The Witch's Book of Self-Care: Magical Ways to Pamper, Soothe, and Care for Your Body and Spirit - Arin Murphy-Hiscock 2018
Journaling Exercises
Mental and Emotional Self-Care
A great way to remember that happiness is within reach is to list things that bring you joy; write them in your self-care journal. This can sometimes be overwhelming or daunting to do without a context, so a great way to approach it is to work with a specific subject. The following journaling exercises will help you explore some specific details to give you insight into your larger self.
Journaling Exercise: Sensory Gratitude
One way to feel more connected to the world around you—and to discover how you can further expand your methods of self-care—is to explore your relationship with your physical senses. What brings you joy when using your senses?
What You Need:
♦ Self-care journal
♦ Pen or pencil
What to Do:
1. Center and ground.
2. Take a few moments to open your mind and think about each sense in turn. Write down your answers, then move on to thinking about the next sense.
♦ What sights bring you joy?
♦ What sounds bring you joy?
♦ What scents bring you joy?
♦ What tastes bring you joy?
♦ What brings you joy when you touch it?
3. Don’t censor or criticize yourself as you make your lists. No one is going to see this other than yourself. If you like burying your face in kitten fur, write it down. If you like the smell of a freshly uncapped marker or a just-extinguished match, write it down.
4. The lists don’t need to be exhaustive. It’s enough to list one or two things during this round.
This journaling exercise makes you think about your relationship with your senses in a nonabstract way. It also helps you think about specific moments within larger actions. The smell of a freshly extinguished match is a very specific moment in the larger process of striking the match, lighting something with the flame, and then shaking or tamping out the match. Now that you know the specific moment is something that brings you joy, you can take pleasure in it the next time you light and extinguish a match. To fully recognize and appreciate it as an enjoyable sensation, be fully present in the moment that it happens.
Journaling Exercise: Seasonal Gratitude
Journaling gratitude can help you recognize more opportunities to practice thankfulness. As with joy, journaling a broad topic like gratitude can sometimes be overwhelming or daunting to do without a context, so this exercise offers you the chance to explore gratitude within a seasonal context. See also Chapter 4 for ideas about working with seasonal energies to engage in self-care.
What You Need:
♦ Self-care journal
♦ Pen or pencil
What to Do:
1. Center and ground.
2. Take a few moments to open your mind and think about each season in turn. Write down your answers, then move on to thinking about the next season.
♦ What are you thankful for in the spring?
♦ What are you thankful for in the summer?
♦ What are you thankful for in the fall?
♦ What are you thankful for in the winter?
3. Don’t censor or criticize yourself as you make your lists. No one is going to see this other than yourself. If you’re thankful for having an excuse to stay inside more during winter, write it down.
4. The lists don’t need to be exhaustive. It’s enough to list one or two things during this round.
Tip:
♦ If you live in a geographic location that doesn’t have a lot of variation between the seasons, think about the yearly calendar instead. For example, how are the seasons reflected in the produce available to you or the seasonal decorations in your town?
Journaling Exercise: Daily Gratitude
One of the principles in magic is that like attracts like. The idea behind listing things you’re grateful for is that it invites you to recognize more blessings or good things for which to be grateful. This exercise is also good for mental and emotional health. When you make a point of listing good things that happened or things you accomplished, then you start to validate your own successes. It’s healthy to be proud of getting through the day if it was hard. Go you!
At the end of the day, sit down with your self-care journal and write these things:
1. Three successes. You define what success is. If you deal with a chronic illness, a success can be “I got out of bed” or “I ate breakfast.” Maybe a success is remembering to take your multivitamin or remembering to hydrate enough to finish two refills of your water bottle at work. The key is that you have to consider it a success within the context of the kind of day you had.
2. Three things that brought you joy. Again, you get to define what a joy was on that particular day. Did your favorite song play on the radio on the way to work? Did this month’s issue of your favorite magazine subscription land in your mailbox? Did you see a cute cat on the way home? If it made you happy, write it down.
3. Three things you’re thankful for. Were you grateful for catching the early train so you had a bit of extra time to settle in before class started? Was there a computer server issue at work so you got to come home early and sit in the sun with a good book? Were you there when a friend needed to touch base today? Write it down.
Is coming up with three things hard to manage? Start with one thing in each category, then move up to two, and finally to three. You’ll find that it gets easier the more you practice it.
After doing this for a few days, you may notice that your mood in general has improved, because you’re focusing on positive stuff instead of the bad things that happen to you. The negative things tend to stick with you more easily than the positive ones; when you finally manage to put the bad things out of your mind, something will remind you of them and—guess what?—they’re back. Practicing daily gratitude by choosing to record good things instead of bad means that you are consciously choosing to search your memory for positive events. It’s another form of rewiring your brain and redirecting your thought patterns. And apart from that, it just makes you feel good to remember the nice stuff that happened.