Journaling | Intuition Development | Emotional Wellness
Tune In To Your Inner Voice
Access the healing powers of your inner guidance through journaling exercises, daily journal prompts, tools for building intuition, and resources for emotional wellness & emotional healing.
The Healing Powers of Anxiety: How I Reduced My Anxiety & Let It Heal Me
I’ve come to believe that every emotion has a purpose. If there was no purpose for an emotion, our bodies wouldn’t produce that emotional experience. Now, this definitely doesn’t mean every emotion is pleasant, and it doesn’t even mean that we accomplish the purpose of the emotion each time it arises, but I do believe that every emotion – even anxiety – arises for a good reason.
For me, anxiety served as a helpful way to block out other emotions that it wasn’t time for me to address yet. Anxious thoughts are distracting, they keep us busy and leave us with no time or energy to address deeper matters. The unpleasant physical sensations associated with anxiety are also very good at convincing us to turn around and run from what we’re feeling because anxiety feels really unpleasant to sit with.
Anxiety is a natural, protective response of the human body that we’re all capable of calling upon. But, looking at my mother and grandmother, I can see that there is definitely an intergenerational dynamic to my relationship with anxiety. Part of that intergenerational dynamic is also being completely oblivious to the fact that we have anxiety. And what a grand plan that is! If you don’t even know you’re anxious, you’re an extra step away from getting to the root of the hard things you don’t know how to address yet.
Journal Prompts To Find Your Purpose
Sometimes we go around life chasing purpose like it’s something that can be checked off a list. It’s tempting to believe that we will have - or find - purpose when we accomplish some tangible thing in the outside world. I wonder, though, is purpose more of a feeling that we’re seeking? The feeling of being connected to something meaningful, or maybe just the feeling of being connected at all?
Maybe that’s the case for you, maybe it’s not, but whatever has you seeking purpose right now, I know that you have important things to say to yourself that are worth listening to.
These journal prompts to find your purpose are designed to help you reflect deeply on what it means to have purpose, why purpose matters to you, and what the drive for purpose that you’re feeling has to tell you about yourself and your life’s journey.
What does it mean to have a purpose in life?
Is it important to have a purpose in life? Why or why not?
Think of a time that you did something you felt had purpose. Write about your memory of this experience. What did you do? Why did this feel purposeful to you? What thoughts did you experience? What emotions did you experience? How did others respond to you?
What does it feel like to do something that has purpose? What other emotions do you associate with this experience? What physical sensations are associated with these emotions?
Search Your Heart With These Journal Prompts For Self Reflection
According to Plato, Socrates famously said, “[T]he unexamined life is not worth living…”. I think that’s taking it too far, but self reflection does play a very important role in living the good life. Without moments of self reflection we can find ourselves cut off from who we are and what makes like meaningful. Without sufficient self reflection, it’s all too easy to find ourselves living a life that isn’t truly aligned with who we are on a deep level. Self reflection is how we bring back to life parts of ourselves that have gone in to hiding in the face of pressure to conform and the humdrum of daily life.
There’s a line in a Rilke poem that I love that goes like this: “[T]hough we strain against the deadening grip of daily necessity, I sense there is this mystery: All life is being lived.”[1] Self reflection is part of tapping in to the heartbeat and the mystery of the life being lived inside you, so take a short break from the necessities of daily living to spend a little time with yourself with these journal prompts for self reflection.
Write about a moment in time when life felt really meaningful or fulfilling to you. Write about everything you remember about this moment including any sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and feelings that are associated with this memory. What about this moment made it feel particularly meaningful or fulfilling to you? Does this tell you anything about what makes life feel meaningful or fulfilling to you?
New Year’s Resolution: Journal This Year!
If your New Year’s resolution is to journal, you’re in the right place! We’re going talk about tips and tricks for making journaling your New Year’s resolution. From making a plan for journaling success in the new year to responding effectively to the hurdles along the way, we’ll cover how to incorporate journaling into your self care routine this year.
As you embark on your New Year’s resolution to journal, let’s talk about why you want to journal, what kind of journal you’ll keep, how often you’ll journal, how you’ll respond to moments of struggle, what you’ll need to get started, and what to do when your journaling plan just isn’t working.
Everyday Writing Prompts For Wellbeing
Taking a few moments each day to connect with yourself through writing is a wonderful habit to get in to. These everyday writing prompts for your journal are designed to help you put together a daily writing routine using repeatable everyday writing prompts. If you’re looking for a unique writing prompt for each day of the year, check out this article with 365 Daily Writing Prompts.
