Today’s thoughts are on journaling. It´s not something I have done or have thought to do on a regular basis up until over a year ago when I fell into a deep depression after having left the UK show circuit where I was selling and went back home to Germany in 2017. 2016 was a bad year for me, June and the announcement of Brexit didn’t help because I noticed that sales reduced almost overnight and my takings went down rapidly.

I was suffering from what I thought was burnout. I was falling asleep at night, only to wake up at 2 am and then not sleeping for the rest of the night. I felt ill, had very little or no energy which was very unlike me, and I was hanging onto the edge of a mental cliff face, the marks of my fingernails having gouged deep trammel lines into it as I started to plummet into the dark, black depths. I was very scared as I had never felt so bad in this way before, I really thought this was it and I was going mad.

I decided to Google solutions for getting a good night’s sleep. Like anyone with a time hungry life, I needed solutions and I needed them fast as we all do these days. I needed them especially fast because I was reliant on my ever dwindling money. I looked under meditation even though I had never meditated in my life, I needed a quick fix. I was surprised to find it in the shape of a meditation machine which made an enormous difference to my sleeping pattern after a couple of weeks. The people I spoke to about it on the telephone were so compassionate, helpful and understanding and I was grateful.

It was shortly after that I visited a homeopath and she told me I wasn’t going mad, but I did have adrenal fatigue brought on by the stress of my lifestyle and possibly by the menopause. Thank goodness, I at least had a name for what I was feeling. Isn´t strange how once we can stick a label on something, it helps us to feel calmer? I could move forward in a less desperate and more consequent way.

Back where I live in Germany, fell into a depression because I wasn’t doing the show circuit which I had relied on for my connection to people. I stopped washing my hair and didn’t want to get out of bed even, once more, a first for me.

Once again good old Google came to the rescue. Again, I was looking for a quick fix to my problems and I came across an online course which for me, at that moment made sense. A mixture of binaural beats, which of course, I was already hooked on, given I had bought the meditation machine. There were also expert videos from psychologists, psychotherapists and neurologists, as well as others and FB Lives with snippets on a how to live better by changing your beliefs, and a lively, supportive FB Group for 6 months. I needed no convincing whatsoever and signed up immediately.

In the meantime, I had joined another online course for self-discovery and a different FB Group for manifesting energy. It is where I, in both of the online courses and the FB Group discovered a parallel, which was journaling to heal.

A journal enables free thought and expression, a liberation of your inner you, whether good or bad, and it is private to you unless you choose to share it. It is scientifically supported that journaling is healing because by allowing your thoughts onto paper, you lessen their hold over you.

By expressing yourself and your true thoughts in a journal, you will, if you come from an abusive parental controlling childhood, or any other childhood where you have felt trapped, enable yourself to start healing with freedom and start to live life freely. No-one will read all those thoughts and feelings which you keep hidden away under tight lock and key, except you and it is you that is the most important element in all this, you and your healing count, more than anything.

It has many benefits, it clears our head and it allows us to write down those fleeting, unfettered thoughts which would normally be forgotten in the blink of an eye. It captures those insights and aha moments which are so important in our growth as a person, whether we are 20 or 80, as we constantly expand and grow.

It enables us to go back over our writing either immediately or at a later date, when we feel ready to face them full on and start to use them to heal.

By writing those sometimes terrifying thoughts that float and race around in our head, threatening to overwhelm us, we can then use our finger to trace a path over these words in order to release them forever from our psyche, our souls and deepest inner selves. I do it often now and it truly works for me.

By getting the knot of trouble out of my head and onto paper, it allows me to then forget about it, or I can alternatively look at it and disassociate myself from it. It may come back to me another time and tap me on the shoulder at some point in the future and say, “Hey, Charmaine, you need to deal with me, we have unfinished business,” but that is fine. Why? Because I have already started the first step of dealing with it by putting pen to paper. When we deal with our problems and tangled knots in the future, we know that they are more diluted and not so dangerous anymore. So much that they cannot hurt us anymore, the way they have in the past because we allowed and gave them permission to.

When journaling, we are processing past events and by including forgiveness and gratefulness for the lessons we have learnt from others we benefit greatly from it. By wielding our pen/pencil as a sword we learn to vanquish the demons of the past by doing battle with them on paper and we allow ourselves to unleash our buried power.