Journaling Is the Ultimate Form of Self-Respect
Getting to know yourself benefits you, the collective, and evolution
Your thoughts and feelings are damp clay. They are the raw material for your future circumstances.
Journaling lets you shape subconscious impressions prior to their materialization into future events. Reflecting on your interpretations allows you to intervene before the clay dries, or before your assumptions harden into circumstance.
When you consciously transmute emotions, assumptions and stories into frameworks that evoke positive emotion, you embark on an upward spiral. Positive feedback loops love you. You gain more authorship over your life direction.
In other words, journaling enables you to become the alchemist, rather than the recipient, of your subjective experience. And it isn’t useful only for release and clarity. With reflection you realize how to assess and re-calibrate the wiring in your mind so that you naturally feel motivated to do whatever is necessary for bringing forth your desired results.
Let’s explore why journaling is such a powerful opportunity for behavior change.
Undiscovered frontiers are internal and psychological
“You take your time you will come across parts of you that have been shut away. You will need those shut away parts to approach the challenges of the past and future.” — Jordan Peterson
Journaling invites you to tap into your subconscious mind, also known as the laboratory of behavior change.
The subconscious speaks in feelings. It’s the storehouse for all the modes of being you’ve collected throughout your life. Because the subconscious doesn’t deliberate or conceptualize, it’s extremely susceptible to suggestion.
If you regularly experience fear and doubt (or excitement, joy, and relief), it’s because you’ve internalized subconscious programming that validates those states. People mistakenly assume that they don’t choose how they feel. The truth is that attitudes prefigure emotions, and attitudes are your reactions to the stories you’re telling yourself.
If you want more emotional freedom, journal in the morning and before going to sleep. Turn the volume down on the editor and release as many thoughts as you can. During each session, cause-and-effect reflect over the feelings and interpretations that inspired specific behaviors throughout the previous days or hours. Identify the patterns of interpretation that resulted in the outcomes you wanted vs. those that did not.
When you identify the qualitative differences in those patterns, it becomes easier for you to automatically pivot in the direction of the interpretations that lead to desired actions and situations.
Go for congruence, not discipline
“Anything you dis-identify from you gain power over.” — David Snyder
Interpretation regulation via journaling is also a good replacement for will power. Discipline or will power is for people who are out of touch with the subconscious.
When you cause-and-effect reflect, you don’t need will power. You’re intervening directly on the programming that’s causing resistance or struggle, and you don’t have to force yourself to do anything.
With a high degree of awareness about the stories and interpretations that cause you act in specific ways, you modify your identity rather than just your behavior. With identity-level shifts, you easily re-interpret your feelings so that you feel congruent while taking whatever action is necessary for producing the results you want.
The difference between forcing yourself into an action and allowing the action to emerge as the result of honest and thorough reflection is akin to the difference between using a drag-and-drop function to build a website vs. altering the code.
Sure, the tools may get you to the same place, but changing the programming is a direct intervention on the phenomena itself. When you exert will power in spite of not wanting to do something, you’re simply overlaying another program onto the wiring producing your resistance. You’ll need to keep applying your forced-based will power ad nauseam.
When you cause-and-effect reflect and generate forward-moving interpretations, you access the power of congruence, a resource that is more potent than force.
The truth is that you can’t be sane if your thoughts and actions are at war with each other. Without journaling or another reflective practice, it’s easy to become caught in the throes of un-integrated experience.
When you prioritize searching for the interpretations that propel you forward, it becomes undeniable that knowing how to modulate your meaning-making processes is the foundation of self-respect.