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  • Journal with me about gratitude and feel the change.

    Journal with me about gratitude and feel the change.

    Episode 12 Journal with me on gratitude

    Welcome to Journal On It, the podcast where we slow down, tune in, and turn the page on the story we tell ourselves. I’m Shannon and each week we explore the powerful practice of journaling and self-reflection to help you reconnect with your thoughts, your purpose, and your inner voice. Whether you’re new to journaling or you’ve got stacks of filled notebooks, this space is for anyone ready to grow, feel, and get honest, one page at a time. Let’s dig deep, write freely, and reflect boldly. Episode 12, A Grateful Journal With Me. We’re gonna do another journal with me this week.

    How this episode will go.

    The focus is going to be entirely on gratitude. With Thanksgiving coming up, I figured getting in the grateful mood and thinking of all of the things we should be thankful for might be a great way to kick-start this holiday season. Because some of these will be one word answers, I’m going to keep the music between the prompts a little shorter this time, give you a little bit of time to think about it, but hopefully keep it kind of a little bit neater this time. Also, there will be a few towards the end where I give you like a minute, and that way you have a little bit of time to dig into it. And I’ll tell you like, if you need to, pause, take your time, think about all the reasons you’re grateful for something, list it out.

    Tab this!

    This is a really good page or pages to look back on when you’re having a bad day or you’re feeling kind of like down in the dumps, you’re thinking things aren’t kind of going your way. This is one of those pages I tend to actually like tab in my journal so I can go back and look at all the reasons I have to be grateful. So keep that in mind. And as we go through, some of these will be quick little ones and some of them will be a little bit longer.

    The Prompts

    1. Who are you currently most grateful for in your life?
    2. What is a sound you are grateful for?
    3. What is something you are grateful to have learned?
    4. What is a piece of art you are grateful for?
    5. Name something in your community that you’re grateful for, something like a park or a library or even the fire department.
    6. What is a simple pleasure that is always guaranteed to make you smile?
    7. What piece of technology are you most grateful for?
    8. Describe your favorite place in your home and why you’re grateful for it. This one should take you a little bit longer.
    9. What book are you most grateful to have read and what impact did it have on your life?
    10. Journal prompt 10, our last and final one for this series and one I’m going to read aloud what I’m writing or maybe I’ll write it after I’ve read it to you or said it to you. But look around the room and list all of the items you are grateful for.

    My answer in the moment to prompt 10

    I’m going to go ahead and start the music but I’m also going to keep talking so you can hear me actually say what I’m grateful for in this room currently because I think it’s always good to show what I’m talking about.

    I am firstly grateful that I can sit here with the window open and soft rain sounds outside. I am grateful to have a computer that me and my friends built together. I am grateful that I’m using a mic that my dad heard I wanted just because as soon as I said I wanted to do a podcast he was in for it. He said let’s do it, let’s get you set up and he bought me that.

    My Pets in the room

    I am thankful for the two very silly black cats under my desk currently and hopefully, well, I hope you can hear them. I was going to say I hope you can’t but I hope you get to hear them crunching because that’s another thing I’m grateful for is the pile of food that I’m currently using to keep them entertained but also I’m thankful I can afford to feed them with. I am thankful that I am in a room full of Pokemon cards, and Magic the Gathering cards, and all sorts of trading card games that I love and adore and that I spent years collecting.

    More thankfuls.

    I am thankful for the piles of fabric that me and my mom use to make quilts. I’m thankful for the step ladder because it lets me reach things because I am exceptionally short. I am thankful for the that I’ve lego’s built.

    I am thankful for the books. The very first book that ever made me want to read often is in this room and maybe when we talk about reading journals I’ll tell you a little bit about that story. I’m thankful for the piles of paints on the shelf that I still need to organize because they will eventually let me be creative.I am thankful for the air dry clay. I’m thankful for the piles of beads that me and my friends have used to make friendship bracelets that currently adorn my car.

    Some small luxuries that deserve a shout out.

    I am thankful that there’s a small air purifier currently turned off so it’s not making a whole bunch of racket that I was able to get last year. Oh, I am supremely thankful for the ceiling fan also turned off because it’s a little rickety but I am thankful because it made this room bearable during summer which allowed me to start this podcast.

    Thank you!

    I’m also thankful for the software on my computer that took me forever to figure out and I am thankful that it allows me to share something I love with the people I love, my friends, and my family and if you’re not one of those people and you’re listening I am beyond grateful for you because it is you that I am doing this for. I can talk till I’m blue in the face about journaling but not everyone wants to hear that and I am grateful that there are people that do. There are people that want to dig deep within themselves and be better today than they were yesterday and for that I will always be thankful so thank you.

    Surprise guest

    I truly hope my microphone is picking up the frogs that are singing outside because the rain just let up and there’s a little guy right outside my window singing his little heart out and it is so cute. I hope you guys can hear it so badly. I want you to hear it but thank you guys as always for journaling with me and I will have a link to all the songs down below.

    You’ll probably hear me clicking for just a second. I did choose one artist off of Pixabay this time. All of these are Lo-Fi Dreams. I did choose just three songs to try to simplify it but I really hope you guys are able to enjoy this and I hope you go check that artist out.They have some wonderful Lo-Fi music. I’ve been using it in my background music for a while and I often find myself listening to it when I’m at my normal day job and it’s really good, really great quality so go check them out.

    ourFroggy Friend

    But as always that little frog is bringing me so much joy.You know what? I’m thankful for that little frog outside. It’s put a genuine big old smile on my face so I’m grateful for him or her. I can’t presume. I don’t know enough about whatever frog is outside. But thank you guys for journaling with me. I’ll link the music below.

    All of these prompts are ones that I’ve used before so I pulled these from my journal so I don’t have anything to cite but I’m certain if you go on Pinterest or Google them you’ll be able to find more like them or if you want I can also send you some more. I can put a list together anytime. But thank you guys for journaling with me and I hope the rest of your day is filled with joy and gratitude.

    Outro

    Thanks for joining me on Journal On It where we slow down, tune in, and turn the page together. If something resonated with you today take a moment to journal it out and let the words lead you. You can find show notes, journal prompts, and more at the link in the episode description. Remember, growth happens one honest page at a time. Until next time, keep writing, keep reflecting, and keep showing up for yourself. I’m Shannon and I’ll meet you back here soon.

    https://pixabay.com/music/beats-lofi-girl-lofi-ambient-music-365952

    https://pixabay.com/music/beats-lofi-girl-lofi-ambient-music-365952

    https://pixabay.com/music/beats-lofi-cafe-427593

    https://open.spotify.com/episode/5UyvXEYafkPpDUJbz5wRcL?si=4fpWRiQFRlCQOxth8rR4KA

  • Morning Pages the way to kick start your day.

    Morning Pages the way to kick start your day.

     Welcome to Journal on it

    The podcast where we slow down, tune in and turn the page on the story we tell ourselves. I’m Shannon. And each week we explore the powerful practice of journaling and self-reflection to help you reconnect with your thoughts, your purpose, and your inner voice. Whether you’re new to journaling or you’ve got stacks of filled notebooks, this space is for anyone ready to grow, heal, and get honest one page at a time. Let’s dig deep, write freely and reflect boldly.

    Episode 11 Morning pages.

