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CREATIVITY AND JOURNALING: Tools to enhance your journaling practice

Last updated: March 28th, 2019

I’ve used journaling to write, to feel, to pray, to understand, to love. What I also love equally is the actual act of being creative. So I wondered to myself: What would it look like if I combined the two mediums? I decided to embark on a 30-day creativity journaling challenge. What came about is a journaling practice that was enhanced considerably, and I found myself enjoying the simple things in life.

Creativity is energy. It is movement. It is the act of doing. To be creative means to engage in something that sparks activity of some kind. I like to look at it as a collective use of our senses in the outer world. Creativity equals expression. Creativity is what we see in everyday life but take for granted. Creativity is what we see in nature, it is art, it is music, it is cooking, it is gardening, it is silence, it is writing. Sometimes creativity is also stillness.

I look at journaling as a creative therapeutic tool. It’s combining creative media such as art, music, story and poetry with journaling. Creativity is all around us—there’s an element of play and fun in creativity. It gets us to be in a natural state. So combining the two by engaging in a creative activity can prompt writing. It can ease the process of opening up our inner creative self that we often think is nonexistent.

As children we’re born creative. The key element for creativity is curiosity and impulsivity. Fear is a word that does not exist. It’s willing to take risks even if we may fall. It’s looking at “falling” as a stepping stone to our next progress. Creativity is also stillness sometimes. So when we rest, we come a new to create. When we’re moving, we’re engaging in an art that leads to action. Children are creative, carefree, impulsive, curious, excited and ready to get messy. They would not need to think twice about getting dirty with paint. They get up and dance without care in the world. Similarly, they need their sleep, rest and grounding to get ready to “move.”

As we grow into adulthood, we become more enclosed because of the experiences that we encounter: loss, death, status change, lifestyle change, etc. We forget that we were once free and lose that childlike innocence. There’s a strong element of criticism in our head. Our inner critic says things such as “I’m not good enough, I don’t sound correct, I must be crazy for thinking this way, I can’t do this.” And in doing this we create layers and layers of coating around us that prevent us from returning to that pure creativity, where whatever we did was perfect because it originated from us. Why does it stop as adults? We begin to enter a competitive world and the layers and blinders come up. Our authenticity is lost.

Journaling helps us get back to that innocence. Journaling lets that true self come out by tapping into our internal world through writing prompts. Sometimes writing about nothing can leave a vacuum. In fact often when given a task to write without a topic it can get daunting. The feeling of opening up our wounds, our innermost thoughts, our fears, our dreams on pages and pages of notebooks is frightening. We may not know how to begin, where to begin and may need some form of direction.

Creative activity combined with writing/journaling allows for the inner critic to be silenced. There are two acts involved, passion and intention. Passion of engaging in something we care about and intention to engage in things that will nourish you and sustain you, not deplete you.

What would be the goal of combining the two? It depends on what your goal is. For me it was because I wanted to engage more in the process of writing and often I found that a creative prompt sparked the writing. I felt that if I allowed myself to engage in a prompt prior to free writing, the writing flowed—very similar to our bodies: If we don’t stretch, we find that our bones get stiff and rusty.

With journaling, if I did not experiment with various creative media, my well was thirsty. I found that if I communed with nature, I opened up an energy in me that allowed writing to flow. I also found that sometimes the writing sparked the creative side of me that didn’t exist. Journaling I found opened up an energy level that surprised me. I found myself paying more attention to the intuitive nudges that urged me to experiment in art that I would otherwise not consider. For example, from out of nowhere there would be days when I would want to pick up a paintbrush and start painting. For Mother’s Day, I bought four mini 2×2 canvases and instead of buying real flowers for the moms in my life, I decided to paint them flowers. I loved what came out and there was pure joy in the process. That joy I believe is the key.

Going to a yoga class involves the use of our breath. And it also involves a state of total relaxation and stretching parts of our bodies and limbs we didn’t think could stretch. In doing that we’re actively releasing emotions stored in our bodies. For example, opening up our hearts in a cobra pose opens up our hearts, which allows us to connect more to others on a compassionate level.

If we write after certain poses, it’s always fascinating to see what comes up. It could be a release of some sort, it could be a step or decision made, but whatever it is, it’s moving upward and inward. So the goal is not to get some sort of epiphany, but it is to live harmoniously and simply with what I believe is yourself and your environment. And this is something you can do with any type of creative medium—I experimented with cooking, poetry, gardening and photography, and usually would carry a notebook with me and spend some time writing after engaging in a creative act.

Keep a journal with you for reflection, and above all, have fun with the process—if there’s no joy in the process, we lose sight of the purpose.

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image: painting via Shutterstock

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