Meditation Journal: The Ninja’s Meditation Tool

I’ve kept a journal (diary) since my junior school. God knows what I used to write in there when I was that young, but nowadays I have 3 journals  – one for ideas, another for the regular ‘keeping a diary’ thing and another one which I call my meditation journal. And when I look back at what I wrote in there in past year – I can’t believe that I have come so far. It has really improved so much in me – as a person and mind and soul. It’s always good to see yourself progress.

What’s a Meditation Journal?

Journals are like recordkeeping and talking to oneself and in doing so we reflect on our thoughts. All the major thoughts we have had in a day, and then we know all what happened much more clearly.

And that’s exactly what a meditation journal is like. You keep a record of meditation, how did you feel when you meditated today, what were the sensations in body like, how long did it take you to drift off to meditation? What insights did you have? What problems were solved? What miracles did you experience afterwards and so forth.

What to Write

Just write what you feel like writing and after a month of writing you can go back and look how far you’ve come since and you will be amazed at your progress. You will feel proud of yourself – it will become one part of your life where you are progressing no matter what and that too so easily. There is not hard work in it – in fact there is no work – that’s what we call meditation.

January is good time to begin with. Why not just pick up a nice looking journal and start writing? Just write whatever you want. Someday you might feel like writing a song, or a poem or drawing something after meditation so just put that in.

When to Write

Best time to write is just after meditation. But don’t make a work out of it. It’s completely optional. Usually I pick it up before going into meditation and add last few words to previous day writing whatever extraordinary experience I had during that day after I made an entry to my journal. Then I go into meditation and write for today.

Here are some more tips:

1. Keep your journal near your meditation corner so you won’t loose it and you won’t waste time looking for it everywhere.
2. Keep it simple, don’t make work out of it. On some days you won’t feel like making an entry at all – so skip that day.
3. Don’t be shy – write it all even if it’s weird and gibberish.
4. Keep a separate pen/pencil with the journal – again so you won’t waste time looking for one.
5. Write what you feel – there are no rules, no should’.
6. Do share some of your entries with us here. It’d be inspiring to others.

So go ahead and give it a try. Don’t wait till you get a new journal. Just write on a piece of paper, later when you have the new journal you can paste those in. But important thing is doing it. And do let me know how you felt.

Photo Credit: Journal / Diary  {Feb 2009} by sushi♥ina, on Flickr

Tagged as: meditation corner, Meditation Jounal, writing poetry