    Side note, today’s episode’s going to be a little bit shorter. I am having some technical difficulties with my mic, so we’re gonna keep it a wee bit shorter than our typical episode, but I’m gonna try and kinda high speed and get everything that you would normally get into this. So bear with me. Hopefully we’ll be back in normal action next week.

    What is Morning pages?

    Morning pages is a style of journaling where you set aside a specific amount of time in the morning. Most people prefer to do this shortly after waking up. Some do this as soon as they wake up, and they use this as a way to organize their day and create a. Good routine for their morning.

    Pros

    Some of the pros to morning pages are, it’s a great way to start the day. Um, you’re focused in on being more mindful and it can help set a more positive mindset for your day. It also helps ground you in the moment. A lot of people use this to help them focus on their daily goals or their to-do list. It can reduce stress much in the same way a personal journal can. And creating the routine and sticking with the routine can really help improve your discipline.

    Cons

    Now, for the cons, as with all journaling, same kind of pitfalls happen where you’re focused more on the journal than living. It can also cause you to set unrealistic goals or not healthy habits, which can also lead to some pretty negative feelings.

    If you are somebody who has very limited time in the morning, it can feel like you’re adding a task to an already overbooked time of day. And it can also cause you to overthink. It can also become more of a to-do list than an actual journaling practice. Instead of the to-do list of being part of it. It becomes all of it.

    This isn’t for me and thats okay!

    Now, from my personal experience, I am not a morning person to begin with. So for me, I found this really difficult and the times that I did do it, I didn’t enjoy it at all and it kind of didn’t set a positive tone for the rest of my day. Like I said, I’m not a morning person though. I liked to lounge around a little bit in the morning and that kind of cut into that time.

    So for me, I prefer to journal in the evening. Okay. But I can see where this is a really good part of a person’s day and I can see why they would enjoy setting a more structured routine for me. It just isn’t it. But I will say it does have positive effects for those that do enjoy it, and those who do enjoy getting up a little bit earlier in the morning, um, while I have a morning routine.

    Journaling just won’t be part of it. And that’s a lot ’cause I love journaling and I do get so much out of it. For me, it just doesn’t go in the morning. But I know lots of people that sitting down after they’ve kind of eaten and they’re sitting with their morning coffee and journaling then is really empowering and really helpful.

    Do what works for you!

    So it’s not to say you can’t, and it’s not to say it’s all bad. But for me, it just didn’t quite fit. And that’s okay. Not every style of journaling is gonna work for every single person, and sometimes you figure something might work and it doesn’t. And for me, morning pages was one of those things. As always, I’ll have a bunch of links in the description and in the blog post for this, there are gonna also be a few testimonial pieces from people who did really enjoy morning pages and journaling in the morning.

    So that way you can see both sides of it, because I know mine isn’t the most positive, but a lot of people do have a great time with this. So links to all of that will be down below. And if you are looking forward to the next one, let me know what you’re thinking we should do. And if you wanna see anything like what we’ve done the past week or any of the journal with mes, just let me know that as well. We can certainly make that happen.

    Outro

    Thanks for joining me on journal on it where we slow down, tune in and turn the page together. If something resonated with you today, take a moment to journal it out and let the words lead you. You can find show notes, journal prompts, and more at the link in the episode description. Remember, growth happens one honest page at a time. Until next time, keep writing, keep reflecting and keep showing up for yourself. I’m Shannon and I’ll meet you back here soon.

    https://open.spotify.com/episode/5SBq4kd5susvtxabhW3ZN2?si=f2ec054e4073437d

  • Hobby Journals,the greatest learning tool you will have for your hobby.

    Hobby Journals,the greatest learning tool you will have for your hobby.

     Hobby Journals

    Welcome to Journal on it, the podcast where we slow down, tune in and turn the page on the story we tell ourselves. I’m Shannon. And each week we explore the powerful practice of journaling and self-reflection to help you reconnect with your thoughts, your purpose, and your inner voice. Whether you’re new to journaling or you’ve got stacks of filled notebooks, this space is for anyone ready to grow, heal, and get honest one page at a time. Let’s dig deep, write freely and reflect boldly.

    Episode nine, hobby Journals.

    Hello. Welcome back. You are probably wondering where I’ve been. Um, episode eight did not go as planned. I had done a journal with me episode, and I’m not certain how all of it happened. But Spotify did decide to take it down. They said the mix between music and talking wasn’t quite right, and then they said there was possibly a copyright issue and a bunch of other things.

    So I’m not entirely certain what happened, but episode eight. You will not get to here, but it did happen. And then I took a week off because I was trying to figure out what happened with episode eight and one of my puppies was not feeling well, so I took some time to take care of him. But we are back at it this week, ready to roll with a whole new episode on Hobby Journal.

    So what is a hobby journal?

    It is a journal or a place where you keep all of your notes, thoughts, reminders, information about a specific hobby. Some people put multiple hobbies in the same journal, so it’s just kind of all conveniently placed for them. But most people choose to do one journal for one hobby.

    So say you golf or you garden, you would have. One journal for golfing and one for gardening. If you’re like me, you have one for video games because I do enjoy keeping track of my video games and all the things I’m figuring out. So a hobby journal is just a place for you to keep track of everything to do with your hobbies.

    Now for the pros,

    It’s a great place to gather inspiration for your hobbies. If you’re a crafter or a quilter, you can keep patterns or thoughts or ideas together. It can also help you remember things, so you can go back and look at what you have done in the past and what you would wanted to do. It’s also a great place to see what did or didn’t work.

    So if you are a crafter or like me, you work a lot in your garden. You can see what did or didn’t work. You can see what plants don’t belong together. I’ve done that one a few times. One of the great things is it really helps you learn. You gain experience from doing the hobby, but this also gives you reinforcement on that knowledge by making you write it down or acknowledge it so you can kind of reinforce what you’re learning through experience or like hands-on kind of things.

    And depending on what your hobby is, it can be very helpful in setting goals, tracking things like metrics, like if you’re a sports person, like what’s your. Swing speed, um, things of those kinds of nature. Uh, it can really help you keep track of all of those things.

    The cons,

    It can take time from your hobby. If you’re busy stopping in the middle of doing something to write a bunch of stuff down, that’s obviously gonna take away from it. Um, there can also be an additional cost to your hobby if a notebook, pen, however, you’re going to keep your journal. It isn’t already kind of included there. Especially like for me, I have a weatherproof one for my garden that is pricey.

    Any kind of weather resistant writing material can be, so it adds a small cost. But honestly, those were the only two cons that I found in my research and in my practical experience.

    My personal experience with Hobby Journals has been very helpful.

    I have two different hobby journals. One is for my garden and one is for video gaming For my garden, one, one of the best things I’ve learned is it helps me keep track of doing my little crop rotation.

    Because I have a couple of raised beds and I try to rotate what is in them or which raised bed is in what location. And I have found that really helps me keep track of like, I don’t wanna grow tomatoes in the same one every year. ’cause that will deplete a bunch of nutrients and we just. Don’t quite want to do that.

    The goal is to keep the soil healthy so you can get the most use out of it. That’s another thing I’ve learned and written a lot about is trying to figure out what my soil is doing this year. The soil did not agree with me so much, but I’ve written all about that. So it’s all kind of going into a different bed, or actually, I dumped one of them into the woods.

    Because it had a bunch of not so great bugs in it, that would’ve eaten the roots of my plants. So I decided, let’s return those bad boys back to nature where they belong and the plants have what they need to defend against them, where my little strawberry plant did not. So it definitely helped me learn a lot about what does and doesn’t work, and how I can help my plant succeed the best.

