J is for: Journaling As A Spiritual Practice
This post is part of a series I’m so excited about: “The ABC’s of What I’ve Learned as a Medium and Intuitive Healer.” This is my full-time career, and I am thrilled for the opportunity to share what I’ve learned!
Journaling As a Spiritual Practice
Journaling as a spiritual practice comes up in a lot of my posts, and this is because it is such a useful tool! I’ve mentioned journaling with your inner child, for your energetic resources, with your higher self… there is practically no end to ways you can use journaling as a spiritual practice.
I have multiple journals going at all times! Right now, I use: a general journal in which I channel messages from my guides, an inner child journal, an ascension path journal, an energetic resources journal, a personal cycles journal, a magic journal which is broken into several sections, a research journal, and a mentorship journal in which I keep notes about the things I’m learning from our for those whom I’m mentoring. This may be overkill, and I definitely don’t use every single one every single day, but I use each regularly and each has enhanced my life spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically.
I’m going to break this into several ways you can use journaling as a spiritual practice, and then end with some all-purpose instructions for working with Spirit while you journal, which will give you the best results taking on any spiritual journaling process!
Journaling to Raise Your Overall Frequency or a Specific Vibration
I did a whole post about the words frequency and vibration and how though they are overused in our community, they have very physical and literal meanings. We are each on one overall frequency: the rate at which we are literally and physically vibrating. We don’t just have one vibration - our frequency is made of thousands of individual vibrations. If we raise one vibration, it is typically connected to several or many others, and we can raise our overall frequency. We can also journal to raise our frequency overall, especially if we don’t have a specific vibration we can feel is pulling us down more than others.
Journaling to raise your frequency or vibrations is especially helpful when you’re trying to manifest more intentionally. We don’t manifest based on words, but based on vibrations. If you are a vibratory match for something in your area, you’re going to find it. This means we have to accept responsibility when things in our life are there which we don’t like, because we had to be on a vibratory match for it at one point.
This means to change our circumstances, we have to change our underlying vibrations. We can be on the vibration of: very good or very bad luck, finding exactly what we need or always losing everything we find, car accidents, scrapes and bruises, breaking our fingernails, seeing yellow butterflies… everything in life has its own vibration. If we have a specific vibration in our subtle energetic systems, we are going to run into it in the physical world.
So this means that if we are on the vibration of rage and we are trying to manifest something joyful, it is a vibrational impossibility. Manifesting anything new has to come from changing the vibration we’re putting out, not merely the words we speak.
Journaling to raise your overall frequency or vibration should have a purpose, and it should feel good. I have several favorite ways to do this:
-An Appreciation or Gratitude Rampage
-Wouldn’t It Be Nice…
-Only Positive Aspects
An Appreciation or Gratitude Rampage is exactly what it sounds like! Start a journal page (and these can be very fun to do artistically, as a brain map, as traditional journaling, it really doesn’t matter! This can be done any way) and start writing what you appreciate and what you’re grateful for. Absolutely do not go to any other topics. Only focus on the things you appreciate. When we focus on what we’re grateful for it puts us on the vibration of gratitude, which means the universe must deliver us more to be grateful for. It’s math; it’s vibration.
These can be themed, like a whole page of reasons you appreciate and are grateful for your dog, cat, cow, or bunny. Your best friend, partner, job, or family. There should be at least one area of life where you can truly go on a gratitude rampage.
I would not ever choose a topic you feel iffy about. This isn’t a practice to do when your frequency is low. If you feel grief, rage, full of trauma that needs to be released – this is not the practice for that moment. This is for when we are already feeling fairly decent and we want to ride that high to manifesting even more things to be grateful about.
Wouldn’t It Be Nice… is great for when you want to bring something into your life which you don’t have yet. This can raise a vibration or your overall frequency by making you focus on what you do want instead of what you don’t want. Usually, when we think of something we want but do not yet have, we think about the lack, and so we stay on the vibration of the lack. We can put ourselves on the vibration of what we want by talking about what we want as we want it, not by talking about what we don’t want. So we play Wouldn’t It Be Nice to ask ourselves just that question! Wouldn’t it be nice if I found the friend I was looking for? Wouldn’t it be nice if I found the car, business partner, or roommate I was looking for?
