Meditate

Practice of the Week
Meditate

Category: This is one of the Three Core Daily Practices. In addition to your chosen spiritual practice, every day devote 10-30 mins to each of the three core daily practices (meditation, journaling, and study).

"Dedicating some time to meditation is a meaningful expression of caring for yourself that can help you move through the mire of feeling unworthy of recovery. As your mind grows quieter and more spacious, you can begin to see self-defeating thought patterns for what they are, and open up to other, more positive options." -Sharon Salzberg

Why to Meditate

From: "Benefits of Meditation," artofliving.org (original: HERE)

Physical Benefits of Meditation

With meditation, the physiology undergoes a change and every cell in the body is filled with more prana (energy). This results in joy, peace, enthusiasm as the level of prana in the body increases.

On a physical level, meditation:

• Lowers high blood pressure
• Lowers the levels of blood lactate, reducing anxiety attacks
• Decreases any tension-related pain, such as, tension headaches, ulcers, insomnia, muscle and joint problems
• Increases serotonin production that improves mood and behavior
• Improves the immune system
• Increases the energy level, as you gain an inner source of energy

Mental Benefits of Meditation

Meditation brings the brainwave pattern into an Alpha state that promotes healing. The mind becomes fresh, delicate and beautiful. With regular practice of meditation:

• Anxiety decreases
• Emotional stability improves
• Creativity increases
• Happiness increases
• Intuition develops
• Gain clarity and peace of mind
• Problems become smaller
• Meditation sharpens the mind by gaining focus and expands through relaxation
• A sharp mind without expansion causes tension, anger and frustration
• An expanded consciousness without sharpness can lead to lack of action/progress
• The balance of a sharp mind and an expanded consciousness brings perfection

Meditation makes you aware - that your inner attitude determines your happiness.

Other Benefits of Meditation

• Emotional steadiness and harmony. It cleanses and nourishes you from within and calms you, whenever you feel overwhelmed, unstable, or emotionally shut down.
• Meditation brings harmony in creation. When you meditate, you are in the space of vastness, calmness and joy and this is what you emit into the environment, bringing harmony to the Creation/planet.
• Personal Transformation. Meditation can bring about a true personal transformation. As you learn more about yourself, you’ll naturally start discovering more about yourself

How To Get The Benefits

To experience the benefits of meditation, regular practice is necessary. It takes only a few minutes every day. Once imbibed into the daily routine, meditation becomes the best part of your day!

Meditation is like a seed. When you cultivate a seed with love, the more it blossoms.

Busy people from all backgrounds are grateful to pause and enjoy a refreshing few minutes of meditation each day. Dive deep into yourself and enrich your life.

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Adapted from: Belle Beth Cooper, "What Happens to the Brain When You Meditate (And How It Benefits You)," Lifehacker.com (full original: HERE.)

I’ve found how simple (not easy, but simple) meditation can be and what huge benefit it can have for my day to day happiness.

As an adult, I first started my meditation practice with just two minutes per day. Two minutes! I got that idea from Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits blog, where he points out how starting with a tiny habit is the first step to consistently achieving it. So even thought two minutes won’t make much difference, that’s where I started.

What is Meditation?

There are different ways to meditate. Scientific research tends to focus on two:

Focused-attention, or mindful meditation, which is where you focus on one specific thing—it could be your breathing, a sensation in your body or a particular object outside of you. The point of this type of meditation is to focus strongly on one point and continually bring your attention back to that focal point when it wanders.

The other type of meditation that’s often used in research is open-monitoring meditation. This is where you pay attention to all of the things happening around you—you simply notice everything without reacting.

What Happens in Your Brain When You Meditate

This is where things get really interesting. Using modern technology like fMRI scans, scientists have developed a more thorough understanding of what’s taking place in our brains when we meditate. The overall difference is that our brains stop processing information as actively as they normally would. We start to show a decrease in beta waves, which indicate that our brains are processing information, even after a single 20-minute meditation session if we’ve never tried it before.

In the image below you can see how the beta waves (shown in bright colors on the left) are dramatically reduced during meditation (on the right).