    Another hobby journal I keep.

    For video gaming. Um, I play a lot of cozy games, a lot of like life sim type games, so I use it to keep track of like where certain crops are. I use a hobby journal for, like, I play a Disney game and it has little creatures that you can befriend. So I have a page that’s dedicated to the little critters, where they’re located, what their favorite little snacks are, so you can make them your friends.

    I also have like. What time certain fish are out. I also play animal crossing, so of course knowing when creatures and fish are out is super helpful. And there are apps out there now, but when I first started there were not so many apps, so I definitely kept like a notebook with all of that information kinda logged in.

    So I had an easy reference. Another game I play is Destiny two. I have a notebook with a bunch of different emblem codes. Back when Sir moved around a lot, I had all of his locations and what landing spot to go to for them. I kept track of like different things, what rates I had completed. If there were missions that we needed to do that we hadn’t completed, I would also write those down just so I could remember to go back to them.

    My uses of them

    I really used this a lot to keep track of just small information that I knew I wasn’t going to remember by the next time I sat down. Things like that is kind of what I use it for. I know a lot of people use this as like a giant hub of knowledge, and I guess with my gardening one I do that, but for video games it’s not so much.

    A hub of knowledge as it is a space where I can go back, reference, look at it and see where I was and what I was doing. And it also depends, obviously on the game. Destiny is a first person shooter, so there’s less keeping track of creatures and more trying to look at my stats, figure out what my. Goals were what I was working on, was there a weapon I was on the grind for.

    And with my life sim games like Animal Crossing and Disney, I’m obviously working on building things like friendships and critters and gardening and things of those natures. So kind of depends specifically on what you’re focused on as to what you’re gonna keep track of and how that’s gonna be useful for you.

    Final notes

    But that’s all I really have on keeping a hobby journal in reference to what I mentioned earlier about episode eight. If you did wanna see what my journal prompts were, those will be on my blog. I’m going to keep the full transcript up in case you wanna kind of poke at it. Episode eight most likely will not be published anytime soon until I figure it out, but hopefully I do figure all of that out.

    As always, thank you guys for listening and I look forward to doing this again every week. We should be back on our normal schedule, and if you have suggestions for what you would like to hear about next week, feel free to leave those in the comments. I do read all of them.

    Outro

    Thanks for joining me on journal on it where we slow down, tune in and turn the page together. If something resonated with you today, take a moment to journal it out and let the words lead you. You can find show notes, journal prompts, and more at the link in the episode description. Remember, growth happens one honest page at a time. Until next time, keep writing, keep reflecting and keep showing up for yourself.

    I’m Shannon and I’ll meet you back here soon.

    References

    Come journal with me as we focus on fall!

    https://www.duncanandstone.com/blogs/duncan-stone/how-to-take-your-hobbies-to-the-next-level-with-journaling?srsltid=AfmBOooV2Svp60X84L4FQBJB0H0H4AaCLmDif3sv1xalvyTTEa8hKCD6

    https://somethingforkeeps.com.au/best-ideas-for-your-hobby-journal/?srsltid=AfmBOorhPyz64buli3CEHi2_QQkvKYPk5SzN2s6z7o5sq8Z_S0MdF7LN

    HOBBY JOURNALS

    https://pixabay.com/photos/journal-red-park-autumn-flowers-4732287

    https://pixabay.com/music/beats-whispering-vinyl-loops-lofi-beats-281193

  • Come journal with me as we focus on fall!

    Come journal with me as we focus on fall!

    Journal with me! 

    Welcome to Journal on it, the podcast where we slow down, tune in and turn the page on the story we tell ourselves. I’m Shannon. And each week we explore the powerful practice of journaling and self-reflection to help you reconnect with your thoughts, your purpose, and your inner voice. Whether you’re new to journaling or you’ve got stacks of filled notebooks, this space is for anyone ready to grow, heal, and get honest one page at a time. Let’s dig deep, write freely and reflect boldly.

    Episode eight journal with me all about fall.

    After the last journal with me, I received a lot of positive feedback, both in person and via some messages, so I figured we would continue to do this at least once a month. If you have other things you would like to see me do in the podcast, please feel free to drop a message or send me a message on any of the other platforms.

    I do enjoy hearing from you guys, so love to hear your feedback and ideas. Seeing as this will be releasing on October 1st and I’m having my first chili kind of evening, I figured we would do a journal session together all about Paul and all the spooky things we love. As is my favorite place to find inspiration for us.

    I found a bunch of prompts on a website linked from Pinterest. It is Navigate mindfully. The website has lots of really long prompt list, and they’re all really good and really well thought out. So feel free to hop on over there and see what all they have over there. And don’t worry, I will be linking everything as always. So without further ado, let’s dig into it.

    The Prompts.

    Prompt one, describe a fall memory that brings you joy.

    Prompt two. Imagine your leaf falling from a tree. Describe your journey.

    Prompt three. How do you feel about the end of summer?

    Prompt four. How do you feel about Halloween?

    Prompt five, describe your perfect Halloween costume.

    Prompt six. What is your favorite spooky activity?

    Prompt seven. What is your favorite? This one says October, but I’m going to say fall food or drink.

    I hope you enjoyed some of the spooky music I chose. I tried to find some silly, fun, slightly lo-fi music for us this time around. Um, and of course I will link all of those down below so you don’t have to worry about trying to find them on your own. If you have any questions or if you wanna talk about all of these journal prompts, feel free.I’ll be keeping an eye out on the comments.

    Thanks for joining me on journal on It where we slow down. Tune in and turn the page together. If something resonated with you today, take a moment to journal it out and let the words lead you. You can find show notes, journal prompts and more at the link in the episode description. Remember, growth happens when Honest page at a time. Until next time, keep writing, keep reflecting and keep showing up for yourself. I’m Shannon and I’ll meet you back here soon.

    Resources and Music:

    75 Fall Journal Prompts to Get Ready for the Season

    https://pixabay.com/music/scary-childrens-tunes-spooky-halloween-381141

    https://pixabay.com/music/build-up-scenes-halloween-background-music-405067

    https://pixabay.com/music/scary-childrens-tunes-funny-halloween-spooky-horror-background-music-242101

    https://pixabay.com/music/beats-scary-pumpkin-spooky-halloween-trap-beat-242102

    https://pixabay.com/music/scary-childrens-tunes-fun-spooky-guitar-408986

    https://pixabay.com/music/scary-childrens-tunes-spooky-ghosts-172130

    https://pixabay.com/music/main-title-funny-halloween-cartoon-comedy-spooky-orchestra-334169

  • Meditation journal more than what is written.

    Meditation journal more than what is written.

    Welcome to Journal On It, the podcast where we slow down, tune in, and turn the page on the story we tell ourselves. I’m Shannon and each week we explore the powerful practice of journaling and self-reflection to help you reconnect with your thoughts, your purpose, and your inner voice. Whether you’re new to journaling or you’ve got stacks of filled notebooks, this space is for anyone ready to grow, feel, and get honest one page at a time. Let’s dig deep, write freely, and reflect boldly.

    Episode 7, Meditation Journals.

