Keeping a meditation journal
Types of meditation journals
I know that some people use checklist style journals, with lists of distractions and positive factors that can be checked off. The advantage of this is that you can do your journaling very quickly, and that you have ready made categories to help you analyses your experience. But I’m not fond of this kind of journaling. To me it seems to pigeonhole our experience and leads to a superficial understanding of what’s going on in our practice.
I prefer a more unstructured form of journal, where you can write freely about your experience. In this style of journal a blank or lined notebook will do. There are a few brief formalities that precede any entry – the date, the name of the meditation practice, and how long you meditated for. Then you can write more generally about how the practice went – what distractions you had, what you did about them; what positive factors (like calmness, patience, concentration, etc) that were present and what you did to strengthen them. You can write about factors in your life that had an effect on your practice – things like lack of sleep, or a particularly busy day, or that you felt refreshed after a day’s hiking with a friend.
All of my students keep an online journal where they write down what’s going on in their practice. I read their journal entries and can give them very specific feedback and encouragement. Most of them find this to be very useful, but unfortunately not everyone can get a teacher to read over their journals and make comments. You can gain some of the same benefits, however, just by rereading your own comments over a period of time and reflecting on them. It’s an excellent practice once a week to read over all of your journal entries for that week and to see what trends you notice. This helps you appreciate change and to stand back from your day-to-day experience so that you can learn from having an overview.
A further refinement of this approach is “double entry” journaling. In this method you leave every second page blank in your journal – you only write on the right hand page. Then when you do your weekly review of your journal you can make notes on the left hand page. Those notes might include further reflections on some aspect of your experience, or may pick out particularly significant things that you have learned. Or they might simply summarize what you’ve written on the opposite page so that you can look back over an even longer period – perhaps three or six months – and can quickly review your major trends and learning experiences over that time without having to read each journal entry in full. Those notes also “flag” particularly significant experiences and observations so that you can easily find and reread them in detail later.
In short, journaling helps to connect past, present, and future, so that our life seems more of an integrated whole rather than an assortment of disparate experiences. This helps us to develop more integration, or integrity – a sense of continuity of experience over time.
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Comments
Comment from Sasha
Time: September 14, 2009, 6:58 am
Hi.. Let me start of by saying I really enjoy reading your website and find it to be very useful. I am very new to meditation and have a few concerns that I was hoping you may help me with. Firstly, I find that whilst my inward breath is uncontrolled and flows smoothly, my outward breath is very stilted. My exhalation comes out in spurts and feels very forced. Any suggestions on how I may over come this?
Also, I find that whilst I am meditating I am aware of certain thoughts, but that soon after my meditation is over, I forget the thoughts I was previously aware of. Is this normal or a sign of improper meditation?
Many thanks
Comment from Bodhipaksa
Time: September 16, 2009, 10:16 am
Hi Sasha,
First up, it’s very common to have thinking going on and then to forget what it was all about afterwards. It’s a sign that the thinking wasn’t very mindful (or perhaps wasn’t mindful at all) but that too is very common. That in fact is the normal state of affairs that we’re working with in meditation. Those periods of unmindful thinking often cause the arising of negative emotional states such as self-doubt, ill will, etc.
The issue of controlling the breath is a bit more tricky to answer. One approach is for you just to stick with the practice, noticing the feelings of discomfort, and letting go as best you can of any judgments that you make about what’s going on. Often what happens is that we decide that something (like tightness in the outbreath) is “wrong” and so we tense up even more. If you keep working in this way then one day you’ll simply “forget” to tighten up! Perhaps you do already, for periods of time.
Another approach (and there’s no reason you can’t use both) is to use your imagination to help you connect with a sense of letting go of controlling the breath. You can read more about that here.
Please do let me know how you get on.
Pingback from 4 Great Reasons to Track Your Meditation Efforts in a Log or Journal | No Stress Ever
Time: November 25, 2009, 1:09 am
[...] I also came across the idea of keeping a meditation journal. I realize that I am not an expert or doctor and so a lot of what I share on this blog is articles or information that I have found from real experts or doctors. “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.” -wildmind [...]
Comment from Ashley
Time: December 6, 2010, 7:43 pm
Hi Bodhipaksa,
Do you still do that “looking over your student’s journals” thing, and is it here on wildmind or elsewhere? It sounds like a fabulous idea and I wouldn’t mind doing something like that myself.
The ideas for meditation journaling presented here sound good, too. It might be hard to get into the habit considering that I already keep a daily journal but I think I might give it a try and see what happens.
:)
Comment from Bodhipaksa
Time: December 7, 2010, 2:09 pm
Hi Ashley,
I haven’t been doing that for a while. Writing, keeping up the website, being a parent, and doing some face-to-face teaching doesn’t leave me enough time at present for doing online coaching. Sunada does, however, do something similar as part of her life-coaching work: http://www.mindfulpurpose.com/
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