I’m proud of myself today because…
The best thing about today was…
The hardest thing about today was…
The experience I had the strongest emotional to today was…I think I had a strong emotional reaction to this because…
Here’s one sentence to summarize my day…
I felt the most fulfilled today when…
Quotes About Dreaming: Exploring The Meaning of Dreams
Almost everyone dreams, but dreaming is still a bit of a mystery to all of us. Let’s explore the meaning of dreams with these quotes about dreaming from psychologists, a neuroscientist, mythologist, and classic literature. We’ll even explore quotes about dreaming from a TV series and a philosophical aeronautics engineer from the 1920s.
#1 Quote about dreaming
“Heaven and hell are within us and all the gods are within us…They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. That is what myth is. Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the organs of the body in conflict with each other.” Joseph Campbell in Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers
Deep Philosophical Journal Prompts
Journaling about life's profound questions can offer valuable insights into your personal worldview. By gaining a deeper understanding of how you see the world, you become more aware of the reasons behind your actions and the way you approach life. Allowing your mind to explore these deeper inquiries also opens you up to the mysteries of existence and the vastness of the universe. I invite you to grab your journal and reflect on life’s mysteries with these deep philosophical journal prompts.
How do you know that an action is right or wrong? What does it mean for something to be right or wrong, ethically speaking? Is doing what is right important? Why or why not?
Is it ever ethically okay to do something wrong? If so, when is it okay to something wrong?
What is the meaning of life?
If you change over time and your cells change over time, what makes you still you?
Why is there something rather than nothing? Where did the first thing in the universe come from?
Journal Prompts For Finding Yourself
Finding yourself often involves uncovering the things about yourself that you’ve hidden away based on messages you’ve received from the world about what is and isn’t acceptable to think, feel, do, and be. We all want to be loved, accepted, and connected to other humans. From the time we’re an infant we’re dependent on human connection for our very survival. We go throughout life with this hard-wired desire to connect and belong, and sometimes the need to connect and belong causes us to lose touch with deep parts of ourselves that we believe pose a threat to belonging and connection. Because living life as the full and complete you can feel like a threat to human connection, sometimes the journey to find yourself can be a bit scary and confusing. These journal prompts for finding yourself are designed to gently guide you through a conversation with yourself to help you re-discover the you that exists beyond the fear of what the world has to say about it.
What Does A Snake Dream Mean?
Your dream symbols are unique to you, but sometimes it helps to have guidance about what a particular symbol in a dream might mean to get started interpreting your dream. Use the information here about snake dreams as a guide, but don’t let it override your intuitive sense of your snake dream’s meaning for you.
Before you read about what your snake dream might mean, try answering these questions to tap into your intuitive sense of the meaning of your snake dream before you’re too influenced by the information in the rest of this article. It can also help to write out the answers to these questions in a dream journal.
What did the dream snake look like? What color or colors was the snake? What size was the snake?
How was the dream snake behaving? Was the snake sitting still? Was the snake moving? If so, how was the snake moving? What was the dream snake doing? Was the snake aggressive? Was the dream snake interacting with you or anyone or anything else in the dream? If so, how was the dream snake interacting with people and things in the dream?
Where was the dream snake located? What were the surroundings like? What was the dream snake near?
When was the last time you saw a snake?
Does the dream snake remind you of any particular snake you’ve seen before (in real life, a movie, television show, art, another dream, etc.)?
What was your emotional reaction to the dream snake? If there were other people in the dream, how did they respond to the snake?
Self Care Journal Prompts For Nurturing Mind, Body & Soul
We get a TON of messages about what self care is and what self care isn’t. Despite all those messages (and maybe in part because of them), there was a time when I honestly found self care really confusing. In large part, this is because I was looking outside myself to answer my questions about what self care looks like.
We’re told self care is getting a pedicure, or buying ourselves a treat, or setting boundaries, or standing up for ourselves, or taking a bubble bath, or we’re told that thinking self care is pedicures and bubble baths is a “not deep” silly way to talk about self care. What I learned when I began to use journaling to really listen to myself is that self care can be a bubble bath, pedi, setting boundaries, or pretty much anything else that actually makes me feel cared for by me. Writing it out this way it seems so obvious, but this was truly lost on me for a long time.
