Journalling has been an important part of my life for the past 20 years.  I don’t write everyday and I don’t beat myself up if I forget or get too busy and miss a day or a week of entries.  I do not use my journal as a record of my everyday life but as a record of the thoughts that just won’t go away until I see them on paper.  Writing is powerful.  It makes things real and somehow solvable.  Writing about something that is on my mind takes it off of my mind and puts it on a piece of paper somewhere that I can refer to later if I choose to … or not.  At least it is not rolling around in my mind driving me crazy.

Journalling truly keeps me sane.  It also allows me to formulate new ideas and synthesize issues and look at things in a different way.  When we have participants Journal at PULSE we ask them to write.  It doesn’t matter what they write, just write.  Once they have written we ask them to read it over and then notice whether they have written about thoughts, actions or feelings.  We ask them to use coloured dots to categorize their journal by placing red dots by feelings, yellow dots by actions and green dots by thoughts.  It is also possible to use the red for past, yellow for present and green for future categories.  When people do this they begin to see patterns in their writing that begins to help them understand more about their own predispositions and maybe even Enneagram types.  Are they in the Head Triad thinking about the future, Heart Triad feeling about the past or Body Triad acting in the present?

Journals can be quite revealing and you may even find out more about yourself then you really wanted to face.  A journal is a friend and like  good friend it doesn’t judge it only allows you to observe yourself in a reflective safe environment.  Journals are a wonderful way for us to begin to see the Walsch Illusions, the Love Criteria and the Riso-Hudson Qualities from earlier entries on this blog. 

Let’s continue this dialogue by examining more closely each of the rows of the chart that shows my suggested relationship between the Illusions, criteria and qulaities over the next few days.  Meanwhile, journal …. write what you are feeling, doing and or thinking and notice which is more comfortalbe to write about.  Have fun!!