A SPIRITUAL JOURNAL

As you enter the new year, consider keeping a spiritual journal. Write spontaneously and freely.

      A daily writing practice, such as journaling, is healing at all levels. When you write, you become both writer and reader. Just as reading can awaken places of inner wisdom, so can writing. Writing helps you understand your own mind. It helps you listen to yourself. It connects you to heart, intuition, creativity, and divine intelligence.

      At times it may seem as if you are writing nonsense—but if you continue writing, you are bound to find deeper meanings and messages hidden in the words. The discipline of writing gives your intuition a chance to express itself. It gives voice to your heart as well as your mind. Rereading what you have written, especially after some time has passed, can give you greater insight into yourself, the journey you are on, and reveal even more insights from the angels and your intuition.

      Throughout your life, you have been socialized and censored, told what to think and feel, admonished to be good, afraid you might not be good enough. Writing gives you the possibility to be totally spontaneous and unrestricted, free to let whatever flows—flow.

      Research supports the positive effects of writing as a means of releasing stress and boosting the immune system.[i] Writing down your visions and goals is also a way to help manifest them. So, whether you write poems, stories, journals, or letters to your guardian angel, you will reap many benefits. We will talk more about guardian angels in future lessons. For now, just know that—yes, you have one. Whether or not you see angels, angels see you. This is enough.

---

 5. “Writing about stressful life events helped reduce symptoms of asthma and rheumatoid arthritis in patients with these chronic illnesses. The effects of the writing exercise were still evident four months later and resulted in clinically meaningful improvements in patient symptoms. The new findings add to a growing body of evidence linking mental health to physical wellbeing. Although researchers are not sure how this technique—called "expressive writing"—can lead to improvements in health, they speculate that it may help people better cope with stress, which can take a deleterious toll on health. On average, asthma patients who wrote about their most stressful life event showed a 19% improvement in a specific measure of lung function, while control asthma patients showed no change, the researchers report. Rheumatoid arthritis patients were found to have a 28% reduction in symptoms, whereas control arthritis patients did not improve. Ventilation of negative emotion, even just to an unknown reader, seems to have helped these patients acknowledge, bear, and put into perspective their distress. In this and a growing number of studies, it is not simply mind over matter, but is it clear that mind matters.” The Journal of the American Medical Association, April 14, 1999;281:1304-1309, 1328-1.