Now that you’ve practised observing your thoughts, feelings and mood, I want you to anchor that in your body.
By including your body in your observation, you’ll learn a lot that you might otherwise miss.
In a world where we’re always busy and switched on, scrolling through feeds and multitasking (or trying to), we move so quickly from one moment to the next that we can’t keep up with everything that’s happening to us.
Scrolling a social media feed is like an emotional rollercoaster.
You’ll see one about the rainforest burning and feel deep despair, then you’ll see a cute otter do something funny and your heart melts, then you’ll see a post about someone whose house burned down, and they had to move into a car with their three dogs.
It goes by so fast that you don’t have time to really notice what’s happening to you.
Is it any wonder that you feel emotionally exhausted at the end of the day?
Eventually, all those emotions turn into one enormous ball of mushed-up feelings and you can’t tell one from the other.
Then you either go through life with this ever-growing ball of confused, roiling emotion weighing you down until it breaks you – substance abuse, physical illness, mental breakdown, burnout, etc.
Or you have to spend years picking it apart, understanding all the things you’ve shoved in there and how they’ve contributed to bringing you to this moment.
Journaling is great for cultivating presence and awareness.
And today I want you to go a step further and really observe your body.
Because even when you forget the individual events and emotions, your body remembers. And your body carries the emotional burden as much as your mind does.
One thing that can easily happen with journaling is that you rush ahead, try to keep up with your frantic thoughts.
Today I want you to completely immerse yourself in the act of journaling itself.
Experiencing it in a mindful way.
Forget about trying to capture your thoughts and instead focus on describing how it feels to write in your journal, be in your environment, what you can hear, how it feels to sit what you’re sitting on, etc.
This is about taking a moment and being present with your experience of journaling, observing it from within.
This can be very calming and meditative.
JOURNALING PROMPTS:
How does my body feel right now?
Do you have aches and pains? Is there tension or relaxation, heat or coolness? How does the air flow in your body?
What does it feel like to put pen to paper and see the ink going onto the page?
Focus on the act of writing, look at the letters you form and how they combine to form words, how they flow together and weave sentences.
Look at your paper and observe the texture, the weight of the paper, how your pen sits in your hand and how the nib connects with the paper as you write.