What happens in each part of the brain during meditation:

• Frontal lobe. This is the most highly evolved part of the brain, responsible for reasoning, planning, emotions and self-conscious awareness. During meditation, the frontal cortex tends to go offline.
• Parietal lobe. This part of the brain processes sensory information about the surrounding world, orienting you in time and space. During meditation, activity in the parietal lobe slows down.
• Thalamus. The gatekeeper for the senses, this organ focuses your attention by funneling some sensory data deeper into the brain and stopping other signals in their tracks. Meditation reduces the flow of incoming information to a trickle.
• Reticular formation. As the brain’s sentry, this structure receives incoming stimuli and puts the brain on alert, ready to respond. Meditating dials back the arousal signal.

How Meditation Affects You

Now that we know what’s going on inside our brains, let’s take a look at the research into the ways it affects our health.

• Better Focus. Because meditation is a practice in focusing our attention and being aware of when it drifts, this actually improves our focus when we’re not meditating, as well. It’s a lasting effect that comes from regular bouts of meditation.
• Less Anxiety. This point is pretty technical, but it’s really interesting. The more we meditate, the less anxiety we have, and it turns out this is because we're actually loosening the connections of particular neural pathways. This sounds bad, but it’s not. What happens without meditation is that there’s a section of our brains that’s sometimes called the Me Center (it’s technically the medial prefrontal cortex). This is the part that processes information relating to ourselves and our experiences. Normally the neural pathways from the bodily sensation and fear centers of the brain to the Me Center are really strong. When you experience a scary or upsetting sensation, it triggers a strong reaction in your Me Center, making you feel scared and under attack. When we meditate, we weaken this neural connection. This means that we don’t react as strongly to sensations that might have once lit up our Me Centers. As we weaken this connection, we simultaneously strengthen the connection between what’s known as our Assessment Center (the part of our brains known for reasoning) and our bodily sensation and fear centers. So when we experience scary or upsetting sensations, we can more easily look at them rationally. For example, when you experience pain, rather than becoming anxious and assuming it means something is wrong with you, you can watch the pain rise and fall without becoming ensnared in a story about what it might mean.
• More Creativity. As a writer, this is one thing I’m always interested in. Unfortunately, it’s not the easiest thing to study, but there is some research into how meditation can affect our creativity. Researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands studied both focused-attention and open-monitoring mediation to see if there was any improvement in creativity afterwards. They found that people who practiced focused-attention meditation did not show any obvious signs of improvement in the creativity task following their meditation. For those who did open-monitoring meditation, however, they performed better on a task that asked them to come up with new ideas.
• More Compassion. Research on meditation has shown that empathy and compassion are higher in those who practice meditation regularly. One experiment showed participants images of other people that were either good, bad or neutral in what they called “compassion meditation.” The participants were able to focus their attention and reduce their emotional reactions to these images, even when they weren’t in a meditative state. They also experienced more compassion for others when shown disturbing images. Part of this comes from activity in the amygdala—the part of the brain that processes emotional stimuli. During meditation, this part of the brain normally shows decreased activity, but in this experiment it was exceptionally responsive when participants were shown images of people. Another study in 2008 found that people who meditated regularly had stronger activation levels in their temporal parietal junctures (a part of the brain tied to empathy) when they heard the sounds of people suffering, than those who didn’t meditate.
• Better Memory. One of the things meditation has been linked to is improving rapid memory recall. Catherine Kerr, a researcher at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and the Osher Research Center found that people who practiced mindful meditation were able to adjust the brain wave that screens out distractions and increase their productivity more quickly that those that did not meditate. She said that this ability to ignore distractions could explain “their superior ability to rapidly remember and incorporate new facts.” This seems to be very similar to the power of being exposed to new situations that will also dramatically improve our memory of things.
• Less Stress. Mindful meditation has been shown to help people perform under pressure while feeling less stressed. A 2012 study split a group of human resources managers into three, which one third participating in mindful meditation training, another third taking body relaxation training and the last third given no training at all. A stressful multitasking test was given to all the managers before and after the eight-week experiment. In the final test, the group that had participated in the meditation training reported less stress during the test than both of the other groups.
• More Gray Matter. Meditation has been linked to larger amounts of gray matter in the hippocampus and frontal areas of the brain. I didn’t know what this meant at first, but it turns out it’s pretty great. More gray matter can lead to more positive emotions, longer-lasting emotional stability, and heightened focus during daily life. Meditation has also been shown to diminish age-related effects on gray matter and reduce the decline of our cognitive functioning.

