Journal Day! (about the floor…Marty the Poodle has an affinity for socks, slippers, and stray shreds of paper)

I had the opportunity to take a retreat day today to journal, play guitar, meditate, and to just embrace the delicious!  I have had the most life-changing experience of affirmation and appreciation!  I want to share it with you!

I try to set an agenda(if you will) for my journal days.  I have kept a journal writing experience going since I was a kid.   I occasionally  scan the volumes and discard those that no longer hold meaning or hold only pain.  I know there are some who consider this a sin, believing that all should be saved.  I simply don’t agree. For me, my journals represent a record, yes, but also a way station in channeling to manifestation.  Writing is an act of bringing the interior to the light…sort of opening the windows of the soul to the sunshine.  The writing is the important part for me.  I do keep some volumes that are either artistically fun or “pretty” or hold content that may still illuminate a concern.  Gratefully these have whittled down to a few;  one of which being a fabric volume I have held onto(not rereading) simply for the cover page I created and some lists.

As I started writing today, I grabbed that volume remembering how I had established the practice of devoting a couple of pages at the beginning of the month to lists.  I thought it might be fun to resurrect this, so opened the book to analyze it.  As I looked at each list page(there were six a month!!!). I found myself less impressed than memory implied.  But upon realizing the volume was from May of 1990, I thought I would read through to see how I was doing back then.

What I’ve saved from that volume

What a revelation greeted me!  The pages were so sad.  My goals were really obsessions.  Nothing seemed to be working for well for me.  I was in a job that afforded me a couple of wonderful friends but much pain.  I really hadn’t grasped hold of my life and lived.  After noticing scratch marks on the side of the page I remembered that my moods spiraled so that I made a mark on the side of the page to see every day where my mood was.   Reading it left me with one brilliant effect.  I began to realize just how far I had come in these 25 years!  And really if I’d been asked yesterday morning what I’d done I would have been sure that it wasn’t much.  But reading those pages let me take stock of my life to see how very much I have accomplished.  It allowed me to acknowledge myself!  In seeing the life I have lived these years I am filled with joy and gratitude.

We really don’t acknowledge our accomplishments, endings, beginnings, good days with the energy we might.  I know that I am always concerned with the goal still hanging, the pounds sticking on, all the ways I should be working to improve and develop.  In all of that I forget to bask in the glow of the work done so far, the journeys still to come, the moments of bliss, the occurrence of miracles.

I read somewhere that there is a circle of productivity wherein sitting back and acknowledging achievement or the end of a project is every bit as important as planning and executing it.  I notice now that sometimes (often) I am so taken with the goal, with the imperative to achieve it NOW that I paralyze myself and do nothing.  Then of course I make no progress, have no fun, defer joy.  If this is something many of us suffer from(and it really is a form of suffering and perhaps disowning the self), maybe we could all make a concerted effort to notice an achievement, bid a fond farewell to a goal no longer needed or appropriate, revel in a moment of bliss!  Even more important, maybe we can allow ourselves to more fully embrace and embody our journey through projects, goals, lifetimes.  Perhaps it is in the living of the moment that the boundless eternity is unleashed!

Peace and Bliss in the journey!

© 2016, Carolyn Mora