So for instance, if someone were playing this game to change their relationship with food, they could start a page specifically for that and make statements like: wouldn’t it be nice if I ate when I were hungry and stopped when I were full? Wouldn’t it be nice if I craved foods which nourish my body? Wouldn’t it be nice if I found foods I love which also enhance the way I feel? You can do this forever! Once again, notice what it isn’t saying is: wouldn’t it be nice if I didn’t hate my body? Do not bring anything into this which could be remotely negative! This should feel good and every “wouldn’t it be nice” statement should end in something that sincerely makes you feel good when you think of it.
I played this game about a year and a half before meeting my current partner, and he has, very sincerely, every single one of the attributes I listed! Even the ones I thought were completely impossible. So this takes a different tone depending on what you’re trying to bring to yourself, but again use only statements for what you actually want. Don’t bring the statements into the negative whatsoever. Only talk about what you want. When I did this for my current partner, it was things like: wouldn’t it be nice if I had a partner who was kind and fun? Wouldn’t it be nice if I had a partner who stayed off social media? Wouldn’t it be nice if I had a partner with whom I could share my inner world and thoughts? Etc.
Again, playing this game should make us feel better, more hopeful, and like the things we want are obtainable. This raises our vibration immensely.
For Only Positive Aspects, choose a topic and write down its most positive aspects! You should find that when you are looking for some positive aspects, more come to you than you would have thought. We are often more accustomed than we realize to looking at the negative, and focusing on it until it seems to be the only truth. However, even with things we don’t like, When we intentionally focus only on their positive aspects, we find that they have more positive qualities than we realized!
We can do this with a person, a job, a pet who’s giving us difficulty, with our family members, friends, partner, coworkers. No matter where we believe the responsibility falls, (for instance, when there’s a person in our lives whom we don’t particularly like, and we tell ourselves it’s not our responsibility to see their positive aspects, possibly because they don’t see ours, etc.) it makes us feel better to raise the vibration so we should! It does us no good to hold onto poison, no matter at whom we believe it is aimed. Poison in the body is poison in the body, and we poison ourselves with it first and foremost.
I find that this game can be great to play with someone or something you believe you really dislike or even hate, because it teaches you a lot and more self-awareness is vital! No matter where your vibration, whether very low or very high, it can be helpful to look at something for only its positive aspects. Once again, if you find yourself writing something negative or focusing on something negative, it’s important to stop the practice!
Journaling to Talk to an Aspect of Self
I’ve done two full blog posts on this, one on our inner child and one on our higher self. In each case, singling out an aspect of self and journaling with them teaches us so much about ourselves! However, we can also use this in a slightly more esoteric way and get some very interesting results as well! What about singling out one of your emotions to talk to in a journal? One of your behaviors you don’t particularly like? Pick a particular thought and journal with it as if it were its own being and see what it has to inform you of? All these things are possible!
Talking to an aspect of self is and should always be first and foremost about us. This is not the practice to take on if we are concerned about other people. Though we may believe that our inner child will want to talk about our parents or our siblings, etc., almost unequivocally, they will only want to talk about you because you are all you control. Same with your higher self! Many people believe they want to talk to their higher self to talk mostly about their soul connections or what someone from their past is doing, but once again, our higher self is mostly concerned with us, because we are all control in any given situation, and our higher self is concerned with our life purpose, and how well we are moving toward it.
Talking to a particular emotion, thought, vibration, behavior, etc., any other aspect of self which isn’t a soul fragment, (such as an inner child or higher self), this should also be all about the self! Though we are often inclined to want to talk about the person whom we feel placed the emotion, thought, or behavior, this practice is only helpful when we are motivated to see into our personal depths. This isn’t the practice for trying to work out relational things so much as very personal emotional and even physical areas of life.
