Journaling

By Mafalda Lempicka

Journaling as a technique for knowing yourself and improving all aspects of your life. Create the life you really want to live through the power of your mind. Everything you want has already been created inside of you.

Journaling is a technique that guides us step-by-step to write in a diary each day so that we can give order to the contents of our minds. There are numerous benefits that we can get from journaling but the most important are:

-Self-knowledge

-Mental peace

-Organizing our objectives

-Greater happiness

-More creative thinking

-Better management of our time, mental space, and our emotions

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lempicka Publishing
• Release date: Mar 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9781667470672

Book preview

JOURNALING: UNLEASH THE POWER OF YOUR MIND

Mafalda Lempicka

All rights reserved. Work registered with the Intellectual Property Registry. Copyright © 2016 Mafalda Lempicka

Introduction

Journaling. What Is It? Why Do It?

The term journaling alludes to a journal, which is nothing but a diary. It is the practice of keeping a diary, a very widespread tradition in Anglo-Saxon countries and one that garners more followers each day all over the world because its benefits have been proven by various studies. Establishing a dialogue with ourselves, taking the time to delve into our thoughts, our worries, and our desires, allows us to reconnect with that part of ourselves that modern life forces us to permanently set aside. We automatically recover peace, a kind of inner silence which is very restorative and becomes an ideal space for creativity to flourish and ideas to become ordered.

Journaling is distinguished from writing in a diary in that we do not write down what we do each day, but rather our desires, aspirations, what we feel, and very specific questions that help us get to know parts of our mind that can often be very hidden. This practice from centuries ago that was originally a record of daily events has transformed to give us self-knowledge.

You may think that keeping a journal is not for you. I thought this the first time I heard about journaling ten years ago when I lived in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, once my curiosity got the better of me I began to read books that talked about this practice, and I realized that I might like it. Having said that, I can tell you that after only a few weeks of daily writing, I so clearly noticed the benefits and I believe I will never give up this habit. I am sure that once you try it, you will not want to stop.

What we do when we journal is spend a little bit of time every day to empty ourselves out onto paper. That is exactly how I would describe the best way to practice this discipline. With journaling we must pour ourselves into the writing. We must become liquid, fluid. In other words, we must get out of the way to let ourselves pass through. Although this may seem contradictory, it reveals a big truth: that most of us are our own worst enemies, and this is the greatest obstacle we must overcome to achieve our goals and to be happy. There is nothing and no one else that can possibly be as harmful to our journey on this earth as the fabrication of ourselves that we have created. I am talking about this layer that we have been forming since infancy. We show it externally and at one point it becomes so solid and so believable that we end up assuming it as our persona. Sit with this for a moment. If you stop and observe yourself in silence you will realize that it is as if there are two halves that live inside you. If you let one of the halves loose they would be immensely happy because they know what they like, what they want, what works for them on all levels. The other half slows you down, limits you, judges you all day and tells you that everything you do is wrong, tells you about what you do not deserve and what you can never have. You may think this second half is simply realistic or that it is trying to protect you from disillusion, but nevertheless, I guarantee that everything good that you have in your life today has come from your true self, not from that artificial construction.

The first satisfaction that the practice of daily writing will give you will be that you feel free, even if only for a few minutes a day, and you will return to your true self. It is a marvelous experience, I assure you. The feeling of clarity and freedom cannot be described, it must be lived. But I digress. The great benefit of journaling is that these brief moments of freedom grow with time, until they start to occupy most of your day-to-day life. Consequently, you feel fuller, truer. You become yourself again and you show yourself to the world  transparently. You improve your relationships with others and with yourself. Your results improve because your goals are clear, because you know what you want, in the order that you want it, and how to get it, because you have freed yourself from the mental noise, from unnecessary thoughts that only take up space and bring about chaos that affects us by causing insomnia, anxiety, and sadness. This chaos is fortunately very easy to eliminate.

With journaling, you will get to know yourself, to know your life, what works and does not work with other people. It will be like drawing a map of your situation and, as you can imagine, going through life with a map makes things much easier.

Throughout this book I want to share with you what I have learned about this discipline of self-knowledge, my experience, and methods and suggestions for you to make the most of such