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How to Meditate

There's the "body" part and the "mind" part.

BODY

Find a posture that will allow you to stay still for the duration of your meditation period -- ideally up to 25 minutes without needing to squirm, wriggle, or adjust your position. You may need to experiment with the different posture options to find one that will allow your body to experience extended stillness.

Burmese Position

In the Burmese, the legs are crossed and both feet rest flat on the floor. The knees should also rest on the floor, though sometimes it takes a bit of stretching for the legs to drop that far. After awhile the muscles will loosen up and the knees will begin to drop. To help that happen, sit on the front third of the cushion, shifting your body forward a little bit. By imagining the top of your head pushing upward to the ceiling and by stretching your body that way, get your spine straight—then just let the muscles go soft and relax. With the buttocks up on the cushion and your stomach pushing out a little, there may be a slight curve in the lower region of the back. In this position, it takes very little effort to keep the body upright.

Half Lotus Position

In the half lotus, the left foot is placed up onto the right thigh and the right leg is tucked under. This position is slightly asymmetrical and sometimes the upper body needs to compensate in order to keep itself absolutely straight. People who use this position should make a habit of alternating which leg they bring up.

Full Lotus Position

The full lotus is the most stable of all the positions. Each foot is placed up on the opposite thigh. This is symmetrical and very solid. Stability and efficiency are the important reasons sitting cross-legged on the floor works so well. There is no esoteric significance to the different positions. What is most important is what you do with your mind. What you do with your feet or legs is merely to allow you to be stable and still.

Seiza Position

You can sit seiza (kneeling) without a pillow, kneeling, with the buttocks resting on the upturned feet which form an anatomical cushion. Or you can use a pillow to keep the weight off your ankles. A third way of sitting seiza is to use the seiza bench. It keeps all the weight off your feet and helps to keep your spine straight.

Chair Position

When sitting on a chair, ground the body by keeping your feet flat on the floor, about 8" apart, with shins perfectly vertical. You can use a cushion the same way you would use it on the floor—placing it beneath you on the chair and sitting on the forward third of it. Some people like to place a cushion between their back and the back of the chair, to keep the spine straight and vertical.

All of the aspects of the posture that are important when seated on the floor or in seiza are just as important when sitting in a chair.

Photos of positions taken from, and descriptions of positions adapted from, Zen Mountain Monastery:
http://zmm.mro.org/teachings/meditation-instructions/

In any position:

• Sit up straight. Sit on the front edge of your chair or cushion. Extend your back, lifting the top of your head as high as it will go.
• Let your shoulders and arms completely relax. With your hands resting in your lap, cup one hand inside the other with the tips of the thumbs just barely touching.
• Almost, but not quite, close your eyes. Leave them open a slit, with your gaze directed downward 45 degrees.

MIND

There are various types of meditation. Here's one excellent method, especially suitable for just starting out on a meditation practice.

Bring attention to your breathing and count each exhale to yourself. Count up to 10, then start back again at 1. Repeat counting 1 to 10 throughout the silent period.

When your mind wanders, make a note of what it wandered off doing (e.g., planning, remembering, fantasizing), then gently bring yourself back to this moment and start again at 1.

The objective is not to suppress all thought, but to notice when thoughts arise -- then return to the breath. In this way, your body-mind begins to learn that what you are is not your thoughts. Your thoughts are just something that happens to you in the same way that the weather, or intestinal gas, are things that happen to you.

Use a Timer

Decide whether you're going to meditate for 2 minutes or 10 minutes or 25 minutes or whatever. Set the timer and let the timer take care of telling you when you're done. This avoids distracting glances at a clock.

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PRACTICES INDEX

Study Spiritual Texts

Practice of the Week
Study Spiritual Texts

Category: This is one of the Three "Core" or "Base" Daily Practices (along with Journal and Meditate)

You can learn a lot by reading. Certain texts are helpful guides for developing spiritual wisdom.

Select worthy texts of “wisdom literature.” The scriptures of any of the world’s religions are wonderful:

• the Dao De Jing, 
• the Bhagavad Gita, and 
• the Hebrew Bible's books of Psalms, Ecclesiastes, or Proverbs 

for instance.