Journaling to Talk to Spirit Guides
Talking to your spirit guide through journaling is excellent, provided your gifts are in a place where you can receptively channel or try automatic writing, etc. Many of us are capable, at least with our closest spirit guides, of asking questions, opening ourselves to something bigger than ourselves, and receiving an answer.
That answer may not always come the way we think: many people do not receive answers in clear words, but in feelings, memories, pictures, feelings in the body. There are many ways to receive psychic information, and often, that one expects it to come a specific way actually stops them from a lot of the information they could receive!
I have done a whole post about spirit guides, who they are, what they want for us, what they’re most invested in, etc. When journaling with your spirit guides, you can single one out and ask them questions specifically and personally, or you can talk to your guides as more of a chorus. Though they will each be helping you with very specific things, Spirit can also talk to you as a group and let you know what they’re working on together most for you.
Journaling to Work Through a Memory
When a memory is persistently resurfacing, it is doing so with a purpose. Usually, a consistently resurfacing memory is part of an ascension path or other spiritual process in which we are involved, often without our realizing. This is not meant to torment or upset us, even if the memory is a particularly upsetting one. It is happening with a purpose because it is something we must work through.
This is even neurological: the more traumatic a memory, the more likely it is to sit in the wrong area of the brain, never physically moving the memory to the area of the brain which would actually make it a memory. Neuroscientist Daniel J Siegel talks about this in the book The Neurobiology of We, in which he talks about his experiences as he set out to learn why victims experiencing PTSD had flashbacks in their bodies. He learned this is because their trauma was still being held in the short-term memory center of their brain, and not moving it to the part of their brain which would actually make it a full memory. This is why their body believed they were still experiencing the trauma. He found that the best therapy was integration therapy, in which the therapist, through only talk therapy, helped the client almost physically move a memory from one part of the brain to the other, integrating it as a memory, and changing PTSD symptoms such as body flashbacks which happen to veterans and victims of sexual assault, among others.
All that to say, memories surface for a reason, and often a persistent memory is not located in the right area of our brain. This is as physical as it is spiritual. A persistent memory needs to be worked through to integrate it and we are the only ones who can do it.
Journaling to work through a memory can be painful, as often we only get to this stage when the memory is one which we would rather not be having in the first place. However, to release ourselves from the trauma, we must work through the memory – we must integrate it.
This really comes with asking a lot of questions and doing an honest and fierce self-inventory. When we want to know why a memory is surfacing, we can typically ask ourselves the following questions:
What happened, and how does it vary from what I wish had happened, or, often most importantly, believe should have happened?
What has happened as a result? How does that vary from what I wish had happened or believe should have happened since this event I am now remembering?
Can I see the memory from a different perspective? Can I put myself in the eyes of anyone else who was there at the time? If not, can I zoom out, almost watching the situation through an external lens like a camera on the memory? Does looking at the memory from a different angle change the paradigm at all?
Is there anything foundational about the memory which I need to rewrite? Rewriting is very different than looking at it from a new lens. For some situations, we just need a new perspective - we just need to see it from a different angle and it changes everything. Sometimes, this doesn’t help, and we need to rewrite something foundational. The point is not to lie to ourselves or to convince ourselves something different happened than actually happened, but the point is to write out what we think should have gone differently, and what we think would or could have happened afterward, but write this all as if it were true. If nothing else, this helps us release tension and stored up information and painful belief systems in the chakras and auric field.
Do I need to process loss, confusion, fear, grief, and/or understanding of tragedy, guilt, powerlessness, etc.? These are the very lowest vibrational feelings, and often a persistent memory, especially from very far back, is holding onto one of the lower emotions associated with it. Releasing the memory needs to come from processing that feeling, likely a feeling we were unable to process at the relevant time. For instance, if we have a particularly traumatic death in our life, and we are unable to feel the grief around the time of the passing (because we are too young to understand it, we ensure we are very busy and don’t have time to grieve, we are taking care of others at the time and set our grief aside, etc.), that grief does not just go away. It sits heavily in the body, chakras, and auric field, and waits to be processed, affecting one's belief systems and what they are manifesting every day. The heaviest feelings are physically heavy as well. They are very heavy and difficult vibrations which lower our overall frequency and drag us down. If the memory is telling you that one of these feelings needs to be processed, the feeling needs to be processed. When we allow for a feeling like this to come out, even if it is one of the worst feelings, I promise it is very short-lived. A true feeling, even a feeling like grief, only lasts for about 10 minutes before we release it energetically and then we release it physically.
