My Experience With The Journey Journal

We had to write forty entries in our journal about what was going through our heads for the most part but more than just writing random thoughts that were running through our minds we had  to “go for the jugular”  which basically means to really dive into deep though and express your true feelings in your writing. Anger, happiness, sadness, frustration, stress, these are some of the emotions that you might feel when doing this sort of exercise, that and the occasional hand cramp that you could get from writing too much or too fast. What was the solution? That’s where the “Life Compass” comes into play. 

The life compass was part of the journey journal that at least for me served as an equalizer after venting so much in my writing. The compass was drawing of a circle on your notebook with a word written in the upper, lower, left and right part of the circle. The words that were written were: physical, psychological or mental, emotional and spiritual. The point of each word is to give them a number value from 1 to 3 expressing how well you were feeling at the time for each category. The lower the value the worst you were feeling and the higher the value the better, this helped in seeing progress from week to week on just how much a person can change in many different aspects of their life. In my experience I found the compass useful and I noticed that my spiritual value never went down from 3, this was exciting for me because I tend to pride myself in being a very open person that can adapt to different points of view on numerous aspects and I felt that the spiritual value reflected that part of me. That said though, the values for the other categories did fluctuate frequently. For me the journal experience was a very interesting idea that gave me a different perspective and I could even continue doing it as a way of venting in my writing whenever I feel the need or a way to relieve stress.