    So what is a meditation journal? In its most basic form, it is the notes you keep after you have meditated. There are two main ways that this type of journal is kept. The first one being is a more checklist style where you kind of have the same bullet points that you write down every single time. And then the second way is more of a journal entry where you’re writing a paragraph or two about your experience while you were meditating.

    But no matter which method of these you choose, there are a few items you should have at the bare minimum. That being;

    • the date that you’ve meditated on,
    • how long you meditated,
    • what type of meditation you did,
    • be it a guided meditation,
    • a not guided meditation,
    • one with movement,
    • a breathing exercise type of meditation,
    • and anything that it invoked like emotions or thought-wise.

    If you have consistent thoughts that interrupt your meditation, you will want to note that as well.

    The Pros.

    This provides a great space for you to reflect on what you’ve experienced during your meditation and how it affected your emotions, be it before or after the meditation. So for example, if you go in feeling very anxious and you come out feeling very calm and relaxed, you would want to annotate both of those emotions and see if that’s a trend that continues for you. This leads into the next one, which is it helps you really learn your patterns. It can help you kind of dive into what emotions are reoccurring and what thoughts are reoccurring while you’re meditating.

    Journaling as a whole can help you enhance or strengthen your ability to focus, which is obviously going to help you when you’re trying to meditate. Your meditation journal can act as a accountability buddy. So if you’re somebody who struggles with building a habit or maintaining a habit, it can be exceptionally beneficial. Because it does allow you to keep up and keep tabs on when you are and when you aren’t meditating. And as with journaling and meditation, it does enhance the ability to manage your stress. This can be a really great way to figure out what meditation styles work for you to help with stress management.

    The Cons.

    The first one I found pretty much noted everywhere was it can add a lot of time to your meditation practice. And that is time to like sit down before and after. Meditation journaling can sometimes be a distraction from the meditation itself. As with most mindfulness practices, this does have a chance to allow you to wallow or kind of fixate on your negative emotions. And that can be a dark path to go down. So be careful with that part.

    And for me, the biggest con was if you decide to meditate somewhere outside of your normal area, be it at your house or your yard, you have to pack up your journal and supplies to go. I use like a little pillow or cushion to meditate on. But if you’re somebody who has like the singing bowls or things like that, that you meditate with, this can add an extra thing to that pack. It can be a lot to carry somewhere, especially if you’re doing like a spiritual hike or if you’re going to do a group activity where you’re already packing quite a bit.

    Intermission.

    If you hear meowing behind me, it is because one of my cats is in the room with me. Hopefully, he is settled. He needed ear scratches really bad just a moment ago. Hopefully, he’s good to go now.

    And last but not least for the cons is it can be very difficult and discouraging to see how often you have thoughts or emotions disrupting your meditation practice. This is probably one of the ones that most people kind of get stuck on. So keep that in mind, this isn’t to discourage you or dissuade you. This is how you see where you’re supposed to focus on so you can grow your meditation practice or your mindfulness practice.

    My Experience.

    Now for my personal experience when it comes to meditation journals. I tried to do a journal dedicated to a meditation practice and I found with me already having a pretty dedicated set time in which I do journal every day, it didn’t really work for me personally. What I did decide worked and what I do quite often still is I keep track of when I’m meditating. I built that into my journals habit tracker at the beginning of the month and every day when I meditate, I go in there, I mark that I’ve meditated.

    If I find that I’m really noticing a repeat thing, I will then kind of take that day and make that journal time all about the meditation and that like repetitive thought or feeling that keeps coming up. That’s kind of where I’ve been at for probably two years now practice wise. But like I said, I did try at first to have a dedicated meditation journal and I’ll kind of go over what I did there.

    Where I began.

    When I first started meditating, I didn’t know a lot about the meditation or about meditation journaling. I just knew I wanted to add to my mindfulness practice and my journaling practice with meditation and I wasn’t certain where to start which happens quite a bit when I decide I’m going to do a new thing. I just dive in headfirst. That’s just how I do things sometimes but it did teach me a lot. I learned I’m definitely an overt like analyzer, I’m going to spend a whole bunch of time looking at each and every detail and sometimes I can get lost in those details. I think that can be an issue for a lot of people when it comes to meditation journaling which is why I said sometimes it can be discouraging.

    Because I didn’t know what I was doing or where to start and I am an overthinker, I ended up spending a lot of time filling pages with every single thought that crossed my mind. Every emotion that even flickered into existence and dissipated before I could comprehend it went onto those journal pages. I put way too much into it and for me that took away from my meditation practice. I found that I was doing way too much in that journal and not enough focusing on the meditation.

    Conclusion.

    I decided to reel it in a little bit because like I said, I do tend to overdo and I found that doing my meditation, thinking it through, and then setting aside a chunk of my journal to keep track of the habit and noticing my thoughts and emotions and making sure that I was giving myself space that if I was working on something or if I was processing something I had a place to write it down and kind of do my analysis on it and dig deep into what was happening in my own mind but I also needed to not have that take over the entirety of my practice.

    Overall, I find that having a place to think about and process what you’ve discovered during your meditation is really beneficial but I think you’re going to have to find a way that it works for you. For me, doing a whole journal on it was just too much and it would become hyper fixation and it just wasn’t the right thing for me but I know many people that this is the correct thing for them. They find a lot of peace in going over their meditations and they learn a lot about themselves and their practice, writing it down and looking into it. So it’s all about finding your balance with it.

    Outro

    Thanks for joining me on Journal On It where we slow down, tune in, and turn the page together. If something resonated with you today, take a moment to journal it out and let the words lead you. You can find show notes, journal prompts, and more at the link in the episode description. Remember, growth happens one honest page at a time. Until next time, keep writing, keep reflecting, and keep showing up for yourself. I’m Shannon and I’ll meet you back here soon.

    Resources:

    Keeping A Meditation Journal: How To, 8 Prompts & Top Tips

    https://www.artofliving.org/us-en/meditation/beginners-guide/meditation-journaling

    How to Start a Meditation Journal (With Links)

    Music

    https://pixabay.com/music/beats-whispering-vinyl-loops-lofi-beats-281193/

  • Journal prompts, everything you need to get writing.

    Journal prompts, everything you need to get writing.

    Intro: Journal Prompts

    Welcome to Journal on it, a podcast where we slow down, tune in, and turn the page on the story we tell ourselves. I’m Shannon, and each week we explore the powerful practice of journaling and self-reflection to help you reconnect with your thoughts, your purpose, and your inner voice. Whether you’re new to journaling or you’ve got stacks of filled notebooks, this space is for anyone ready to grow, heal, and get honest, one page at a time. Let’s dig deep, write freely, and reflect boldly.

    Episode 6

    So we did some journaling together last week and we used prompts to do that. And I think part way towards the end, I did say we would kind of do our normal thing with journal prompts. So here that is, probably should have done it flip-flopped, but that’s okay.

    What is a Journal Prompt?

    So what is a journal prompt? It is anything that you use to guide your journaling session or time. This can be a question, a concept, a statement, anything that you use to kind of guide your session.

    You can use these to guide you towards a realization or to help you work through a plan. You can use them for anything that you really are trying to work towards, be it like a deeper understanding of yourself or anything you don’t fully know how to get there on your own.

    A lot of times people use these to kind of dig deep into something, an issue they’re experiencing. So that’s a really good use of these. A lot of people also use them as like jumping off points. So if you’re going to use one to like start your journaling, that’s also another good way to use them.

