Janet Ruth Falon has been keeping a vital since 1963. Why? "Most people keep journals for emotional release or reflection, which is great. But in addition to self-knowledge and support, a journal is also a place to record personal history for your own use or to share with descendants, and for some people it's the only place in their hectic lives where they take time and focus on themselves. Journaling can also be a lot of fun, a place to play and be creative. I know very few people who wouldn't benefit from some dimension of journaling."
“Therapy isn’t for everyone, certainly, but most people can benefit from at least a little introspection. The more solid your sense of self, the more you can use it as a springboard to being big in the world. Ways of going inward that can pull you outward might include everyday activities like reading, enjoying stimulating conversation, even watching Dr. Phil. Spiritual practices serve for others. But one of the most reliable methods I know, one that seems to work for almost everyone, is keeping what I call a vital journal, which energizes you as you delve into new mindfulness about the stuff of substance you’re dealing with right now. There’s something about committing thoughts to paper (or computer screen) that makes them more real, something tangible to tangle with. A vital journal is, above all, organic and not forced. It’s a tool that tunes you in without burdening you with common journaling “shoulds” like writing a certain number of times per week or writing “well.” It is your safe place, where you can bare your imperfect soul, speak your truth, and grapple with those feisty little bits of awareness as they surface." —Janet Ruth Falon for Body and Soul
TEN "RULES" FOR EXPANDED JOURNAL-KEEPING
1. You don't have to write every day -- or at any interval
2. You don't have to write just when you're sad, angry or
otherwise miserable
3. Think of the journal as a scrapbook -- and you don't have
to use only words
4. You can lie -- lying is using your imagination
5. Don't cross out, worry about spelling, or try to be a "good
writer"
6. Know your intended audience -- yourself, your descend-
ants, the world --and keep it in mind
7. Don't just keep a journal when you're on vacation; write
about your everyday life
8. Think twice before throwing out your journal, or any
particular entry
9. Title your entries so later on it will be easier to find
entries about only particular topics
10. Write about the process of journal-keeping as well as
the product
Read Janet’s tips about the use of color in journaling.
Janet Ruth Falon teaches journal-writing workshops at libraries, schools, universities, churches, synagogues and cultural institutions for students, educators, writers and anyone who wishes to learn the art of journaling. An avid journal-keeper since age eight, Janet believes that everyone – writers and non-writers alike – can find comfort in a vital journal.
Janet also created and taught journaling skills to women with breast cancer at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, and is eager to share journaling with other individuals and groups dealing with illness.
To inquire about journal writing workshops, call 215-635-1698 or to get more information, click here.
Janet Ruth Falon is the author of The Jewish Journaling Book: How to Use Jewish Tradition to Write Your Life & Explore Your Soul (Jewish Lights, 2004) and the creator of the Jewish Journaling Workshop.
Q. So what’s particularly Jewish about keeping in a journal?
JRF: It’s an amazingly Jewish pursuit. For one, there’s an historic precedent to journal-keeping. There have been times in our history when Jews kept journals, such as the when the Kabbalists used journals to record their experiences. And the Holocaust journals of survivors as well as people who perished are essential, heart-breaking documents that give us intimate portraits of what it was like to live during that terrible time. There’s also a spiritual precedent to journal-keeping. For example, it’s traditional to write in a journal during the introspective month of Elul, right before the High Holidays, and at other times of the year, such as the 40 days of counting the Omer. But journaling is wonderfully Jewish because, after all, we’re “The People of the Book.” Books – the Torah, and all the books of commentary that engage with it – are central to our identify. Words matter to us and we know their importance out in the world. We’re verbal people, inward-looking people who use words to grapple with the most important issues of our human experience.
Q. Can you provide an example of how you used journaling in an overtly Jewish way?
JRF: Sure. A few years ago I was beating myself up because I wasn’t active in a synagogue and thus didn’t think of myself as a “practicing Jew.” So I wrote a series of lists in my journal: First, a list of “Why do I want to be a Practicing Jew?” Second, I wrote a list of “What do I mean by being a Practicing Jew?” I then wrote my reactions to the two previous lists, and a final list, “How am I a Practicing Jew?’ which ended with the words “You bet I’m a practicing Jew!” I had used the journal to discover my assumptions about how I was supposed to live a Jewish life, and then to identify and appreciate my unique connections to being Jewish. It was wonderful.
To inquire about Jewish journaling writing workshops, call 215-635-1698 or click here.
In The Jewish Journaling Book, Janet Ruth Falon delves into the practical aspects of keeping a journal as well as how you can use your journal to nurture Jewish values and concerns. Using examples from her own writing, she demonstrates how journaling can unleash your creativity and reveal aspects of yourself that you may not have thought about before. She also includes 52 journaling tools that teach specific techniques to help you create and maintain a vital, living journal, from a Jewish perspective.