Self care was definitely not something I was taught growing up, and I didn’t really know how to listen to myself to find out how I needed to experience care. It turns out that the self care I most needed was learning how to hear myself over the noise of ingrained coping patterns and societal messages. Journaling became my designated time to sit and listen to myself and hear about my needs and desires. As my journaling practice helped me connect more deeply with myself, I also learned to hear myself throughout the day. This made self care so much easier! Sometimes I fall into old patterns and quell my own voice and needs to accommodate someone or something else, and sometimes life is just hard and that makes self care difficult, but it is so much easier to meet my own needs now that I know what they are!
I wrote these self care journal prompts with the hope that these prompts will help you nurture your connection with yourself and learn what self care looks like for you.
How Intuition Benefits Wellbeing
To dig into how intuition benefits wellbeing, we first need to talk about what intuition is. I explored this more deeply in my post on what intuition means, but by way of recap here, intuition is a quick way of knowing that doesn’t come from logical reasoning or the conscious mind. Intuitive knowing comes from an accumulation of all the knowledge that we hold; some of this knowledge comes from our personal experiences and some of it comes from inherited instinctual information. Intuition is an important way that we arrive at conclusions and make decisions. We often think of intuition as being an animal-like instinct coming from our spirit, or a feeling more than an intellectual knowing. Intuition might speak to us through words, phrases, music, images, or symbols that float into our mind. Intuition is one of those things that can be hard to define in words, but easier to feel or explain metaphorically. With that definition of intuition in mind, let’s explore how intuition benefits wellbeing.
We’re already using our intuition, so we are better off when we learn how to use our intuition well.
How To Use The 5 Dream Types To Understand Your Dreams
Even when you don’t understand the symbols in your dream, you can still learn something by analyzing your dream patterns. I recently read a very interesting dream study that analyzed more than 200 dreams and identified 5 dream types that almost all dreams fall into. Even more interesting, the study explained how as dreamers make psychological progress, their dreams move through these 5 dream types.
I’m excited to tell you what I learned from this very interesting piece of research (“Dream Content Corresponds With Dreamer’s Psychological Problems and Personality Structure and With Improvement in Psychotherapy: A Typology of Dream Patterns in Dream Series of Patients in Analytical Psychotherapy” by Christian Roesler), because to me it really drove home the importance of dream journaling to help track dreams over time. Full disclosure, I’m not a psychologist or therapist, but I do love dream journaling and reading about what psychologists have to say about dreams! What I read in this dream study absolutely rang true for what I’ve noticed in my own dreams, and I think it can help all of us better understand our dreams.
Warm Gratitude Prompts For A Grateful Heart
Let’s explore what it means to be grateful (and even what it means to be ungrateful) together. These gratitude prompts will help you recall grateful moments and memories, reflect on what you’re grateful for and how it feels to experience gratitude. These gratitude prompts are also designed to help you explore messages you’ve received about gratitude since childhood and delve into how those messages might be impacting how you experience gratitude today. Grab your journal, and let’s get started!
Gratitude Prompts
What are you grateful to have experienced in the last year?
Did you experience gratitude today? What are you grateful for about today?
When you were a child, did the adults in your life express or exhibit gratitude? If yes, what kinds of things were the adults in your life particularly likely to express or exhibit gratitude about? How did they express or exhibit gratitude (in other words, how did you know they were feeling grateful)? How have these childhood experiences influenced the way you express and experience gratitude today?
What is something that feels like of silly to be grateful for, but that you’re still grateful for? Why are you grateful for this? Why does it feel a little silly to be grateful for this?
Grounding Journal Prompts For Embodiment
Explore what it means to be connected and attuned to your body and your five senses with these journal prompts designed to help you on the journey to live an embodied life. We’ll begin with journal prompts that explore your connection to your five senses, and end with journal prompts to help you reflect on what it means to you to live an embodied life.
Write about a childhood memory of having a pleasant emotional response to a sound, scent, or taste. Write down everything you can remember about the experience and how it felt. What emotions did you experience? What physical sensations were associated with those emotions?
Think about a texture that you find pleasant (this could be a food texture, clothing texture, etc.). Write about this texture in as much detail as possible. What does it feel like? What emotions do you associate with it? Why do you think you find this texture pleasant?
In an average day, how often do you consciously pay attention to and experience pleasant sensations associated with sound? Take a few deep breaths and then try to lightly focus on only the sounds you are hearing for 5 minutes. Describe the sounds you heard. How did you feel focusing on sound for a few minutes? What emotions arose for you? What physical sensations were associated with those emotions? What thoughts arose?
Night Journal Prompts For A Peaceful Heart
Ending your day with journaling can be a relaxing way to ease out the hustle and bustle of the day. Journaling at night can also help you connect with yourself, understand yourself better, and ease into sleep. In this article you’ll find night journal prompts along with four fun night journal exercises that incorporate poetry, music, meditation, and free association into your journaling practice.