    The Pros

    Now for the pros. It can help you develop self-reflection. It can also help you develop like a mindfulness practice and work on being more mindful throughout the day. It can help you get your mind working on a specific topic that you want to focus on.

    It will also fight the blank page anxiety that some people experience, myself included. It can force you to think outside of the box, and there’s a whole host of mental health benefits the same way there is for most types of journaling.

    The Cons

    Now for the cons. A lot of people can find these very limiting. Instead of using it as a chance to be very creative, they find it’s exceptionally like structured and they find themselves falling into like a specific format and they don’t find a lot of growth there.

    That can be one of the issues. It can also be very repetitive. So if you’re following the same series of prompts every time, you’re not gonna dig deep within yourself and get that kind of benefit of the mindfulness practices of trying to reflect a little deeply within yourself.

    The other big one that I find is it has a lot of overwhelming options. If you type in journal prompts into Google or Pinterest or YouTube, you’re gonna find thousands and thousands of options and it can be difficult to sift through what you’re looking for. It can be helpful, but it can also be really difficult to find what you’re actively looking for.

    The Biggest Con

    The biggest con or negative in my opinion is it can really force you to stay on a negative train of thought. It can cause you to spiral a little bit because a lot of times like you’ll find these shadow work ones and they can kind of go into past traumas and in an uncontrolled or too structured environment that can be difficult to handle and difficult to cope with.

    So that’s probably the biggest con in my personal opinion. But I think with a little bit of help, either from a professional or a friend, you can do those types of prompts and see benefits from them. But always be cautious.

    Personally, I use them often!

    For me personally, I do use journal prompts quite often. I use them when I’m having like a low mental energy day or if work has completely drained me and I just can’t even think straight. I will just go on Pinterest, that’s my preferred platform, and sniff through a bunch of them that I have pre-saved, find one that has like four or five, and kind of use those as my prompts for the day.

    That way I can still journal, but I’m also not overexerting my limited mental energy. I also use them when I have something I’m trying to work through or focus on and I’m not certain what questions I need to be asking myself.

    Looking at what I use.

    So pulling up my Pinterest here, I have some for how to stop self-sabotaging yourself, how to accept yourself, how to cope with anger, questions to ask on a hard day. Let’s see, I have one for helping me understand how my nervous system reacts to things and how I can better respond to that.

    So there’s endless options. I just kind of sift through and find the ones that work really well for me. And then usually I put on a little bit of music and I will write the question out or write whatever out and answer, fill it out, however I need. Then I’ll write the next prompt, next scenario, and repeat. And I’ll do that until I’ve answered everything that was on my list to answer for the day.

    Where the growth happens

    And sometimes I find when I’m doing this, what I think will be a short answer, I will eventually fill a page or two or three. And not always, but oftentimes when I’ve gone down that kind of path where I’ve kind of used the prompt and gone a little bit further than I anticipated, that’s where I really find the most guidance, the most growth out of.

    I know that probably doesn’t make the most sense, but it’s where I find the kernel of information that like I was truly looking for is when I’ve gone a little bit further than what the prompt originally wanted me to go.

    Once I’ve dug that little bit further down and I’ve thought about it a little bit more, usually that little bit of information I’ve dug out is what I needed. And it’s not always like some big grand thing.

    A personal example

    Like the other day, I was really struggling. I was like, my schedule seems off. I can’t figure it out. How can I fix this? And I sat down and I forget what I had looked up, but I had looked up something for figuring out your routine and your schedule.

    And I realized I had tried to add a bunch of things to my schedule all at once instead of doing it one item at a time like I used to. And by adding so many, I had kind of overwhelmed myself, which led to me forgetting things.

    So I went back to the basics. Everything I needed to do in the day. It got an alarm set. Everything was labeled. And I made sure that I only added one, maybe two things a week to my schedule. That way I wasn’t overworking my mind.

    Its a great way to start

    I will also say I think this is one of the easier forms of journaling to get into. You can buy a journal that already has prompts in it. It’s also very easy to find the prompts. So it’s a very low barrier to entry kind of style of journaling.

    And I think that can be highly beneficial if you really aren’t certain where you want to start. Or if you aren’t certain you want to go ahead and start a personal journal, but you want to start the practice and develop the skill and the habit of it, I think it can be a great easy way to start journaling.

    Check out where I share prompts

    And I did want to note if you do want to try some journal prompts. I have been for a while on a Instagram page with the same title of the podcast journal on it. Been putting out three times a week give or take different prompts.

    Some of them are just like one-offs. Some of them are series of questions. So feel free to go check that out. Also, that’s where I kind of put the time that we’re releasing the podcast. So feel free to kind of check that out.

    And like I said, you can find them really anywhere. I find them all the time on Pinterest. I’ve googled them. I’ve done some guided journal practice on YouTube. That was a great place for me. I really enjoyed it because a lot of times that meant I didn’t have to find the music and they can be a little bit more upbeat.

    Outro

    Thanks for joining me on Journal On It, where we slow down, tune in, and turn the page together. If something resonated with you today, take a moment to journal it out and let the words lead you. You can find show notes, journal prompts, and more at the link in the episode description. Remember, growth happens one honest page at a time. Until next time, keep writing, keep reflecting, and keep showing up for yourself. I’m Shannon, and I’ll meet you back here soon.

    The Podcast:

    Resources:

    What Are Journaling Prompts?

    https://childmind.org/blog/the-power-of-journaling/#:~:text=Whether%20you%27re%20dealing%20with,mental%20health%20and%20well%2Dbeing.

    How to journal your way to happiness, success, and game-changing clarity
    Journaling Can Be Harmful? 5 Examples and How Keep It Positive

    https://kripalu.org/resources/what-makes-great-writing-prompt#:~:text=A%20writing%20prompt%20is%20a,to%20write%20about%20is%20terrifying.

    https://positivepsychology.com/benefits-of-journaling

    The Benefits of Journaling PLUS Some Journal Writing Tips & Prompts
  • Let’s try a new method and journal together.

    Let’s try a new method and journal together.

    Hello!

     Welcome to Journal on it, the podcast where we slow down, tune in and turn the page on the story we tell ourselves. I’m Shannon. And each week we explore the powerful practice of journaling and self-reflection to help you reconnect with your thoughts, your purpose, and your inner voice. Whether you’re new to journaling or you’ve got stacks of filled notebooks, this space is for anyone ready to grow, heal, and get honest one page at a time.

    Let’s dig deep, write freely and reflect boldly.

    Episode five. Journal with me.

    This episode is going to detour from our normal format. This time we are going to journal together, so I have some prompts that I found on Pinterest and we are gonna work through them together. When I am writing, so it’s not dead air, I am gonna play some lo-fi music for you.

    I will have a link to what I am listening to and what I have you guys listening to as well, so you can go and see it for yourself if you really enjoy it. The journal prompts I found on Pinterest come from a list of 40 journal prompts. The link is broken. It goes to a broken medium post that’s no longer functioning, but the original person who posted these was vivaciousvida.com.

    I have not been able to find website or the post where it originally came from at this time. If I do, I will also link that, but I’m just gonna do a few of these ’cause I, they kind of hit the spot today.

    The Prompts.

    1. Use 10 words to describe yourself.

    2. What qualities do you value in a friend?

    3. List 15 things that make you happy.

    4. What inspires you?

    5. What is your favorite physical feature?

    6. Who do you admire most and why?

    What do we think?!