Aside from the canonical scriptures of established traditions, there are many works of wisdom and insight. Here is an essentially random sampling of just a few of the sort of books I have in mind, in no particular order:

Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul
Pema Chodron, The Places that Scare You
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First and Second Series
Stephen Levine, A Gradual Awakening
Ram Dass, Be Here Now
Jaris Jay Masters, Finding Freedom: Writings from Death Row
Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
Henry David Thoreau, Collected Essays and Poems
St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul
Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Awakening of Intelligence
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
The Writings of St. Francis of Assisi
Sharon Salzberg, A Heart as Wide as the World: Stories on the Path of Lovingkindness
Dan Millman, Way of the Peaceful Warrior
Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step
Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are
Howard Cutler and Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living
Julian of Norwich, Showings
M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
Carlos Castenada, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge
Lama Surya Das, Awakening the Buddha Within
Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
Dalai Lama, An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life
Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess
Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart: A Guide through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life
The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila
Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man
Kazuaki Tanahashi (ed. & trans.), Moon In a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen

Many more could be mentioned. Choose works that resonate with you, that will coach you in the ways of wise and loving peace in a way that makes sense to you.

Since spiritual deepening is never completed, maintaining a regular, ongoing discipline of study is the important thing here. Set aside 15 minutes a day for reading and reflection on your choice of wisdom literature.

There is a truth/awareness/experience beyond words. The books, of course, are all full of words. But, in combination with practices of silence, regular and continuing spiritual study can give us the words to help free ourselves from the grip of words -- the concepts to help us see through concepts.

Study of a spiritual text enlists your cognitive capacity to assist your spiritual. We live through our days full of ideas and concepts -- and most of them are connected to some form of judgment, some form of not wanting things to be as they are. Wisdom literature helps give us some concepts that can nudge some of those other concepts a little bit into the background more often.

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PRACTICES INDEX

Start a Journal

Practice of the Week
Start a Journal

Category: Journaling is one of the three core daily practices.

“Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.” (Christina Baldwin)

“These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.” (Terry Tempest Williams)

How:

There are many methods for journaling. Here's a good one.

1. Set aside a time each day. Generally the best time will be either early in the morning, soon after getting out of bed, or at night just before going to bed.

2. Set a timer. What amount of time each day for personal reflection about your life feels right for you? Maybe 10 minutes? 15 minutes? Maybe longer? Once the timer starts, keep writing. Try to keep the pauses few and relatively brief. You're not writing for publication here, so, rather than think it through before writing, keep the pen moving and "let the pen do the thinking."

3. Start with gratitude. Begin by making a quick list of 3-5 things you're feeling grateful for. Repetitiveness is not a problem: if you find yourself listing the same things day after day, that's just fine. The point is just to orient yourself toward gratitude -- which is very powerful. (See the Practice of the Week: "Be Grateful" CLICK HERE.)

4. Then, as suggested in the article below, begin writing about how you're doing. What are your habits -- habits of mood as well as habits of behavior? What would you like them to be? Exactly what is it that's preventing the development of the habits you would like to have?

5. When the timer chimes (or buzzes), stop. Even if you're in mid-sentence (or mid-word), put the pen down and close the journal. We're not looking for instant transformation here. The subject will be there waiting for you to return to it tomorrow. Life itself is endlessly unfinished and often interrupted, and has recurring themes. Your journal reflects your life, and, in the process, begins to slowly change it.

from Tara Parker-Pope, "Writing Your Way to Happiness," New York Times, 2015 Jan 19:

The scientific research on the benefits of so-called expressive writing is surprisingly vast. Studies have shown that writing about oneself and personal experiences can improve mood disorders, help reduce symptoms among cancer patients, improve a person’s health after a heart attack, reduce doctor visits and even boost memory.

Now researchers are studying whether the power of writing — and then rewriting — your personal story can lead to behavioral changes and improve happiness.

The concept is based on the idea that we all have a personal narrative that shapes our view of the world and ourselves. But sometimes our inner voice doesn’t get it completely right. Some researchers believe that by writing and then editing our own stories, we can change our perceptions of ourselves and identify obstacles that stand in the way of better health.

It may sound like self-help nonsense, but research suggests the effects are real.

