Keeping a meditation journal

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Mindfulness is about knowing where we are (being in the moment) and also about maintaining an awareness of where we have been (reflection) and where we are going (having goals). A meditation journal can help us with all of those areas of awareness, helping us to have a more unified awareness of ourselves.

We may make efforts to be in the moment while we’re meditating - to be aware of our experience as it unfolds in the eternal moment and allowing our own inner beauty to manifest. Or perhaps we become a habitually vague in our practice, and spend a lot of our time drifting in thought, making insufficient effort to bring ourselves back to our current experience.

Keeping a meditation journal helps us have a more definite sense of what is actually going on. When we sit down after meditation and take a few minutes to journal what we’ve been experiencing, it makes it pretty obvious how effective we’ve really been. If we examine our experience, honestly and with a desire to learn, then we become much more aware of what our meditation practice actually is. We can become more aware of our weaknesses and our strengths, and have a much more penetrating understanding of what we need to be working on.

A journal also allows us to look back at our experience as it has changed over a period of time. We can review several days, weeks, or months of our practice and learn about the patterns that our consciousness follows. Perhaps we’ll discover that we are lazier than we thought, or perhaps that we try too hard, or perhaps even that we fluctuate in our efforts. We may discover that there are particular distractions that are much more common that we had recalled. We commonly also discover - especially when we’re feeling a little down - that our meditation practice has been more effective and enjoyable than we had remembered.

And our journaling can help us to set goals. It’s not that we try to pin down our experience before it happens - that’s rarely if ever going to work and it’s more likely to result in frustration than in any progress in our meditation practice. Instead what we’re trying to do in setting goals is to develop a stronger sense of where we want to go in our meditation practice. Through looking back at our past experience we can see what we need to work on. Perhaps it’s forgiveness or patience that we need to develop. Perhaps it’s more persistence. Or more calmness. Whatever changes we want to make, having clear goals will help us attain them. Our goals become the magnetic north pole that allows us to navigate through our experience in order to get where we want to go.

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