    So what did you think of writing with prompts and even better, what did you think of journaling with me? I hope you had a good time. I hope you enjoyed the lofi I picked. And next week we will absolutely be going over in our normal way. Everything we can about doing prompts for journaling. If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments on Spotify and I can certainly answer those for you next time around.

    Outro

    Thanks for joining me on journal on it where we slow down, tune in and turn the page together. If something resonated with you today, take a moment to journal it out and let the words lead you. You can find show notes, journal prompts, and more at the link in the episode description. Remember, growth happens one honest page at a time.

    Until next time, keep writing, keep reflecting and keep showing up for yourself. I’m Shannon and I’ll meet you back here soon.

    Resources

    Music: https://pixabay.com/music/beats-whispering-vinyl-loops-lofi-beats-281193/

    https://pixabay.com/users/delosound-46524562

    https://pixabay.com/users/ribhavagrawal-39286533

    https://pixabay.com/users/lofium-30660321

    https://pixabay.com/users/dragon-studio-38165424

    https://pixabay.com/users/snoozybeats-45164075

    https://pixabay.com/users/delosound-46524562

    https://pixabay.com/users/lofidreams99-25132446

    https://pixabay.com/users/xethrocc-12734491

    Relates to this post.

    Personal Journal, where you dig deep to improve yourself.
  • Episode 4 Food Journaling broken down

    Episode 4 Food Journaling broken down

     Welcome to Journal on it, the podcast where we slow down, tune in and turn the page on the story we tell ourselves. I’m Shannon. And each week we explore the powerful practice of journaling and self-reflection to help you reconnect with your thoughts, your purpose, and your inner voice. Whether you’re new to journaling or you’ve got stacks of filled notebooks, this space is for anyone ready to grow, heal, and get honest one page at a time.

    Let’s dig deep, write freely and reflect boldly.

    Episode four food journals. What is a food journal?

    It is a place, be it app or document or notebook in which you track your food consumption, to get to a new goal or step towards figuring something out. There are a lot of reasons that people may choose to food journal, but what I’ve decided today is to focus on two of the more common reasons people choose this.

    The first being figuring out if you have a food sensitivity or food allergy, and the second one being weight management and/or your relationship with food. For the majority of food journals, even outside of the two that I plan on focusing on, you should have the following in your documentation. What you’re eating. How much of it you are eating. What times you’re eating. Where you’re eating. Why you’re eating. If you’re with somebody who you’re with. Any symptoms you have after you are eating.

    The reason you track the basics.

    Now, there’s a bunch of reasons, but here are some of the more basic reasons why you’re keeping track of these. Obviously, if you’re food journaling, you need to know what you’re eating. The reason you wanna know how much you’re eating is this helps you analyze if you are overeating, undereating, or stress eating.

    When you eat is important because this tells you if you’re spreading your meals out. If you’re actually getting enough meals. Or if you are eating specifically around like a certain event in your day. Where you’re eating and why can be important, are you at home on your couch. Are you eating at your dining room table, are you eating fast food on the road to work? Are you me, eating at your desk, in between filling out forms and checking things over? There’s a lot of places you could eat. Okay. And all of these have interactions with the way you view food.

    Who you’re with can be a big one because some people will encourage you to eat healthier. Some will encourage you to eat less healthy. Some may encourage you to intentionally overeat or undereat, all of these are things you want to write down and analyze and see if there’s a pattern

    For the health part of this, if you’re having symptoms after you eat, you wanna write those down so you can go back to whichever professional you’re seeing and go over all of this with them. So you have sort of a frame of reference for figuring out what is going on with your body and your stomach and your digestive track.

    The Pros.

    Now, there are some pros to this journal style. It can help you figure out your weight management. It can identify food triggers, things that bring up good and bad memories and good and bad reactions.

    Food journaling can also help you see a good habit or a bad habit when it comes to food and it can also help you course correct when that happens. It can help you be mindful of when you’re actually hungry when you’re boredom eating. It can help you understand your hunger and fullness cues, and it can also help you track what nutrients you’re getting in your body. And it can help you ID foods being used as coping mechanisms. It can also help you identify what food is causing you to have an issue. Um, we’ll kind of go over that in the personal part of this. I have experience there and it can be very helpful. I just find you have to be very careful.

    The Cons.

    There are several cons to food journaling and. This can also be where it impacts mental health. So keep that in mind. This style of journal can be exceptionally stressful, especially if you are somebody who struggles with food. Um, it can cause a lot of feelings of guilt or shame. It can cause you to change your food choices.

    If you are somebody who has a disordered relationship with food, it can make that worse. It can help, but it can also make it worse. Food journaling does also make it very difficult to go out to eat, and that’s because you never know exactly what’s in it. There’s a lot of fear of like being judged when you are out to eat and you bust out a little notebook to write down what you’re eating.

    It can also be hard to start this, because if you don’t know where to start or how to start. It can be exceptionally overwhelming. There’s a lot of information out there and it can be really difficult to filter through, and that can be a big barrier to entry when it comes to the style of journal.

    Personal Experience.

    For me personally, I did a food journal probably about eight, maybe 10 years ago. I had noticed I was having a lot of stomach issues when I was eating and after I was eating. And I couldn’t figure out what was going on, and like everybody does, they run to their doctor when there’s an issue and my doctor had no idea what was happening. ’cause they were like, this is just a jumble mess of symptoms.

    Thankfully they suggested doing a food journal and for me this was really difficult because I didn’t know what I was doing. When I first started. I was just like a pizza. Had a hamburger. I had three cups of Starbucks while I was in class today. I had no idea what I was supposed to be journaling or what I was supposed to be tracking or any of that information.

    Figuring it out.

    And it of course, led me where we all go to – the internet and down rabbit hole after rabbit hole of figuring out what I was doing, why I was doing it. And probably after a couple of weeks of test runs of different things I kept in the journal. I did finally find a method that worked for me. What I would do is after I had finished eating, I would write down an in-depth like block description of what I’d eaten. I would also write down like when I ate and if it was food I made myself. Or if I had it pre-prepared from like a grocery store or if I’d gone out.

    And then because I was having stomach issues, I would leave a second part of the page and I would leave that for any symptoms I would feel later in the day. After I think maybe like four or five months, when I returned to the doctor, we were actually able to figure out what was going on.

    And it turns out your girl is lactose intolerant. So the fact I lived off of cream cheese bagels for like four months. Was in fact the issue.

    How I have changed what I do.

    Currently, anytime I notice I am either feeling issues with my stomach or I find that I don’t feel as healthy as I want to, I do food journal. I just do it a little differently now that I’m not in as bad of a position as I was.

    Um, I currently use an app called MyFitnessPal, breaks down a little bit of information about what you’re eating. It is a very manual process. There is a paid version of the app I haven’t tried, but it lets you take pictures of what you’re eating so you don’t have to do all of the steps. But that’s what I currently use and I use that to kind of break down if I’m getting enough protein in the day.Have I had too many carbs? ’cause I know for me, if I have too many carbs, I start to feel really sluggish.

    A note for you.

    Now your reasons for wanting to track your food or wanting to figure out. Your symptoms may be different than mine, and they may be different than everybody else’s out there. The goal is with food journaling truly and deeply to put yourself in a healthier body.

