Of Journal Beginnings

I've been journaling since 1978, the year my son was born. In 1993, after I read the book, At a Journal Workshop by Dr. Ira Progoff, I started using the word processor to journal. I found the ability to edit, revise, and print on my computer to be an improvement over the handwritten journals I had been keeping until then.

Using the Journal Workshop book as a guide, I began a Daily Log and a Dream Journal. Although I had never attended any of the Intensive Journal Workshops, I found the book to be instructive and practical, and was able to apply the method of using Twilight Imagery, or as Carl Jung call it, Active Imagination, to my journaling.

Progoff’s take on journaling goes beyond writing circles around one’s daily life. His book leads the journaler to work on her life as though it were a work of art, recalling major turning points along the way, noting the steppingstones (autobiographical, images of objective sequence of events), and significant scenes from one’s life that one followed, intersections and roads not taken. All this is done in a notebook filled with blank lined pages.

He asks the journal writer the question “Where are you now?” as a point to begin reflecting. There’s a section to record Dialogue between one’s self and one other, perhaps someone we work with or are in relationship with. A major activity directed by Progoff is the recording of dreams and dream imagery, and combining these symbols and feelings with the events of our daily lives. Through all these various sections of the intensive journal, Progoff leads the writer into depths of the unconscious, bringing to the surface awareness and understanding, resulting in open communication between one’s self and one’s soul.

This is an excerpt from one article printed in Psychology Today back in 1981: For those who want to plumb the sources of meaning, Progoff likes to use a metaphor that many find helpful. He says that there's an underground stream of images and recollections within each of us. The stream is nothing more or less than our interior life. When we enter it, we ride it to a place where it wants to go. He says this is not a discursive method, not analytic: "There's no neat wrap-up; you don't end up with 'insight.' It's an event, and when it's happened, your life is different." 

from "The Way of the Journal"  by Robert Blair Kaiser at http://www.intensivejournal.org/articles/main.htm

That’s my understanding of it. I just wanted to pass on this piece of information for those of you who haven't heard of him or for those who might want to get into some really deep transformational writing.

It's been at least eight years since I practiced his method of journaling. Even now I am not ready to post that kind of writing on the web! Writing with a sense of privacy while one muddles through all the tangles and knots of living, trying to make sense, putting things into perspective, is needed sometimes.

I think my paper journals are here to stay.

(see http://journals.aol.com/bgilmore725/Wanderer/entries/808 and http://journals.aol.com/bgilmore725/Wanderer/entries/721)