In one of the earliest studies on personal story editing, researchers gathered 40 college freshman at Duke University who were struggling academically. Not only were they worried about grades, but they questioned whether they were intellectual equals to other students at their school.

The students were divided into intervention groups and control groups. Students in the intervention group were given information showing that it is common for students to struggle in their freshman year. They watched videos of junior and senior college students who talked about how their own grades had improved as they adjusted to college.

The goal was to prompt these students to edit their own narratives about college. Rather than thinking they weren’t cut out for college, they were encouraged to think that they just needed more time to adjust.

The intervention results, published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, were startling. In the short term, the students who had undergone the story-changing intervention got better grades on a sample test. But the long-term results were the most impressive.

Students who had been prompted to change their personal stories improved their grade-point averages and were less likely to drop out over the next year than the students who received no information. In the control group, which had received no advice about grades, 20 percent of the students had dropped out within a year. But in the intervention group, only 1 student — or just 5 percent — dropped out.

In another study, Stanford researchers focused on African-American students who were struggling to adjust to college. Some of the students were asked to create an essay or video talking about college life to be seen by future students. The study found that the students who took part in the writing or video received better grades in the ensuing months than those in a control group.

Another writing study asked married couples to write about a conflict as a neutral observer. Among 120 couples, those who explored their problems through writing showed greater improvement in marital happiness than those who did not write about their problems.

“These writing interventions can really nudge people from a self-defeating way of thinking into a more optimistic cycle that reinforces itself,” said Timothy D. Wilson, a University of Virginia psychology professor and lead author of the Duke study.

Dr. Wilson, whose book “Redirect: Changing the Stories We Live By,” was released in paperback this month, believes that while writing doesn’t solve every problem, it can definitely help people cope. “Writing forces people to reconstrue whatever is troubling them and find new meaning in it,” he said.

Much of the work on expressive writing has been led by James Pennebaker, a psychology professor at the University of Texas. In one of his experiments, college students were asked to write for 15 minutes a day about an important personal issue or superficial topics. Afterward, the students who wrote about personal issues had fewer illnesses and visits to the student health center.

“The idea here is getting people to come to terms with who they are, where they want to go,” said Dr. Pennebaker. “I think of expressive writing as a life course correction.”

At the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute, life coaches ask clients to identify their goals, then to write about why they haven’t achieved those goals.

Once the clients have written their old stories, they are asked to reflect on them and edit the narratives to come up with a new, more honest assessment. While the institute doesn’t have long-term data, the intervention has produced strong anecdotal results.

In one example, a woman named Siri initially wrote in her “old story” that she wanted to improve her fitness, but as the primary breadwinner for her family she had to work long hours and already felt guilty about time spent away from her children.

With prompting, she eventually wrote a new story, based on the same facts but with a more honest assessment of why she doesn’t exercise. “The truth is,” she wrote, “I don’t like to exercise, and I don’t value my health enough. I use work and the kids to excuse my lack of fitness.”

Intrigued by the evidence that supports expressive writing, I decided to try it myself, with the help of Jack Groppel, co-founder of the Human Performance Institute.

Like Siri, I have numerous explanations for why I don’t find time for exercise. But once I started writing down my thoughts, I began to discover that by shifting priorities, I am able to make time for exercise.

“When you get to that confrontation of truth with what matters to you, it creates the greatest opportunity for change,” Dr. Groppel said.

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PRACTICES INDEX

Choose Your Spiritual Practice

Practice of the Week
Choose Your Spiritual Practice

“You create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song that sings you." (Sue Monk Kidd)

The "Practice of the Week" has offered many practices to help in the development of mental, psychological, and spiritual health, flourishing, and joy.

The "Slogans to Live By" and the "Worth a Try/Occasional" practices are recommended for everyone. Other practices aren't for everyone but might be for you. Here's a partial listing of possible spiritual practices:

using prayer beads
fasting
attending peace vigils
listening to music
serving on the congregation’s Board of Trustees
walking a labyrinthe
needlepoint
antiracism work
writing letters to the editor
painting
scuplting
cardio kickboxing
bath time with your kids
saying “hello” to cashiers and clerks
dancing
teaching RE
washing dishes
taking a bubble bath
chanting
camping
running
creating sacred space
tai chi
going to an art museum
surfing
making pottery
attending worship
caring for an ailing parent
writing haiku
playing an instrument
playing with children
yoga
hosting coffee hour
having dinner with friends
studying astronomy
quilting
knitting
cycling
recycling
singing in the choir
nature walks
going to a beach
cooking
martial arts
marching for social change
reciting mantras
e-mailing your governmental representatives
gardening
studying evolution

What Makes "Something I Do" into "A Spiritual Practice"?