Night journal prompts
Here are a few night journal prompts to end your day with! Choose a few night journal prompts from the list below and use them every day, or mix up your night journal practice and choose different prompts every night.
What’s one thing I can do to make myself feel cared for this evening?
How connected with myself did I feel throughout the day today? How grounded (in the present moment and connected to my body) did I feel today? How often did I check in with myself today to see how I was doing and what I needed?
Healing Journal Prompts For Mental Health
These journal prompts are designed to help you work through difficult emotions when they arise and to help you explore the state of your mental health and consider what better mental health looks like for you. I’m not a therapist and this isn’t the same thing as therapy, these are simply questions that have helped me improve my own mental health. A lot of the journal prompts on this website are journal prompts for mental health, so feel free to explore and find journal prompts that are a good fit for you. Check out the suggestions for more mental health journal prompts at the end of this article, too.
What Does A Water Dream Mean?
What does your dream about water mean?
Your dream symbols are unique to you, but sometimes it helps to have a little guidance about what a particular symbol in a dream might mean to get you on the right path for interpreting your dream. Use the information here about water dreams as a guide, but don’t let it override your intuitive sense of the water dream’s meaning for you.
Before you read about what your water dream might mean, try answering these questions to tap into your intuitive sense of the meaning of your water dream before you’re too influenced by the information in the rest of this article. It can help to write out the answers to these questions in a dream journal.
What did the dream water look like? Was it a river, pond, lake, ocean, sea, puddle, pool, drinking water, etc.? What color was the dream water? Was there a current? Was the dream water calm? Was the dream water frozen?
Where was the dream water located? Was the dream water in a natural location for water?
Does the dream water remind you of any particular water you’ve seen before (perhaps in a movie, television show, art, real life, or a previous dream)?
Morning Journal Prompts For Emotional Wellness
Starting your morning with journaling can be a nice way to ease into your day. Journaling in the morning can also help you begin your day with intention and self-connection. In this post you’ll find a few daily morning journal prompts to choose from along with four fun morning journaling exercises that incorporate poetry, music, meditation, and free association into your journaling practice.
Daily morning journal prompts
Here are a few morning journal prompts to start your day with! Choose a few morning journal prompts from the list below and use them every day, or mix up your morning journaling and choose different prompts every day.
How am I feeling emotionally this morning? What do I need emotionally this morning?
How am I feeling physically this morning? What do I need physically this morning?
How are my energy levels this morning? How can I honor where my energy levels are at today?
How grounded am I feeling this morning? (i.e., how in the present moment and connected to my body am I feeling?)
What do I want to accomplish today?
How am I planning to build self care into my day today? In other words, how am I planning to take care of myself today? How am I planning to take care of myself emotionally today? How am I planning to take care of myself physically today?
Journal Prompts For Positive Self Talk
We can be so used to the way that we talk to ourselves that we don’t notice when our self talk is impacting us negatively. When I really started paying attention to the way I talked to myself and questioning my self talk, I was surprised to see how unkind I was being towards myself. Working on changing my self talk was one of the first steps in my healing journey (read a little more about that here, if you’d like). Working on my self talk was part of how I learned to create safety for myself, and this felt sense of safety unlocked the door to a bigger emotional healing journey.
Paying attention to the way I talked to myself and journaling and reflecting on my self talk was very helpful to me, and I hope it will be helpful to you as well. To that end, these journal prompts for positive self talk are designed to help you take an inventory of your self talk, evaluate your self talk and explore the roots of your self talk, and make a plan for creating positive self talk.
Journal prompts for positive self talk
As you work through these journal prompts, keep in mind that some of your self talk may be full phrases or sentences that you consciously say to yourself in your mind. However, some of your self talk might be fleeting thoughts that cross your mind without being fully put into words, and your self talk may even be a pattern of behavior or pattern of emotional response without accompanying words (I like to think of this as the internal equivalent of all the non-verbal cues that get exchanged when you’re communicating with someone else).
Intuition Meaning: Psychologists, Scientists, and Artists On The Meaning Of Intuition
Fittingly, intuition is one of those things that’s easier to sense than it is to define, but reflecting on what intuition means can be helpful to developing intuition and learning how to effectively use intuition in your daily life. To me, intuition means using the full knowledge of my body, not just what is consciously in my mind right now, or what I can consciously recall at this moment. Intuition is a “just knowing” feeling, but it also more than that. Intuition has its own language of sorts.