The spiritual journey is one of continually falling on your face, getting up, brushing yourself off, looking sheepishly at God, and taking another step.
     - Aurobindo

Deep in your being you hold a vast reservoir of wisdom and knowledge that barely gets tapped as you live your busy life. Your inner world holds the rhythms of your psyche, the seeds of your destiny, and the flavor and fragrance of your unique self as it has been shaped and formed by the love of your Creator and the infinite wonder of creation. In short, your inner being holds your truth. This is the treasure that resides, hidden, within you. With love and coaxing, you can bring this treasure forward into your everyday life through the practice of deep imagery.
     - Jenny Garrison from her book Imagery in You: Mining for Treasure in Your Inner World

Journaling and meditation can help us find our truth, our own individual truth that grows out of our own life journey. Heron Dance explores meditation and journaling techniques that can help us better understand the patterns and potentials of our lives.

We each have a surface life -– a life of obligations and places to be, things to do, some urgent, and some that just appear urgent. In our surface day-to-day life, we’re constantly reacting. Below the surface, there is another reality — the reservoir of our accumulated life experience and wisdom. It wants the best for us — it is a compassionate reality and it has messages if we will listen. But our relationship with our inner world requires that we stop to listen. Its insights, its messages, can easily be drowned out in the push and pull of the day-to-day. To nurture that connection, we need to set aside quiet time.

By combining mediation and journaling we can access the wisdom from the deeper levels of our being and develop a greater understanding of the messages it has to offer. Sometimes those messages will be vague and difficult to understand. Sometimes they will be positive and supportive of the path we’re traveling, sometimes they will be contrary to what we want to hear. It is crucial to keep in mind that they are messages from ourselves — just a deeper part of ourselves — but nevertheless messages from a compassionate entity that wants only the best for us. By exploring the messages, symbols and images that come out of our meditation, we can come to a greater understanding of their meaning and significance. Writing adds logic and perspective to the process.

Heron Dance explores the subject of combining meditation and journaling from a number of different perspectives:

• Meditation techniques including shamanic journeying, imagery, relaxation techniques, transcendental and Zen meditation.
• Journaling techniques including art journaling.
• Excerpts from the published journals of writers, artists and others embracing the gift of life.
• Excerpts from the journals of Heron Dance founder and artist Roderick MacIver.

Man does indeed know intuitively more than he rationally understands. The question, however, is how we can gain access to the potentials of knowledge contained in the depth of us, how we can achieve increased capacities of direct intuition and enlarged awareness.
     - Ira Progoff from At a Journal Workshop

___________________________________________________________________________________________

People engaged in highly-creative work often use journaling as a way to access their creative unconscious. Thoreau’s books, for example, were first thought through in his journals, which totaled two million words.

Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to me as my own thoughts….My journal should be the record of my love. I would write in it only of the things I love, my affection for any aspect of the world, what I love to think of…I feel ripe for something…yet can’t discover what that thing is. I feel fertile merely. It is seed time with me. I have lain fallow long enough.
     - Henry David Thoreau, in his journal

The value of journaling goes way beyond creative work: it can access deeper levels of consciousness to access crucial insights into creating a life. Big answers to big questions often lie deep. Sometimes those answers are uncomfortable.

For thirty years, I’ve used journaling to access deeper truths about my life. I use journaling to self-balance. By writing about my life, I clarify my vision. I clarify who I am and who I hope to become. By combining journaling with relaxation and meditation, I pull answers from my subconscious and bring them to the surface where they can be used to shape my life and work.

The deeper you go, the more penetrating (and sometimes even uncomfortable) will be the answers that come back. Uncomfortable is good if it leads you to confront issues that are blocking your way forward. Sometimes the answers are ambiguous, but I’ve found that if I write them down, think about them and journal more on them, they become clear. Clear but not necessarily comforting.

Your destination: the border territory that lies just between the states of awake and asleep. You won’t always get that deep. After years of practice I get there about one in five times. Regardless, I get somewhere worthwhile every time. Except when I fall asleep.

Many people close their eyes and follow their breath for a few minutes. Slowly, deeply they inhale and exhale. Others use a meaningless mantra – a word like “onna” – that they repeat over and over for a few minutes, as in Transcendental Meditation. I use a “power” word or phrase like “Love” or “deeper” or “harmony now.” The common element is something repetitious and relaxing. Sit in quiet at a chair at a table or desk, open your journal, get comfortable and try different ways of going deep. Anything that brings on deep relaxation short of sleep is good.

My dreams and notes are likely different than yours. I get my sense of peace from nature, from the northern woods. Similarly, the role in your life of relationships with other people or with financial security might be different than mine. The purpose of these journaling techniques is to help you and me give the issues at the center of our lives the attention they deserve. The only wrong answer is a less than honest one, or one that seeks to avoid uncomfortable truths. And over the years, answers will change as one’s journey evolves and new perspectives are gained.

After a period of meditation that can last from a couple of minutes to half an hour, I go in one of two directions: writing about subjects currently on my mind (self-referral), or turning to imaginary guides for feedback. I often do both, usually in that order and sometimes with a meditation intermission between.

Self-Referral: Checking in on your life.

After five deep, slow breaths, I ask myself for a feeling or emotion that can provide insight into whether or not I’m on the right track. If I get a feeling of balance, warmth and centeredness, I feel that all is as it should be. A feeling of distress, anger, unease or sadness tells me that I’m on the wrong track. At times like this, I ask myself: “What is bothering me about my life or how I’m living it that I don’t want to confront? What question am I avoiding? What question am I keeping from myself because I am afraid of what the answer will direct me toward? Is there a change I’m trying to avoid?”