Click here to sample The Jewish Journaling Book.
To buy this book: $24.99 includes Shipping & Handling. Make your check payable to Janet Ruth Falon. Mail to: Janet Ruth Falon, 8132 Cadwalader Ave., Elkins Park, PA 19027. Please indicate how many books you wish to purchase (enclose $24.99 for each). Also include your phone number and email address in case of questions about your order or payment. Thank you.
“Colors in Journaling”
Writer’s Guide to Creativity (a special publi-cation of Writers Digest
June 2004
I remember reading about the creative process of award-winning South African playwright Athol Fugard. He takes about a year to mull over the project, then he maps out the characters – and finally, he makes his own ink for his fountain pen, getting the color just right to match the mood of the play that’s about to emerge. It’s fascinating, and not surprising, that Fugard, who writes so much about race relations, obsesses about creating a particular shade of ink.
This makes perfect sense to me -- because color matters. A lot. Color has as much impact on us as vivid smells, or sounds ranging from Beethoven’s Fifth to a shrieking police siren. Ask me, anywhere, at any time, to look around and write about what jumps out for me, and it’ll be color: The red walls in my home office, my husband’s purple shirt, the orange day lilies in my neighbor’s yard.
And the impact of colors has always been harnessed, in a variety of creative pursuits, to express or nurture expression. In the Middle Ages, for instance, a herald would make conscious color choices when he created a family’s coat of arms; blue, for instance, stood for truth and loyalty, while red connoted bravery, strength, generosity and justice. Pysanky, the traditional art of decorated Ukranian Easter eggs, has long banked on color association; yellow is used to depict spirituality, youth, light, purity, happiness, or wisdom, but the artist would use lavender to express patience, power, or royalty. Even today, website designers will often tap into the power of color to help achieve a particular effect; they might use blue or purple to create a calming tone, or orange or yellow to achieve a cheerful or uplifting mood.
Happily, there are many exciting ways that you can use color to enhance your personal writing. And there are many components of the writing process whose color you can control, including pens, highlighters, paper, and even the walls of the place where you write. If your journal is in a computer, you can change the “wallpaper” as well as the color of the actual letters.
-- Use color to energize yourself. If you’re in one of those moods where you sorta kinda want to write but you haven’t picked up your pen yet, choose a pen or paper whose color gets your creative juices flowing. Give me something red to write with, on, or about, and I can’t resist. Figure out your energizing color, and use it as your own personal jumpstart.
-- Use color to help yourself create the mood you want to write about. If you know that yellow is often used to create feelings of optimism and hope, and you want to write about, say, what your life might be like 20 years from now, you might want to write on yellow paper, draw a yellow border around this page, or use a yellow highlighter as you’re writing, all to imbue your writing process, non-verbally, with that mood.
-- Use color to help yourself express a feeling. These particular color choices are idiosyncratic, but for me, I only want to write in a dark, coal-black ink when I write about something to which I have a firm commitment; that’s what black means to me. On the other hand, I’ll use pink when I want to write about an issue or incident from my early childhood. Decide what various colors mean to you – maybe even list this somewhere accessible in your journal -- and use them accordingly.
-- Use color to index entries by theme for easier accessibility. If you like to reread your journals, but you sometimes just want to read entries about a particular topic, you can use different colors exclusively to write about different topics. Use green only when you write about money, for instance, or red when you write about your love life, or purple when you’re dealing with spiritual issues. Then you can go back and just reread the entries, by theme, that interest you.
-- Use color as a writing trigger or block-breaker. Let’s say you’re feeling stuck and don’t know how to get your words flowing again. You can write, for instance, a list of things that are grey, and one of the list items might be your father’s eyebrows, which may turn out to be a concept you want to take and run with. (A wonderful way to break a block, by the way, is to go to an art museum and sit in front of an abstract painting with great colors and let your mind jump around in response to the colors – and record it all in your journal.)
-- If you record your dreams, or keep a dream journal, try to note the color of things, people, and animals to use for dream interpretation. You might also want to draw what you dreamt in the appropriate color. There are many theories that equate the colors that appear in your dreams with specific meanings. For instance, turquoise is supposed to represent good luck; brown, freedom, success, money; and orange, passion. There are a lot of books and websites where you can find these theories.
-- Use color to break rules and your own creative boundaries. If what’s itching to come out is an entry about your mixed feelings about someone who just died, for instance, and you’d feel uncomfortable expressing that because it’s not “nice,” then use a color that makes you feel bold or daring to help yourself express these perfectly understandable feelings. Sure, it’s a gimmick – but it works.
-- Use color for easier readability if you write small, or tightly, or on a cramped space. Change pen color every time you start a new paragraph, for instance, if you need more “air” on the page; a page that’s visually overwhelming with too many words, and words that are too small is not conducive to re-reading.
