Are you looking forward to a major religious holiday as spring arrives? Ramadan, Passover, Lent and Easter are times when people look within to deepen their connection with the deity they believe in. Even if you’re not religious, getting in touch with what you perceive as greater than yourself is a great way to begin a fresh new season.

Beyond the Gratitude Journal

Maybe you keep a gratitude journal and know that making a list of what you’re grateful for lifts your mood. But sometimes we need to go deeper, especially in challenging times. As women get older, we may have more leisure time away from paid work and we become more reflective as we watch our kids and grandkids go through the life phases we’ve traveled.

We may find ourselves accessing wisdom we didn’t know we’d acquired. If you’re like most of us, you’ve learned a thing or two along the way. But have you stopped to reflect on it?

You Don’t Have to Believe in God to Keep a Spiritual Journal

Do you like to read magazines like The Upper Room or Spirituality and Health, or anthologies like Chicken Soup for the Soul? That’s spiritual writing!

Journaling about the ineffable, whatever is the bedrock of our lives, can help you see things differently. Author Elizabeth J. Andrew, in her book Writing the Sacred Journey, says it links “our seemingly small lives to some broader truth, some vaster mystery.”

It doesn’t matter what faith tradition you come from, whether you go to church or synagogue or mosque or participate in no public worship at all. Your spiritual quest is your own personal journey to your inner, deeper self. Over my years of spiritual journaling, I’ve learned from classics like Christina Baldwin’s Life’s Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest.

In my own faith community, we’ve used Finding the Voice Within: writing as a spiritual quest for womenby Gail Collins-Ranadive, who suggests opening to what comes to mind without censoring yourself so that “your embodied life experience can become the basic material for spiritual reflection.”

Ready to Give It a Try? Here Are a Few Tips:

1. Use a good, leatherbound journal and your best pen or pencil. This is your sacred work, and it deserves the best home you can give it. Some people journal on a laptop but I find there’s something organic about using a pen and paper, thoughts traveling from the heart through the hand to the page, that connects me more deeply to the divine.
2. Write alone, in a quiet place with few distractions. I like to light a scented candle, sip a cup of tea or sit outside in the fresh air.
3. Write in a small group of women as we did in my church for years. Mutual support for the practice kept us motivated.
4. Read a favorite prayer or affirmation or sit in stillness for a moment before you begin. You might want to collect prayers or sayings and write or paste them into the back of your journal.
5. Copy a passage from Scripture and respond to it with images from your own life.
6. Write down inspiring quotes from poems, novels or movies and react to them.
7. Have a dialogue with yourself and what God or Spirit means to you.
8. Draw or paste pictures of scenes that make you feel connected to what is beyond understanding.

Have you kept a spiritual journal separate from your diary or other writing? Why or why not? What are some best practices you can share with others wanting to start?

Let’s have a conversation!