Guides

Identify a guide or guides you can turn to for advice. I have several:

• I imagine myself twenty or thirty years from now. I have lived the life I imagine for myself. I ask that person I hope to become for advice.
• Elzéard Bouffier, the Shepherd from The Man Who Planted Trees. To really understand and use this guide, it would help a lot to see the film by Frédéric Back. The Shepherd devotes the last decades of his life(?) to the planting of trees on barren mountainsides. In his quiet, solitary way he serves beauty.
• People I’ve known who have captured my imagination. They live slow, or at least thoughtful, lives, and they live on their own terms. There are four of these people, and each in some way resembles Bouffier. They may have passed through my life very briefly but they impressed me as being wise and kind. I imagine that they have seen a lot of life, tried to live their dreams, and largely succeeded but I imagine that they’ve also experienced failure and discouragement. I imagine a conversation with one of these people. I usually consult just one at a time but I tend to imagine different individuals during different meditation/journaling sessions.
• My work, my creativity. I imagine my creative life, my art, as a person and I ask him for advice. How am I treating you?
• My friendship with myself. I imagine this friendship as a person, and I ask it how I’m treating it.

About thirty years ago, lying on my back staring at the sky in a park in downtown Toronto, I began to wonder what my life would be like when I reached the age of 67. I pictured myself as being wiser, more balanced and self-aware than I was then at the age of twenty-six. I pictured myself as having gotten most of what I wanted to get out of life. I was living in a simple home with big windows back in the woods near a lake. I imagined that my average day included both hard physical work and deep rest.

I then imagined a conversation with this person I hoped to become. I walked into his living room and sat down. The room was quiet. I asked him a question. He turned, looked over his shoulder out the window, got up and left without saying anything. He walked down to the shore of the lake, got in his canoe, and went out for an early evening paddle.

After thinking awhile about this, I concluded that what he was saying to me was that a lot of the things that I thought were important really weren’t including the question I had just asked. Many of the things that were preoccupying me in my mid-twenties had little to do with what would eventually prove to be important in my life. What was important, my future self was saying, was to orient myself and my life around quiet beauty, natural beauty. When I’ve deviated from that life path, the ultimate result has invariably been adverse.

I’ve often since turned to that imaginary future self for advice. Many times the feedback has been tough to take. It has directed me in directions I didn’t want to go and so I’ve often rejected the advice. I’ve sometimes thought of my future self as Mr. Kill Joy. “I know you. You always opt for the route that is the least fun. You are kind of dull.” In retrospect, I was wrong. Following the advice offered, while it would have meant some missed fun, would have generally meant avoiding wasted effort and heartache. On the other hand, a balanced life needs fun too.

I record in my journal these imaginary conversations, both the questions and the answers I get back. About half the time, I get little or no feedback, just as in the case of that first conversation decades ago. A number of times the answers have led me in a new direction, one I hadn’t considered before. In every instance that I can recall, when I followed the feedback offered, the new direction was exactly where I needed to go. Sometimes those new directions have made my heart sing.

The most frequent guide that I consult is Heron Dance, which I imagine as a person. I ask him how I’m treating him. (I envision a him, but go with whichever gender comes to mind for you. Genderless is fine too). I ask what he thinks the risks and opportunities are that confront Heron Dance. I ask him general questions such as, “Is there anything I should be doing differently? Is there anything that I am doing that I shouldn’t be doing at all?” I ask, “How will what I am about to do affect the beauty and quality of my work?”

It is likely, in working with this Journal, that you will encounter issues or questions that are irrelevant to your current life or that you are not inclined to address right now. When you come across those, move them to the back of that section. Deal with them when the time is right for you, if ever. For this Journal to be of value, it can’t be onerous or tedious.

As you use this journal, occasionally go back over what you’ve written and reread it. Record new thoughts that come to mind. When I do that, I find that the thoughts I came up with yesterday, that I thought were important and new, were the same thoughts I had years ago. The fact that they recur, and that I think they are new when they do recur, indicates that they are important and not being given enough attention in my life.

Summary:

You might find a summary to be useful as you experiment with different journaling techniques. The following comes from my own notes.

Self-referral:

• In meditation, ask for a feeling or emotion that will provide insight into the current stage of your life journey.
• Positive feelings or sensations indicate that things are proceeding as they should.
• Feelings of distress or unease need to be explored: what important questions are you avoiding that you should confront.

Guides:

• Myself twenty or thirty years from now after having lived a life of meaning and deep satisfaction.
• People of wisdom and wide experience whom I respect for their close relationship between how they live and what they believe.
• My work, my creativity. Imagine these parts of my life as people and ask them for advice.
• My friendship with myself. Imagine this relationship as a person, and ask it how I’m treating it.

Sit in a comfortable chair, open your journal and slowly close your eyes. Relax. Relax into quietness. Listen to the softness of your breath. Relax your entire body. The darkness you enter is comfortable and pleasant. Take five deep, slow and relaxed breaths.

From there go in one of two directions:

• Check in with yourself and ask for an emotion or feeling that best represents where you are now in your life.
• Consult with imaginary guides.

Questions:

• Am I on the right track?
• What is scaring me that I don’t want to confront?
• What question am I avoiding?
• What question am I keeping from myself because I am afraid of what the answer will direct me toward?
• Is there a change I’m trying to avoid?

In dialogue with your creative work: Imagine it as a person and ask:

• How am I treating you? How can I nurture my relationship with you?
• How will what I am considering now affect the beauty and quality of my work?
• What risks and potentials currently confront our work?
• Is there anything I should be doing differently, or not doing, that I am doing?

Notes on Life as Art
Books on Journaling