Journaling can change your life. Yes, we said that. It changed ours! In life we often have a hard time expressing all emotions and feelings. Especially, the hard ones like anger, rage, sadness, vulnerability, weaknesses and self doubt. Those are hard for us and those are hard for women in general. We are the care takers. We are the ones to take care of others emotions. We often don’t have time and space to take care of our own.
Journaling has been a life changer. It provides a safe space to sort through emotions that we might not otherwise express. This is so important because we want and need to process all emotions and feelings. We need to feel them and let them move through us. Journaling gives us a place to do this. There are sooo many different types of journaling styles and there is no one size fits all. Our favorite types of journaling styles are:
- Gratitude: In this style, you list three things each day that you are grateful for. Each day needs to be three different things! We found ourselves taking the easy way out and listing the same three things every day. That takes the magic and emotion out of the experience.
- Done list: In this style you list everything you have done that day. It can be big things and little things. You just list everything you have done and feel good for getting through the day.
- Emotion: In this style you list out some hard emotions you might be dealing with. For example, you might list anger. Under that emotion you list everything that made you angry that day. It does not need to be pretty, does not need to be neat or spelled correctly! Just let it flow out of you and get those emotions out.
- Compassion: In this style you speak kindly to yourself. You encourage yourself as you would your child. You fill yourself up with love and compassion.
- Recap: In this style you recap your day and what happened that day. Think dear diary with this journaling style. This is similar to a keeping a record of the story of your life.
- Brain dump: In this style you literally just word vomit all over the page. Anything that pops into your head you write down and get it out. Anything at all, write it down. Once we started this and it took AN HOUR to get everything out;) We like to think of this as clearing space in our brains. We are downloading all of the “stuff” in our brain onto the pages of our journal to make space.
- Journal Prompts: This is what we use with the girls in class and we want to provide these for you too. We will be posting a journal prompt every Monday on our instagram page @firstloveyoufly. We encourage you to make a commitment to yourself and use that prompt to journal.
To wrap this up, the beauty about journaling and journaling prompts is that they can change with you. Maybe one style works for you one day and another, another day. There are no rules and no mistakes. This FLY process is personal to you and your journey. So get to it girl!