Not every activity or pastime is a spiritual practice. The above activities might or might not be approached in a way that makes them a spiritual practice. It's a spiritual practice if it helps you cultivate spiritual development.

So how can you recognize spiritual development? Here are some symptoms of developing spirituality:

• increased tendency to let things happen rather than make them happen;
• more frequent attacks of smiling from the heart;
• more frequent feelings of being connected with others and nature;
• more frequent episodes of overwhelming appreciation;
• decisions flow more from intention or spontaneity and less from fears based on past experience;
• greater ability to enjoy each moment;
• decreased worrying;
• decreased interest in conflict, in interpreting the actions of others, in judging others, and in judging self;
• increased nonjudgmental curiosity;
• increased capacity to love without expecting anything in return;
• increased receptivity to kindness offered and increased interest in extending kindness to others.

Gardening or marching for social change or playing an instrument might or might not cultivate these symptoms. If you find that an activity helps you have more of these symptoms, then that activity is a spiritual practice for you.

An activity is more likely to work as spiritual practice if you follow these four guidelines:

1. engage the activity with mindfulness (see previous practice of the week, "cultivate mindfulness" HERE, and "be mindful" HERE).
2. engage in the activity with intention of thereby cultivating spiritual development. As you do the activity -- or just before and just after -- reflect on your intention to manifest those symptoms of spiritual development in your life.
3. engage the activity with a group that gathers expressly to do the activity in a way that cultivates spirituality. Group members share spiritual reflections before, during, or after doing the activity together.
4. establish a foundation of spiritual orientation through the three base practices: (a) daily meditation (SEE HERE), (b) daily journaling (SEE HERE), and (c) daily spiritual study (SEE HERE). Painting, running, or reciting a mantra -- or whatever spiritual practice you choose -- will work better as a spiritual practice if you lay this foundation with three base practices that prepare the way for experiencing other activities as spiritual.

Choose an activity and adopt it as your spiritual practice!

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PRACTICES INDEX

Idea Journal

Practice of the Week
Idea Journal

Category: May be a part of your Journaling practice, one of the three core daily practices.

adapted from Jonathan Robinson, Find Happiness Now

The average person has about 50,000 thoughts a day. Most of them are just like the ones you had the day before. Occasionally, though, you have a realization that is new, powerful, and potentially life changing. Perhaps it's an insight into how to make your relationship better, or maybe it's an ingenious idea for how to complete a project at work. Whatever your insight, it likely becomes lost as it's quickly overwhelmed by all the other thoughts in your head. Oh well. If you had only written it down, you could have reaped the rewards of your important realization.

You don't have to let your bright ideas get lost anymore. By beginning an idea journal -- or by using your journal for sketching ideas -- you can keep track of your most meaningful thoughts.

An idea journal is not like a diary in which you summarize important life events. Instead, it's a recording of your ideas, insights, and hopes. Like an artist's sketchbook, it's where you jot out a rough draft sketch of concepts you can subsequently flesh out. An idea journal becomes like a trusted friend, reminding you of where you want to go in life, and how you can best get there. By reading your idea journal periodically, you can trigger important new insights, as well as inspire yourself to take actions that can change your destiny.

These five guidelines can help you turn a book of blank pages into one of your most prized possessions -- one that has a profound impact on your life.

1. Keep your idea journal near you at all times. You never know when brilliance will strike. For convenience, some people have a couple small journals, rather than one large one. Others find it handy to keep a mini digital recorder around to record important thoughts. (Then, when they have time, they transfer their recorded thoughts into a computer file or journal.) A third approach is to type ideas into a laptop computer, smartphone, or tablet. Whatever your means of recording, have it near you at all times.

