blogs at www.CreateWriteNow.com, home of Journaling for the Health of It!™. She guides people in keeping up a Self-Healing Journal Practice, helping them cure their diseases and heal their life. Her most recent publication is Peace of Mind and Body — 27 Days of Journaling to Health & Happiness. Passionate about goals and successful in accomplishing them, Mari is also a singer/songwriter who enjoys raising roses as well as her consciousness.

Photo by Squirrelbrand.

Wordplay Magic

Do you believe in magic? Let me ask a deeper question here: What is magic? I keep a link to Dictionary.com on my favorites bar. The drift of their definition is that magic is appearances created by sleight of hand and devious means. I'm so disappointed. I do believe in magic, and the magic I believe in is the appearance of the unexpected, that which is not ordinarily possible. A related word is supernatural.

That word, supernatural, brings me to the point of this post.

Questions may be the single most powerful life writing tool. I refer to those open questions you pose on the page, then suspend thought and write the answers from wherever they come — your subconscious, God, the Universe. I'm less concerned about the source than the substance.

Winding along the path of my daily adventure of discovery on the pages of my journal, I wrote into a dream fragment that took place in a church of sorts, a sacred space. I posed a question: “What is sacred? What does the concept mean?” Two words flowed out of my pen, morphing into altered configurations:

Trance-form. Trance-in-dance.

I felt a tingle of excitement and delight at the invitation into this wordplay game with Wisdom. Trance. What is trance? My answer is “altered state of consciousness, awareness, or  perception.” I could interrupt my writing to check Dictionary.com, but my meaning is the one that matters when I'm on a journal page. That's my reality. The trance definition I work from is a state of being open to the super-natural, aka God or Wisdom.

Thus transform, or trance-form, involves suspending or setting aside the limitations imposed by (my) ordinary ways of thinking and entertaining alternate points of view and possibilities.

Aha! Of course! How could I change, grow, develop and learn without opening to alternate possibilities? That's the only way forward, out of a rut.

I moved on to trance-send. While in that trance, I send (or am sent) from one way of understanding to another, from one form to another. The sending led me to the next step:  trance-in-dance. Dancing is movement. Dancing is energy.

All these thoughts swirled together in a satori moment: for me, sacredness involves suspending belief in the limits of what I currently know and believe so Wisdom can mold my understanding into new forms better suited for whatever purpose is at hand. In an even more fun-da-mental sense, sacred means opening to the pure energy of life, of God. This new point of view, this new understanding of sacredness, forms an evolutionary thread connecting stages of faith and belief through my life.

The effect of those words and that wisdom flowing from the page into my awareness and understanding is magic — the appearance of the unexpected and ordinarily impossible. I might have struggled for weeks or years to come to that realization if I'd sought it deliberately. I definitely, strongly believe in magic — the magic of opening to the possibility of the page!

Write now: spend some time freewriting, easing into a deep place of meaning for you. Then pose a question similar to the one above, “What is this concept? What does it mean?” As the answer begins to emerge from your fingers, engage with it playfully and let it magically trance-port you to new vistas.

Image credit: h.koppdelaney