If it makes you freeze, it's not a prompt [summer journaling club week 2]

Kia ora fam x

Hope this edition of the Summer Journaling Club finds you doing ok, despite the truly horrific things happening in the world. I'm glad you're here. There are ways to work through and document all that we are witnessing and living through without giving way to despair (I promise!)

I've had some awesome feedback after last week's blog - thank you for letting me know. I am stoked so many of you found the hacks helpful.

I wonder if the the reason these hacks feel revolutionary is because they're not difficult? In my experience, writing prompts have a way of making us freeze. That makes them anti-prompt by definition. Just look at these. Some of them sound inviting on the surface, but faced with the blank page, I know a lot of us would feel as if we'd been asked to dead-lift our own body weight.

By comparison, these hacks feel more like a gentle jog around the block. Sometimes a good challenging writing prompt is just what we need, especially to extend our technical skills, but for a daily consistent practice of journaling we need the opposite kind of prompts. That's why I call them hacks. The last thing we need to do is to assign ourselves a weighty intellectual and emotional exercise to solve first thing in the morning.

We need to set a pace we can enjoy and make a regular habit of. The aim is to remove pressure, eliminate self-judgment and get comfortable enough that the mind can move out of the way and let creativity take over.

This is the substance of Week 2.

Why Journal? Spiritual hacks