WINTER 1995
"Journals and diaries can be workshops for the soul, laboratories where we can investigate and examine our lives, our secrets, hurts, resentments, memories and joys. Journals are records for the heart and mind. The chart the joys and sorrows of our daily lives, and, like road maps, they can direct us back to our hearts after confusing experiences. Journals are testaments of our lives that we live as fully and consciously as we can. Without journals, certain experiences and episodes through writing and communicating with our deeper selves will be lost. These experiences that lay deep in our souls are too important to be forgotten. We owe it to ourselves to remember them, to write them down, to relish and learn from them. We are the only ones who have our particular memories and experiences. If they aren't written down, they will be forgotten and lost in an abyss.
The whole point of keeping a diary is that we live more joyously, accepting even the pain, and in this inner laboratory of the journal, transmute our experiences into wisdom.
Diaries and journals have often been described as our best friends. Most often, we feel free to speak our minds to our friends, and when we are in trouble, they will be there to listen. Similarly, our journals are always available to us when we need them. They will not scold us for writing our deepest regrets, angers or shames. They are there. Listening and accepting. They will not frown or turn their backs on us. We are free to say and write anything we want. What we hesitate to say to someone at work we are free to write in our journals. The anger, or even the joy we feel but never express, we are free to write about in journals. What we concealed from our parents as children, we are free to describe in our diaries. And most importantly, what we deny and hide from ourselves, we are free to explore and rediscover."
- From: "Journey Notes: Writing for Recovery and Spiritual Growth."
Solly and Lloyd.
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