Hello and welcome to your course on Mindfulness and Journaling.
If you have been doing any personal writing, you have already experienced some of what this course is about. Journaling is a vehicle of mindfulness. This course will explain exactly what that means and give you distinct ideas and techniques to elaborate on the connections between your writing and mindfulness.
I’m Beth Jacobs and I’ve been working in the field of therapeutic writing for about 30 years. I wrote Writing for Emotional Balance in 2005 and I’ve been on the council of the IAJW since it started. I’m also a transmitted lay teacher in the Soto Zen Buddhist tradition and a psychologist, and all of this is to say I’m intensely curious about what we as humans can do to understand more, feel better, and live with each other in better ways.
This course will work within the broad context of our human experience and will also be down to earth and practical. The lessons will come to you in different formats so that you can use a variety of senses and learning styles to incorporate the material. I will give you information and exercises to create different experiences, but you will develop your own sense of what works for you and your own mindfulness goals, and you will evaluate your own progress.
Specifically, you will learn:
- how to define mindfulness
- what are the historical roots of mindfulness practices
- methods of writing that access different consciousness states
- how journaling leads to increased observation of experience
- ways to reduce unproductive evaluation while writing
- how to focus journaling on the present moment
- writing techniques that increase creativity in mindful space
- ongoing practices to keep mindfulness growing
This course will give you novel writing ideas that are fun and enlightening. You will leave with new knowledge and information, but that knowledge isn’t the goal of the course. The goal is how you will use it to make your experiences feel richer and fuller, to increase the quality of your engagement in your own life. Enjoy!
Please proceed to Lesson 1: What is mindfulness?