Maintaining a Journal to Discover Yourself

Do you keep a journal to record your life journey? Maintaining a journal is an exceptionally good way of making sense of the things you go through in your life. You can tell your journal what you cannot tell other people and as you look back on past entries, your journal is a record of how every experience you go through in life, becomes a mirror that reflects how you have grown through those experiences. 

Many people feel they could not keep a journal. If you feel this way, and the reason is that you do not like writing or feel you can’t write properly, do not let this stop you exploring this excellent method of keeping track of the many thoughts and ideas that travel through your mind daily. Journaling is not about needing to write in any style or with grammar. You are the only one who will read the journal. It is your thoughts on paper 

Other people have found creative ways to use their journals. Drawings, photographs and poetry or quotes can sometimes depict the stories that you cannot write on paper. It is not the method you use that is important, but it is the concept of keeping a journal; it is the benefit it will be to you and your journey of self-discovery. 

Most of us hold our feelings inside, these can have both a stunting effect on our personal growth, and they can lead to health problems if the stress that usually accompanies them remains internal. Expressing thoughts on paper is the simplest way of learning how to express our feelings. Once expressed we can either look at them from a different perspective and deal with them ourselves or we can feel more willing to talk about them with others.  

Journaling for self-discovery need not be only for expressing our inner feelings and thoughts. As we travel through life, we inevitably have some great ideas. As we write these ideas down, we can return to them when we are in a position to either follow them up with action or to revisit them in the future. Without writing our ideas down, we often forget them and many of the gems that life offers us are forgotten when we try to commit them to memory. 

Once you create the habit of maintaining and writing in a journal often becomes a lifelong habit.