journaling

Journaling is a helpful practice that can be done before or after meditation. Writing down your thoughts can provide therapeutic benefits. It is suggested to write in a physical journal instead of using online platforms. Journaling can help you reflect on past experiences and gain insights. It can also inspire personal growth and potentially lead to publishing your ideas. Sitting for just eight minutes can have positive effects, especially for beginners. Overall, journaling is recommended as a useful tool for self-improvement. Hi everyone, I thought today I'd talk a little bit about journaling, writing a journal. Now there's different ways to go about this, it doesn't really matter which tradition you use or even if you have no tradition, if you just do it before, after meditation, before meditation, after meditation or even instead of as a practice in itself, that can be very useful because you're getting your thoughts about whatever it may be onto paper and it's a form of therapy, so just writing instead of is a practice in itself. But I'm going to talk more about writing after. I think after because if you do it before, you can do it before and then after, but if you do it after, the things that arise will be useful for you to look back on and say well how could that have happened, why was that such a problem, why was that on my mind, why did I think that was something that I needed to worry about or just occupied all my sitting time or all my meditation time. Now I suggest you, now this is interesting, should you do it as online or should you do it like in a blog or on a wiki or something like that or an app that documents everything that you say and is likely to be free as it were but the data is likely to be used in some way to be sold on or should you actually write in a journal, get a little book or paper or folder or whatever and write things down, store them in an old traditional way. You don't need to write with a quill, I'm sure some people do, but it's a process in itself that is very useful. So it's something I've done and in different ways, I've actually used it as a method of putting together thoughts that have come up in meditation and as a form of meditation where you're trying to put together ideas that have multiple levels of potential within them that will be useful to you and to other people, to you in so far as if you read those words you will see them in different ways. They may seem very immature in the future or they may seem very quizzical or very strange, how did I come to that conclusion and you have to remember that. You will do, hopefully, so that can be a very useful thing to do. Some of my thoughts were actually published and I'm not going to discuss that because that's another area completely, but your ideas may be of that usage to other people that you can have them published in some way. Some people self-publish them, that's another issue. So it's a very useful thing to do and I do recommend it because it will inspire you. It will inspire you in the future because you will, I think, if you do it right and if you put in the time and the effort, you will make improvements and they can seem very slow and you can say, you know, why am I doing this, why am I sitting for however long it is, eight minutes. I read just recently, I was quite surprised at that, that people were getting good effects with just eight minutes of sitting. That was the, anything more than that and especially for beginners it didn't make much difference. So you could try sitting for eight minutes and eight minutes can seem a long, long time for a beginner, dependent on what sort of technique that you're using. And this is why things like chanting and things like ascetic practices where you're given a practice to do and you do it as well as you can for the time that you have allocated and you may have to split it into, you know, like if you had an eight minute meditation you might have to do four minutes in the morning and four minutes in the evening. Some people are so busy and, but that's just the way of it, that's modern life. So have a go at journaling and see how you get on with that, see if you find that useful. Okay that's all from me for today, bye now.