    It’s not to punish yourself. It’s not to force you into a specific lifestyle or to make you change who you are at your core. The goal is for you to work a little bit each and every day with this and become a little bit healthier each and every day. And that isn’t a easy journey. It’s going to be a difficult one, especially if like me, you aren’t feeling great at the beginning.

    When I first started food journaling, I was sick all the time and I had no idea what was causing it. And that’s difficult on a good day. But then add something new that you’ve never done, that invades your privacy, and you eventually have to share with somebody. It can be uncomfortable. It can be difficult to process and sometimes that difficultly start color the way you look at this.

    So my suggestion is don’t give up. If you want to do this, try a few different methods. I’ll have a bunch of links down below, and of course there’s gonna be a transcript of this whole episode with links and resources. That are a little easier to click than they are here on Spotify. Find the method that works for you, and I hope that if you do decide to food journal you find a happier, healthier day in your future.

    Outro

    Thanks for joining me on journal on It where we slow down, tune in and turn the page together. If something resonated with you today, take poem with to journal it out and let the words lead you. You can find show notes, journal prompts, and more at the link in the episode description. Remember, growth happens one honest page at a time.

    Until next time, keep writing, keep reflecting and keep showing up for yourself. I’m Shannon and I’ll meet you back here soon.

    Music: https://pixabay.com/music/beats-whispering-vinyl-loops-lofi-beats-281193/

    Resources: https://nourishwithclaire.com/pros-cons-food-journal-ie/

    ⁠https://health.clevelandclinic.org/how-to-keep-a-food-⁠⁠journal⁠

     ⁠https://recipes.howstuffworks.com/food-journaling-101.htm⁠ 

    https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4755274

    https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/how-to-keep-a-food-journal#tips

    https://journalonit.com a Shareable link to the blog and any bonus content I make!

  • Bullet Journal, the bullet points and designs of productivity

    Bullet Journal, the bullet points and designs of productivity

     Welcome to Journal on it, the podcast where we slow down, tune in and turn the page on the story we tell ourselves. I’m Shannon. And each week we explore the powerful practice of journaling and self-reflection to help you reconnect with your thoughts, your purpose, and your inner voice. Whether you’re new to journaling or you’ve got stacks of filled notebooks, this space is for anyone ready to grow, heal, and get honest one page at a time.

    Let’s dig deep, write freely and reflect boldly.

    What is a Bullet Journal?

    Episode three Bullet journal, sometimes referred to as a bujo. What is a bullet journal, to be honest, and the definitions vary depending on where you look. The one I’ve chosen to go off of for this episode. Is from the creator of the bullet journal’s actual website, and the creator is writer Carol, and he calls it a mindfulness practice designed as a productivity system.

    Bullet journal, if you’ve ever looked it up, is kind of a mix of a bunch of things. It’s your day-to-day planner, it’s your to-do list, a habit tracker, a goal tracker, and your personal journal. All wrapped in one place, usually in a beautiful like aesthetic kind of layout. I’m gonna take a few seconds here to kind of break our normal flow.

    A quick note.

    And I did wanna annotate, this is probably one of the newest styles of journaling as it was created in 2013. Um, and this is one of the youngest ones I’ve. Personally come across, which is very interesting ’cause it kind of took the entire world by storm. And the resources for ideas and plans are almost infinite on the internet.

    Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, people actually make their money by showing off their bullet journals. But I did also wanna make you aware, if you go to the creator’s actual website. He hosts classes on how to do all of this and has his own actual like bullet journal set up for you. So if you wanted to start but you didn’t wanna dive off the deep end and you really didn’t know where to go, I would actually suggest going to his site.

    If you type in bullet journal.com in your search bar, it should pull it right up for you. He has infinite amount of resources there. He does have some paid classes. But he does also have a bunch of free materials on his page.

    Pros

    As with all types of journaling, there are some pros and cons. Some of the pros include increased productivity, better organization, having a good creative outlet, saving money by making your own planner instead of buying a super specialized one.

    Uh, less paper waste flexibility. It’s gonna help you remember things, events, birthdays, those kinds of things. Everything is in one place. It’s a great self-development tool, and it’s good for, uh, goal reflection.

    Cons

    Now for some of the cons, the creative parts of this can sometimes actually take over productivity.

    There can be a lot of pressure to make these super aesthetic spreads. It can be very time consuming. It’s honestly overwhelming to start. It can make you really harsh on yourself for failing or not being as good at some of these other parts as others are. Uh, it can be pricey to start if you’re somebody who’s going to make one yourself.

    And losing it can be a major issue because you literally don’t have a backup for it to all of your appointments, all of your goals, everything being in one place can have a downside.

    The personal experience

    For me, while I do enjoy some of the benefits of a bullet journal, I don’t do a full blown bullet journal. I have chosen the parts that work really, really well for me and included them into my personal journal.

    Um, we did talk about that a little bit in an earlier episode. I do a monthly spread at the beginning of every single month, and this is the closest I get to fully incorporating a. Bullet journal part. I pick like two to maybe three pages. And what I’ll do is on page one, I have the goals I’m trying to track or the habits I’m trying to track.

    Um, the next page is my mood tracker. This is a big thing for me as somebody with anxiety. I try to monitor my moods and see if there’s anything I can see. If I do the third page, it is always my to-do list. Um, sometimes I include this on the first page. If I’m not working really hard on building a new habit or if I don’t have a lot of like long-term goals, I should be focusing on that month.

    It’s in the details

    Um, this is little things for me. It’s usually like, make sure I follow up with the podcast, make sure I keep up with the Instagram schedule that I have set for myself. Three times a week sounds really easy until you have to wake up at 8:00 AM after working into the evening. If I have doctor’s appointments coming up that would go on my to-do list, I always like put them as like a line item there, so I make sure that they get accomplished and I’m there when I need to be.

    Just kind of a handy reminder, any holiday or birthday shopping that needs to get accomplished would also go on this page. I don’t keep it in my journal anymore. I keep it in a locked app, but I actually keep a list somewhere of all the things that I plan on getting people that did used to be in my journal.

    But I don’t always keep my journal on hand when I go out just because it is so personal. So I do leave that at the house a lot and having like an app that I use for that works really great for me. I know we’ve talked about it before, but I do. I do the monthly spread and I wanted to share where I get a little bit of my inspiration for these from and where if you want to do a full bullet journal, you may also find some inspiration for different pages and the calendar park.

    Where to look for inspo

    For me, I spend a lot of time on Pinterest looking up these, I have a bunch of different mood trackers. I have a bunch of different things you may wanna track. Like one of the ones that I’m looking at currently is like the songs of the year. And they have a bunch of different shapes and they kind of like a cd, an old school iPad, uh, a cassette.

    Some people dunno what cassettes are, I gotta remember that. But they have a bunch of different little musical icons and as they find a song for like their month, they feel that it should maybe their most listened to song or the song that resonated with them the most. But bullet journaling allows you to track so much more stuff than people realize, and I find a lot of inspiration on the line for these types of things.

    More inspo

    Another place that I get a lot of inspiration from is actually Instagram. There are people who make it their whole Instagram like page to do, prompts to do like full-blown spreads. There’s people who do bullet journaling there. Uh, junk journaling. Any type of journaling you can think of, you can find on Instagram.

    Somebody out there is making an amazing kind of page, or this artistic doodle, like the one I opened Instagram just now, the one I’m looking at, this lovely person made, uh, like little Polaroid frame. And they used it to do like a little back to school page where they like outlined some scissors and then they outlined some other little things and they did ABCs and the little frame just to kind of like emphasize to them how important back to school season was.