Am I ready for this? We will likely be asking ourselves this question this whole time, whether we’ve realized it or not, and Spirit would say that if a memory is resurfacing, it’s because we are ready. Still, we often need to ask ourselves this question and we need to answer it explicitly. Am I ready to deal with this? Am I ready to look at the core of it? Am I ready to process what needs processing, change my view where necessary, or rewrite if that’s what has to happen? Only you know whether the answer is yes or no, but again, Spirit believes that when a memory comes to you, it’s because you’re ready to process it. They believe this is an important question to ask yourself, and that you should answer with a resounding yes. Know that when a memory is resurfacing, the whole reason behind it is that an idea, feeling, thought or behavioral trigger, etc., something in your subconscious is ready for you to see and make peace with it.
Is there more than one aspect of the memory that needs to be processed? Depending on the memory in question of course, but also what it’s trying to show you, there may be more to it than just one thing which needs to be processed. You will know if you are done by a sincere feeling of lightness and having been changed. This has a specific purpose, and we should feel very different when we are done then when we started. If we don’t feel different, if we don’t feel we really got somewhere, we have not gone deep enough, and there is more to analyze.
Journaling to Figure Out Where Your Energy Is Going
I did a post about journaling to be mindful of your energetic resources, and how this plays into one’s sense of discipline and energetic mastery.
Everything in life can be broken down into our physical vibrations, emotional vibrations, relational vibrations, and spiritual vibrations. Everything in life falls into one of these four areas! (Though obviously, something can also fall into more than one area.) Our energetic resources are how much of ourselves we have to give to those four different areas.
These things also really build upon one another. If we don’t have physical resources like food, financial security, sleep, safety, belief in our own worthiness - if we don’t have these resources under control, we really don’t have room for emotional resources, nor relational or spiritual ones. If we are in a financial crisis, more or less all our resources for the day are going to go to thinking about that financial crisis, as well as feeling about it and likely behaving about it. If we are having an emotional crisis, we really don’t have room for the relational or spiritual aspects of life, etc.
I teach many of my clients to look at sleep as a reset, and imagine you have 100 credits or resources to start with every day. For Spirit, ideally, we would spend about 25 in each area of life every day. Again, if any area of our life is in crisis or even just a little difficult, it’s likely to be pulling extra resources from us and we often don’t notice.
Energetic mastery is understanding exactly how your resources are being applied so you can pull them back to yourself at any time and choose to re-allocate them. If we see ourselves losing resources to a fight with our mother, energetic mastery is pulling ourselves back from the fight, choosing not to engage with it, or even better, never getting involved with it to begin with. If we see ourselves losing resources to worrying about whether a partner is faithful, energetic mastery is removing ourselves from a relationship which we know will always take too many resources from us.
This post about energetic mastery really breaks down the best way to create an energetic resources journal, as this one is fairly intensive. But it’s worth it to know where your energy is going and how you could re-allocate your resources!
All-Purpose Instructions to Enhance Your Journaling Experience
These instructions help put this process in the hands of the greater Spirit, ensuring your best outcome and helping you achieve your highest vibration possible for the practice.
When I say “Spirit” or “the greater Spirit,” I mean God, the universe, Them as a group - deities, angels, and all beings who work with us in co-creation. You could say Jesus/Yeshua, Allah, Archangel Michael, Kuan Yin, Lakshmi, or about a billion other names, and they don’t care what you call them so long as you do so with the same kindness and respect with which they treat you. I tend to work with and talk to them as a group unless I’m singling them out for a reason (such as in spirit guide readings), which I call Spirit.
