How to Keep a Meditation Journal

Do you want to get an insight into how and why people use meditation journals? Then you’ve come to the right place! This article will give you the lowdown on how to use a meditation journal, as well as the benefits one might have on your spiritual health and wellbeing.

How to Keep a Meditation Journal 4 Easy Steps

1. While you are in a meditative state, try to expand your awareness to observe the state of your thoughts and feelings
2. Acknowledge what you’re thinking and feeling in any given moment, but rather than react to it, you should aim to let it go. Discipline your mind and return your focus to the practice
3. After your meditation has ended, open a diary or any space in which you can record the details or comment on your experience
4. Take several minutes to reflect openly and honestly on your experience, including any feelings and perceptions that prevailed throughout the meditation, as well as your strengths and weaknesses, or anything else that comes to mind!

Keeping a journal of any kind might seem like a silly thing to do, but don’t be fooled into underestimating the power of meditation journaling! Using a meditation journal can have untold benefits in advancing the effectiveness of your meditation as well as developing a greater understanding of yourself as a person.

“Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.” – Christina Baldwin

Keeping a Meditation Journal

Reflecting on your meditation experience can have countless positive effects on your life and the effectiveness of your meditation. By chronicling the details of your meditation (as well as any commentary you might have around the experience you had) you will begin to compile a record of your meditation experiences over time, which is key to utilising the full benefits of a meditation journal.

Looking back on the information you pen into your journal will help you discern patterns of habitual thinking and negative emotional cycles in which you find yourself trapped. Over time, this will allow you to identify when you are repeating the same thought processes over and over and equip you with the skills necessary to consciously disentangle and disengage yourself from these processes, as well as to avoid mental distractions that might disrupt your meditation.

Keeping a meditation journal will not only help you identify habitual and potentially damaging cycles of thinking, it will also help you consolidate your understanding of how effective your meditation has been. Most people won’t receive the full value or benefits of their meditation without reflecting on the process or experience, which is exactly what meditation journaling allows you to do.

Furthermore, experts suggest that journaling can help you process painful emotions, trauma, grief and stress. It is when we try to quieten our minds that negative thoughts and feelings generally arise. Therefore, you might find the experience of writing about your meditation practice to be cathartic or therapeutic, providing a release for you from troubling memories, urges, impulses, thoughts or emotions.

When you’re writing in your journal, your entry should be framed within the context of your meditation experience. This means that everything you write about or reflect on should, in some way, relate to the meditation that you most recently completed (hopefully the one you had before sitting down to write!).

Meditation journaling is meant to be a liberating activity, and therefore you should be able to write freely about your experience without feeling the need to write on any particular topic or to structure your work in a specific way. Nonetheless, there are a few diary conventions you might like to use before beginning each entry such as the date, the style of meditation you practiced, as well as how long you meditated for.

After that, you should feel free to write about whatever aspect of your meditation experience you feel beholden to, or that which you feel most important to reflect on. Typically, you might write about insights that arose during your practice; what disruptions you went through and how you dealt with them; what positive experiences you had (such as focus, inner peace, sense of vitality and wellbeing, etc); how the meditation has made you feel. You might even like to write about how external factors, such as a good sleep or lack of exercise, influenced your meditation practice. Remember, this is meant to be a free-flowing activity, so reflect on whatever comes to you in your most honest, natural and organic manner.

Nevertheless, if you’re still struggling to come up with ideas or things to write about in your journal, maybe you could consider the following – go for a stroll in one of your favorite settings, but be mindful of your surroundings rather than engaging with your thoughts. You needn’t start writing in your journal just yet. Rather, just try to observe your sensory experience as you move through that place without getting distracted. What does it smell like? Look like? Feel like? Smell like?

Once you have completed your walk, sit down with your journal and allow everything you observed to flow from your head, down your arm and out of your pen onto the page. Try not to think critically about what you’re writing. Resist any urge to proofread or edit or think about grammar or word choice. Just let it flow naturally onto the page.

If this doesn’t work, or you are incapacitated in some way and can’t get outside, you can try to turn inward and mentally transport yourself to a place in your memory. Visualize that place, hold the image in your mind, and situate yourself there as best you can. Then use the same steps for the activity described above, using concrete, sensory details to translate that experience into writing.

If all else fails, you might like to just respond to some of the following questions, elaborating on each point should you feel the need to: was my mind at peace and focused? If so why/why not? What could I observe about the state of my body and mind? What emotional experiences or memories came up? Were they comfortable or uncomfortable? Overall, how would I rate my experience? Why would I give it this rating?

So what are you waiting for? Once you’ve finished your meditation, pick up that pen and start writing!

“Whether you’re keeping a journal or writing as a meditation, it’s the same thing. What’s important is you’re having a relationship with your mind.”
—Natalie Goldberg

Tips to Keeping a Daily Meditation Journal

Don’t be that person who starts journaling only to lapse into laziness a few days later and stops all together. If you’re struggling to turn your journaling into a habit, consider some of the following tips:

Reserve a time at the end of each day to pen an entry into your journal (preferably after meditating). Set an alarm on your phone to remind you that it’s time to stop, drop everything, and write, and prioritize this so it becomes a daily occurrence. Through doing this you are much more likely to turn your journaling into a routine.

If you’re struggling to come up with content for your diary entry, consult some of the questions/prompts we provided above and use those to stimulate your response.

If it’s a time management issue for you, use dot points to condense your entry, or set yourself a short time limit of two to five minutes, to save yourself some time.

“For me, my diary is my life, my comfort, my second existence.”
—Ramon Gil Navarro

Can my iPhone be a Meditation Journal?

The answer to this question is YES. It really doesn’t matter what medium or device you use to translate your experience into the written word, so long as you are going through the process of reflection and contemplating your meditation at a deeper level.

You could use a conventional notepad with a pen, or the notepad on your iPhone using the touch-screen keyboard. It really doesn’t matter. If you’re not much of a writer, one huge advantage to using an iPhone is that you can use a Dictaphone or voice recording feature on your device to create an audio version of your journal entry.

Will meditation make me happy?

While it may not be directly responsible for making you happy, meditation can definitely be a contributing factor to somebody’s overall sense of wellbeing and contentment. It is widely accepted in scientific circles that engaging in meditation over a prolonged period of time can result in a happier outlook on life.

Can meditation help me sleep?

Most definitely. Meditation has been shown to deepen the quality of a person’s sleep, as well as lengthening the duration of their sleep time, and making it easier to drift off to sleep after releasing stress accumulated throughout their day. Meditation can also be used to help treat sleep conditions such as insomnia.

Can meditation lower blood pressure?

Yes, it can. Some scientific studies have concluded that meditation techniques, such as mindfulness meditation, can have a direct impact on reducing a person’s blood pressure and treating hypertension, although the effects should be further explored as a treatment option for these conditions.