    As always, I will. Link to all of the resources I have found, be they for the pros and cons or where I’m finding my inspiration. I’ll put down a bunch of information in the show notes, and of course you’ll be able to find the transcript on the blog site. If you have any ideas or requests for the next episode, feel free to leave me a comment, and I will do my best to get that recorded and out for you, and I look forward to seeing you soon.

    Outro

    Thanks for joining me on journal on It where we slow down. Tune in and turn the page together. If something resonated with you today, take a moment to journal it out and let the words lead you. You can find show notes, journal prompts and more at the link in the episode description. Remember, growth happens when Honest page at a time.

    Until next time, keep writing, keep reflecting and keep showing up for yourself. I’m Shannon and I’ll meet you back here soon.

    https://www.verywellmind.com/bullet-journaling-4520842

    https://bulletjournal.com

    Pros and Cons of Bullet Journaling
    https://www.instagram.com/bullet.journals?igsh=MWwwdnNqZWE3dXV4cw== https://www.instagram.com/reel/DEz4qW2x1rW/?igsh=cWc1aHhiOGVpdDUz

    https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/toyhouy/episodes/Eps–3-Bullet-Journal-e37ba7f

  • Junk Journal – Create the journal you have been dreaming of.

    Junk Journal – Create the journal you have been dreaming of.

     Intro

    Welcome to Journal on it, the podcast where we slow down, tune in and turn the page on the story we tell ourselves. I’m Shannon, and each week we explore the powerful practice of journaling and self-reflection to help you reconnect with your thoughts, your purpose, and your inner voice. Whether you’re new to journaling or you’ve got stacks of filled notebooks, this space is for anyone ready to grow, heal, and get honest one page at a time.

    Let’s take deep. Write freely and reflect boldly.

    Junk Journals

    Episode two junk journals. What is a junk journal? You’re probably asking if you’re not somebody who journals often. You’ve probably never even stumbled upon this. It is a creative journal style. What happens is. You from start to finish, create, and then fill a journal. And what I mean by create is you build the journal from scratch.

    Every single page you are putting together, people sometimes do this page by page and some people will actually go and make a signature or a group of pages and then turn them into a full blown after you’ve got a couple of those journal. This is a process that takes. Forever. But it is a beautiful piece once you’re completed.

    And I mean, it’s absolutely stunning. I’ve never seen one of these that wasn’t absolutely fabulous when it was finished. This is one of the most creative ways I have seen to journal. And the reason I say that is you are building it page by page, paragraph by paragraph into what you think. And what you feel in that moment.

    Pros

    Now you’re probably asking what are the pros and cons like I did last time? And a lot of the pros and cons will be the same because in the end, this does become an exceptionally decorated personal journal. But in addition to that, there are some other pros that I have found. Some of them being it is a creative outlet. It’s a place where you can get inspired to make something entirely new. Something from scratch and that can be a very relaxing and a very inspiring part of your day.

    Cons

    Now, for the biggest con when it comes to this style of journaling, and it’s one, I think everybody when they journal kind of comes across is this takes up a lot of space and a lot of time. And I mean in addition to the time it takes you to write, you are also taking time to create this journal from scratch before you even get to the writing, and that can be kind of difficult to deal with. The other part of it taking up space is you need supplies and I mean, a massive amount of supplies for this, you’re gonna need of course, everything you need to make the journal.

    Supplies

    So that’s pages, that’s the stuff to sew the pages. That’s the punches to make it so you can sew the pages. The whole shebang. Okay? All of that, in addition to everything you may wanna put inside of this from envelopes, stickers, uh, ephemera, if you haven’t heard of that, ephemera, is any kind of like older material that you’re gonna use to decorate it. A lot of people will go find.

    Old receipts, old vouchers, tickets, things of that nature to include in these. I know quite a few people who use rubber stamps who kind of like use distressing stuff to kind of make the pages look a little older than what they are. All of that takes up physical space in your area. If you’re like me and you just have a little desk that you do all of your journaling on that can take up almost all of it and leave you no space to actually write. And that would essentially defeat the purpose.

    Purpose

    I know some people, when they make these, they do actually turn them into gifts for their friends or their family. Um, there are people who actually sell these, so if you want to write in one of these, but you know, you don’t have the space or you don’t have the time to pour into this craft, uh, there are ways to acquire a junk journal, uh, in which you can write in from there.

    Like once you have it, I know most people have like little envelopes or little pages or pockets filled with little goodies, so there’s always plenty to kind of like dig into and play with. One of the other things I’ve seen people do with this style of journal is actually fill them entirely with decoration and use them as display or art pieces in their home.

    I find this to be absolutely brilliant. If you have the time and space to dedicate to filling one of these entirely with arts and decoration, I think they can be a beautiful centerpiece to either a bookshelf or a dining room table. Or a coffee table, something for people to flip through and enjoy. I think that this could be a really good piece for me personally, I have never created a full-blown junk journal.

    My Experience

    What I have done is taken inspiration and done like a series of pages that are junk journal in style. Where like I do the distressing where I’ve done stamps and I’ve decorated these pages to the max that I can while leaving space to write. I can’t say that I’ve done a full blown one. I do want to, I just don’t currently have the space to make that happen.

    But when I did do my little like sampling of junk journal in my like personal journal. I chose like six pages that were a little further out than where I was currently writing. And what I did is I made borders using stickers. I put envelopes and filled them with little things. Um, I did this right before a trip to Scotland and I filled it with all these little trinkets that I knew I wanted to, uh, take inspiration from.

    Like one of them was like a tiny little cow, ’cause I knew I was gonna see Highland cows and I put a bunch of cow stickers on those pages and I kind of used, at the time I was writing with a fountain pen that had like a reddish brown ink in it. And I used that ink to kind of make the outside of the pages look different, kind of give them a little aging, a little distress. Um, I actually, there was one where I cut the center of the page out and used it as like a frame for what was on the next page.

    Inspiration

    So there’s a lot of different ways you can do it, and there’s a whole bunch of people who do these beautiful ones. I will link below to one of my favorites. She has a Spotify podcast slash YouTube page, and she’s constantly putting out new content and everything she does is beautiful.

    So I think you’ll have a good time watching her or listening however you wish, but definitely like there’s so many ways you can go about doing it. In conclusion, I think junk journaling can be a really fun and creative addition to your journaling practice. I think it’s one of those things that can really enhance what you do and allow you to express what you are feeling and thinking in that moment.

    In a really creative and different way than most people think to do. So if you decide you want a junk journal or if you decide you wanna do a few pages like what I do, uh, feel free to let me know. Tell me what you think about it when you’re all done, and I look forward to seeing you guys soon.

    Outro

    Thanks for joining me on journal on It where we slow down. Tune in and turn the page together. If something resonated with you today, take a moment to journal it out and let the words lead you. You can find show notes, journal prompts and more at the link in the episode description. Remember, growth happens when Honest page at a time. Until next time, keep writing, keep reflecting and keep showing up for yourself.

    I’m Shannon and I’ll meet you back

    Music: https://pixabay.com/music/beats-whispering-vinyl-loops-lofi-beats-281193/

    Resources: https://artjournalist.com/what-is-a-junk-journal/

    What’s the Deal with Junk Journals?
    So… What Is A Junk Journal?