The 6th Key to Mindful Weight Loss
Journaling/Writing Daily
Written By: Kathy Best, April 25, 2018
This may sound silly, but journaling and/or writing daily has a very profound effect on you mentally, emotionally, and physically. Human beings tend to bottle up our emotions and feelings stuffing them down deep inside us never to be felt, heard, or seen again. We have been programmed that this is what we are supposed to do. Feelings and emotions are for children or just for girls. That is what we have been taught most of our lives. But it is this very programming that has created so much of the struggle and disease in our lives. Human beings, by our very nature, are emotional, feeling creatures. When we ignore or dismiss our emotions and our feelings we are cutting ourselves off from our awareness, our creative expression, and our ability to process and release that which was meant to be experienced and let go.
Our physical body has an energetic connection to our feelings and our emotions. When we bottle up negative emotions and feelings like anger, fear, regret, anxiety, sadness, loneliness, disappointment, and shame we create disharmony in our minds which is transferred to our bodies via repetitive thoughts and replaying experiences associated with negative emotions and feelings. Bruce Lipton, PhD., has written numerous books on the biology of belief and scientific evidence that proves that our environment, including our thoughts and our beliefs has more of an impact on our physical health than do our genes, our DNA, or heredity. In fact, science is only now beginning to recognize that our environment, including our mental environment, impacts our physical health and well-being as much as 90%.
When we are in the midst of a traumatic or fearful situation that causes us to spend inordinate amounts of time thinking negative thoughts and reliving negative experiences on a daily basis we put our health in jeopardy and we block our ability to resolve or release the situation. As Albert Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Journaling and writing are ways of expressing our feelings and emotions in a safe place where we can examine and process them at our leisure and begin to recognize patterns and beliefs that may be harmful or no longer of benefit to us in the present. This process can also help us to begin to take responsibility for our behaviors and our experiences. It can identify compulsive or addictive behaviors that need to be examined and replaced with healthier patterns. When we continue to do the same things and believe the same thoughts that keep getting us the negative results we don’t want, it’s time to shift the blame from our external world and the people around us to our internal world and the things we hold true about ourselves and our lives.
When we begin to observe and examine the beliefs and thoughts we hold we may find out that most of what we believe to be true is in fact untrue. Most often the beliefs and thoughts are not even our own. From the time we are tiny children we are programmed buy our parents, our siblings, are teachers, our peers, the media, our culture, and the world at large. Most of the thoughts and beliefs that we hold true are simply experiences that someone else had that made them believe something painful or fearful. For instance, if your parents grew up in an environment that was unstable with physical or emotional abuse they will likely either be abusive themselves, or they will be fearful of relationships and distrusting of most people. These fears and beliefs will be passed on to their children regardless of whether the children share the same experiences. You may have been told as a child that you were lazy or stupid, but those were not facts. They were judgements projected on to you by fearful adults reliving their own childhood pain. People carry all of these fears and beliefs with them throughout their adulthood unless or until they decide to re-examine their thoughts and beliefs. When you were a child you could not defend yourself or protect yourself from many experiences that may have been painful or harmful but this does not mean that you have to perpetuate those same experiences as an adult. You can re-create your life at any moment simply by changing your thoughts and your beliefs. Journaling and writing become an important tool in the process of emotional and physical self-healing. It can help you discover what makes you tick and how you show up in the world. They are also wonderful tools to open up your creativity and discover gifts and talents that you may not know you possess.