Set the intention for exactly what you’re doing. This may be to connect to an aspect of self, to work through a memory, to look at your resources, etc., but set a clear intention. (Intentions get a bad rap, and the spiritual community definitely can overuse the phrase “set your intentions” to the point that it loses meaning. However, consent is important in all areas of life, and setting intentions before you do any spiritual work tells the universe exactly what you’re trying to accomplish and it gives them consent to help you. Setting the intention makes it clear what you’re trying to achieve and will put you on a better vibration for getting the answers you’re looking for.)
Put the journaling experience in the hands of the greater Spirit. I put everything in the hands of the greater Spirit all day long, and I find this is how I get the best information, no matter what information I’m after. It means if there’s a Spirit-approved being who can and wants to help, they will help! This may be with a boost in gifts, some helpful translation, connection and healing - you never know.
Ask the greater Spirit to put you in a receptive brain state. Note the difference – it usually feels like the state in between being awake and asleep.
Ask a specific question pertaining to what you’re working on or journaling about.
Be open to any impressions you receive, no matter how they come. You may be given words, but you may have a feeling, thought, memory, an idea for future behavior. You may just know an answer, without knowing how you know. Often, this is still valid. Write down any impressions you receive. (I would also set the intention here that impressions may keep coming to you on this matter throughout the day and in your dreams, as this is an easy way for your spirit guides and aspects of self to communicate with you, no matter the level of your intuitive gifts.)
When you’re ready and you’ve answered all the questions you want, thank your spirit guides and any beings who helped with your experience.
Thanks for reading! Here are some other ways to consider adding journaling to your daily practice:
Tracking progress in psychic gifts/one psychic gift/magical ability
Working through belief systems & the ways they’ve been passed on and will be passed on from you - this is great to think about in terms of family, generations, culture, etc.
An intuition journal for tracking bits and pieces of intuitive guidance you feel you’re receiving, to check back in later and see in retrospect some things you were correct about but may not remember
Ideas for innovation or creativity - while this doesn’t always seem like a spiritual practice at first glance, we are here in these human bodies to do and experience new things, and often we do not. Spirit LOVES to help when we want to come up with a new or innovative way to do anything, whether it’s art, business, education, or anything else
Allowing your beliefs to be challenged - this is honestly one of the most spiritual practices in which we can partake! The moment we decide we’re infallible or know everything there is to know on a topic, we’ve got some growing to do. I’ve had clients have GREAT success from noting when their beliefs are challenged, then over the coming weeks noting how it’s entered their awareness, shifted their thoughts, and then likely their behavior!
A travel journal - this is pretty straightforward and again doesn’t always seem like a spiritual practice, but it absolutely can be! Especially if we ask ourselves questions like: How can I be changed permanently for the better by this place? How can I adapt some of their beliefs into my own? How can I show respect and compassion to someone whom I’d otherwise have ignored or even shown distaste? What did I learn from this trip? Etc.
A brainstorming journal - while this has only a slightly different connotation than an innovation and creativity journal, it’s important! Brainstorming on paper is SO powerful - we lose so much more than we realize when we don’t get our thoughts down
A shadow work journal - I think these can be dangerous, mostly because I’ve had a ton of clients put themselves in a lot of unnecessary pain over doing shadow work when it’s not time for that (shadow work is helpful during only one phase of a cycle - the rest of the time, we’d be better off without it). But because shadow work is a vital and unskippable part of every cycle, a shadow work journal can be helpful when used in moderation! (I’m serious - trying to shadow work one’s way through the whole journey is unnecessary pain and takes longer than necessary)
A journal for research you are doing or want to do - again we lose so many amazing ideas because we don’t write them down! I have a binder for research I haven’t done yet but intend to do eventually, and I really like pulling from it when I can’t think of a practice, and my guides will often suggest research from one of those areas if it will help me now with something I’m working on, but wouldn’t necessarily have at the time I wrote it down