-- Use color to emphasize particular words or concepts you’re expressing instead of relying on traditional writing techniques such as underlining, writing in all-capital letters, etc. Highlighters, available in many colors, are ideal for this job. Or if you’re writing in blue ink, switch to red ink to write important words, then switch back to blue.
-- Use color to help you make a transition from words-only journal-keeping to non-verbal expression. As a professional writer who’s always living in the world of words, I welcome opportunities to take a break from words and express myself with images. Somehow, these opportunities don’t pop up when I’m writing in blue or black ink or when I’m writing on white paper (especially if it’s lined). Yet when I write with a color such as green or purple, my creative self somehow lets me move beyond words to simple drawings, diagrams, or sketches. Give it a shot.
SIDEBAR
Here’s a list of some basic colors and their common associations:
The Jewish Journaling Book
by Janet Ruth Falon
Tool 1: STARTING YOUR BOOK OF LIFE
According to Jewish tradition, three books are opened on Rosh Hashanah: One for irrefutably bad people, one for unimpeachably good people, and one for everyone in the middle. The good people are immediately written into the Book of Life. The bad people are "inscribed for condemnation," the meaning of which isn't clear but doesn't sound great. But the fate of most of us, the folks in the middle, isn't determined until the last second of Yom Kippur, at the last moment of the Ten Days of Penitence grace period, when the Book of Life is closed.
I've been interested in the concept of the Book of Life for as long as I can remember. I've imagined it as a huge book, about the size of a barn door, with a hand-sewn binding and threads of liquid silver holding it together. Its pages are all hand-made with lots of pressed flowers woven into the pulp, and it has a purple marbleized cover. And God, who has an enormous readership (even larger than Stephen King's) writes with a heavy, expensive ink pen, committing names to the page with curlicued flourishes that rival those on the Declaration of Independence.
But as I got older, I grew tired of God deciding whether or not I'd have a good year. As I matured I decided that even 10 days of introspection and amends-making wouldn't wipe someone's slate clean; more important, I got impatient with the notion of a "slate" at all.
So I mutinied and became the author of my own Book of Life, the physical manifestation of which is my journal (which is not to say that I don't panic, fleetingly, at the last seconds of Yom Kippur, when I envision "his" Big Book shutting tight). My own Book of Life is the book in which I do the work of those Ten Days of Penitence, but I do it year round. It is the book in which I condemn myself when I need to, applaud myself when that's called for, and let myself co-exist with uncertainty. It is the book in which I plan and plead, crow and cry, applaud and play and in general revel in the unfolding of my own life story.
Here are some disparate thoughts about the Book of Life for you to think and write about.
--You might want to give your Book of Life a title. I'll recommend that you name each journal volume as you complete it, but here I'm talking about a name for the entire project; in other words, titling the entire, multi-volumed encyclopedia of yourself instead of one of its constituent volumes.
The name of my own Book of Life is Hineni, "Here I am.' To me, it is the ultimate phrase of being present in my life, the ultimate phrase of being grounded, being so solid that I can take off for a spin in the stratosphere without worrying I'll float away for keeps. "Hineni" comes straight from Torah stories. When God calls to Abraham, telling him to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac, Abraham says, "Hineni." When God calls to Moses from within the burning bush, Moses answers, "Hineni." In my Book of Life I am here for myself, better than I am anywhere else in the world. "Hineni" feels perfect for me.
--Just as you might envision the Book of Life that God writes in, imagine what your own Book of Life would look like, especially if it was the size of a barn door, like God's, and you had access to any possible material. What color are the pages? What are they made from? How is it bound? What kind of ink would work best? What's on the cover? Does anything hang from it? Is there a lock? If so, where's the key? Are there any secret compartments or hidden pockets? If so, what's in them? This will give you a tangible image of your Book of Life to conjure up as needed.
--Remind yourself that your Book of Life is the ideal place in which to grapple with what I think is the most important question any human being engages with: What is the meaning of life? Remind yourself that this question is what living is all about, and that the answer doesn't always have to be as "heavy" as the question usually implies. Valid journal entries can be light, too; just as you value boulders so do you marvel at clouds.
--You might especially want to write in your Book of Life on days that commemorate your relationship to Life, such as your birthday, or days when you feel yourself being reborn in some way.
--If somebody couldn't read your Book of Life, either because of a vision disability or because it was in an unknown language, how else might you share the gist of its contents? How would your Book of Life smell? What would it feel like to fingers, to a cheek? If you bit into it, how would it taste?
--Other books in your life have been, are or will be pivotal and will affect what you'll write about in your Book of Life. Write about these other books that nourish, challenge, and stretch you.
--Your Book of Life isn't writing itself; you're the author. So how do you feel about writing? How do you feel about writing about yourself? How do you feel about writing intimate things about yourself? Write about this.