2. Write (or record) in your journal the moment you think of something you don't want to forget. If you're in the shower or walking the dog when a great insight comes, immediately stop what you're doing and record your thoughts. I used to think I could write down my ideas at a later time, I almost always forgot to. I use a digital audio recorder because some of my best insights came while driving my car or walking my dog. Since my brain now realizes I take its insights seriously, my brain now produces more important realizations than I used to have. Keeping an idea journal is like taking care of a beautiful flower: the more you attend to the brilliant "flowers" in your mind, the more they grow.

3. Structure the entries in a way that works for you. Some people derive the most benefit from an idea journal when the entries appear in outline form, while others prefer an unstructured way of writing. As you practice, you'll soon discover what works best for you.

4. Discern what to include and what not to include. If you write too much in your idea journal, it will be boring to read. If you write too little, using it for only the profoundest insights, it will not be as useful a tool as it could be. Again, with time and practice you'll find the best balance. Personally, most of my journal entries fit under four headings: important insights, personal goals, actions I'd like to take, and creative ideas. Coming up with your own list of categories will help you get a feel for what to include and what not to.

5. Discover your method for using the entries you've made. I set aside a small period of time each week to review the previous week's entries. As you look over your entries, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised to realize the quality of your insights.

True genius is not something reserved for a chosen few, but rather is something we all experience on occasion. By keeping an idea journal that records your most profound thoughts, you'll be able to make greater use of the genius within you, and compassionately offer to the world a more creative you.

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See also: "Four Reasons to Keep an Idea Journal"
"How to Keep an Idea Journal"
"Keys to an Effective Idea Journal"

For list of all weekly practices: "Practices of the Week Index"

Morning Pages

Practice of the Week
Morning Pages

Category: May be a part of your Journaling practice, one of the three core daily practices.

"I sometimes think they should be called 'Mourning Pages' because they are a farewell to life as you knew it." (Julia Cameron)

The practice of doing "morning pages" is a specific version of the practice of journaling (an earlier "Practice of the Week": SEE HERE).

"Morning pages" are a key component of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. Cameron writes:

The bedrock tool of a creative recovery is a daily practice called Morning Pages. Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages – they are not high art. They are not even “writing.” They are about anything and everything that crosses your mind – and they are for your eyes only. Morning Pages provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page…and then do three more pages tomorrow.

Journalist Oliver Burkeman was initially skeptical but is now a convert to the value of morning pages. In, "This Column Will Change Your Life," he writes:

As a journalist, I hate writing exercises: why do extra work nobody'll ever see? Besides, Morning Pages were invented in the new age hub of Taos, New Mexico, by the creativity guru Julia Cameron,...But this summer I read three articles that suggested the exercise was catching on with business types, too. Then my friend Joanna, no new ager, revealed that she swore by them....

"There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages," Cameron writes....She means you can write about whatever's on your mind: petty worries, soaring plans, angry tirades.

When it comes to the how, she's strict. The pages must be done first thing: "You're trying to catch yourself before your ego's defences are in place." They must be longhand. And you must fill exactly three sides of US Letter paper (A4 is close enough). That three-sides rule is key: on an uninspired day, you might start writing banalities, but if you keep going, having dusted the cobwebs away, you might find breakthroughs occur. "It turns out you can't really write about nothing for three whole pages," Joanna says. Or, as Cameron writes: "The second page-and-a-half comes harder, but often contains paydirt." Equally, after three pages, you must stop, to avoid "self-involvement and narcissism". Brain-sweep complete, it's time to get on with the day.

Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised at how powerful Morning Pages proved, from day one, at calming anxieties, producing insights and resolving dilemmas. After all, the psychological benefits of externalising thoughts via journalling are well-established. And that bleary-eyed morning time has been shown to be associated with more creative thinking: with the brain's inhibitory processes still weak, "A-ha!" moments come more readily.

Crucially, Morning Pages are private. If you need to destroy them to ensure that, go ahead: it's more important than keeping them for reference. Not because you'll necessarily pour out secrets there, but because it's liberating to know you could. It's why good therapists work hard to create a "secure frame", right down to making sure no one can peer in the window. And why, in her book The Rise, historian Sarah Lewis stresses the importance of "private domains" in the lives of great creative figures: rooms of their own where they could bring their work into the world, externalising it without sharing it. Morning Pages create a metaphorical private domain – one so valuable, I find it hard to imagine I'll ever stop.

See this 3 minute video on morning pages:



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