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Pen & Paper: A Creative Journaling Exercise for the New Year
Welcome to this month’s Pen & Paper: Living Between the Lines written by the amazing Hope Wallace Karney. To learn more about Hope and the column, please check out the announcement post!
A Creative Journaling Exercise for the New Year
As we start off the new year, it is a good time to take stock of where we are, where our thoughts are, and what we are feeling.
I found a fun way to document this on Ali Edwards blog a couple years ago, and love doing it every now and then to ground myself.
She called it ‘Naming Your Petals‘, which she came up with after her son brought home an exercise her did in school. I thought it was brilliant and got to work on my own straight away.
I named my petals back in 2009 (shown in my journal)—in this spread I printed the petal file Ali offered, and traced it onto a tea stained coffee filter, then cut it out.
For my latest petals (2012), I just printed out the petals and cut them out. I plan on adding them to my journal later, and writing a but more about each petal as I reflect upon it.
This is a great way to see how you have grown, where you are en route to your dreams, and balancing yourself when it becomes hard to decide what to focus on.
Go ahead and give it a try—read Ali’s post first, then create your own petals and start naming them. They can be big or small – there are no right or wrong answers here. They can be soul deep, or surface thoughts—just start by naming things that represent you NOW.
Once you have them named, take a day or two to just look at them every now and then, thinking about what they mean to you. Then sit down with your journal, and write a bit about each petal—here are some questions to help get your journaling started:
Overall…
- What was the first petal you named? Why did it come to you so easily (perhaps this is something you self consciously need to focus on the most)?
- What was the last petal you named? It is something you are avoiding? Something you don’t give enough thought to?
- Did any petal surprise you? If so, why?
- Did any petal make you feel guilty? If so, why?
- What order would you put your petals in, as far as importance to you and your well being?
- Any petals you wish you could change now? Explain.
- How do your petals tell your story?
- Which petal do you wish you could pluck off?
For each petal…
- What are your thoughts when reading what you wrote?
- List three things that elaborate on each petal
- Now write one sentence for each list item (this is a good way to jumpstart journaling)
Try and do the exercise again in a month or two and see the difference in where you are then.
images: hope wallace karney
UPDATE: Download Flower Petal Template created by Ali Edwards (link to download on her site is down so we’ve added it here for you!)
Related "ripples" you might enjoy:
- Pen & Paper: 5 Blogs for Journaling and Story Catching Inspiration
- Pen & Paper: 13 Books for Journaling Inspiration
- Pen & Paper: Overcoming Your Journaling Fears
- Pen & Paper: Journaling E-Course Giveaway!
- Pen & Paper: Journaling the Non-Beautiful
This entry was posted on Monday, January 16th, 2012 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Creativity & Inspiration, Guest Bloggers, Inspired, Pen & Paper, Random, When You Feel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
9 Responses to “Pen & Paper: A Creative Journaling Exercise for the New Year”
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I LOVED this exercise!!!! putting perfectionism aside to create the perfect, visually appealing and thought provoking flower…I simply sat down and DID IT…and love t he results. I created mine on a blank Filofax page and now have it tucked in the middle of my weekly calendar where each day I can see the word symbols for my hopes, dreams, and goals for 2012. Thank you for the inspiration…like flowers do, this year I think I am really going to g.r.o.w.
Twitter: leecurrie
says:
LOVE this. I’ll have it all done and put into my Project Life for this week. Thanks so much HWC for reminding me of this brilliant idea :) and to AE too, for developing it!
This what I’ll do when I come back home from work, can’t wait!
Twitter: leecurrie
says:
Got it done! Thank you so much, wonderful project: http://thelinarstudio.typepad.com/embracelife/2012/01/lifting-naming-your-petals.html
Twitter: benspoont
says:
Beautiful!
Oh this was so fun, so good. Perfect for where I at and gathering my thoughts…Thanks to Lee for bringing this to my attention!! If you are interested here is my blog post about it:
http://currychaos.blogspot.com/2012/01/my-petals-thanks-lee.html
Thank you SOOOO much for the push! :)
Twitter: TraceyFisher1
says:
Love this. Thanks for sharing. Can’t wait to try it!
I wish I could post a pic of my flower! I just did mine. Thanks for this post! Love it for sparking journaling ideas.
[...] talking about Ali Edwards in last month’s post, I realized that there are so many inspiring blogs—many that you may not know about. This month, [...]