A Right Way of Thinking - Visual Journaling

For those of you who know me, I have spent a lot of time doing work in the right side of my brain and helping others to do the same… This is the creative side of your brain and it is also the area of the brain where we are able to solve problems. When we engage the right side of our brains, amazing things happen and we see things in a whole different light, so each week I take you on a new adventure, into the land of right-brain thinking. Come on, and play along!

Today I’d like to take the subject we’re focusing on – JOURNAL WRITING and do something really fun! I talked up above about how I took one whole page and wrote about GRATITUDE. Well, the other thing I didn’t tell you, that some of you may already know about me, is that I LOVE Visual Journaling, AKA Creative Journaling. I spend at least one day a week creating something in my Creative Journal. My Creative Journal is a Mixed Media Journal (I love the Strathmore Visual Journals) where I just take a topic and create something. So I challenge all of you to start a Creative Journal and I have some prompts for you for your first page. For those of you who already have a Creative Journal, this will be fun for you too!

Imagine you’re invited to a party in honor of GRATITUDE. Who will be there? Where will it be held? What will transpire at the party? Now write, sketch, make a collage, be creative, do whatever comes to mind and create on your page whatever you’d like that tickles your fancy (as my Grandma used to say - I LOVED that woman!).  I’d love to hear about what you’ve created. Leave me a comment below! Happy creating!

Here's a couple of pages from my Visual/Creative Journal. The page on the left are my grandkids and the page on the right is ARTwork from my favorite mentor SARK!

Dreams

SARK says in her book, Inspiration Sandwich: Stories to Inspire Our Creative Freedom, "Transformative dreams await us each time we sleep. I like to ask questions before sleeping, and then dream the answers.  Dreams love to guide us and answer questions we're not ready to ask our conscious mind. I do write down all my dreams, and now have hundreds of dreams in my journals to reread for clues to my unounscious. Dreams are the angels of our spirits."

So I read this and thought I don't remember any of my dreams, so if I ask questions before I go to sleep this isn't going to do me any good... but then I thought about how much DAY dreaming I do! Oh my goodness! I do lots of daydreaming! How fun would it be to start writing down all my daydreams? Do you write down your dreams? Brian Andreas of storypeople.com says, "Dreams are a starting point. Dreaming is a state. It's the state right before things take form." So today, I'm going to start a Dream Journal.

Before today, I had three journals going. I will now have four.  

• The first one is called my "Daily Pages" journal. It is a tool from Julia Cameran's "The Artist's Way". This is where I do a "Brain Dump" every morning; 3 handwritten pages of whatever comes into my head - it goes out onto paper. I LOVE this journal. It frees my mind to start my day.
• The second one is my processing/venting journal... This is the journal that I write in when I'm having a hard time processing information and I'm feeling negative and it's information that I don't ever want to have to read ever again. I learned after I lost my memory that the journals that I kept in the past were very negative - that the only times or most of the times that I wrote in a journal was when I was mad or wanted to complain about something. I used my journals to vent. I made a decision after reading these journals that I was going to keep more positive journals so that when I went back to read my journals or when my posterity (those who live after me) read my journals it will be a positive experience. So this journal is more of a venting/processing journal. I will probably burn them when they're full - it will be a cleansing ritual :-).
• The third journal I have is my Creative Journal. Now this is a fun journal. I took a FREE, yes I said FREE. I liked this FREE Visual Journaling class by Strathmore where I learned to create these amazing journals. I take time at least once a week to create something in my visual/creative journal. I have a page devoted to my husband where I write all kinds of love notes about him, I have another page where I made a cute little pocket that holds all my keepsakes, I have another page where I painted with watercolors and I wrote poems on top of the watercolors what the picture means to me, I have a couple of fold out pages, and I have this one page where I found some really cool pages from a Newsweek magazine about "Brain Freeze" and "I Can't Think" - how our brain's are on overload and it totally described how my brain sometimes feels... It's just been a lot of fun working creatively just an hour or two a week in it.
• Now I have my dream journal! I could even incorporate my dream journal into my creative journal - who knows?

So what are you dreaming about today? Where have your dreams taken you? Where are your dreams going to take you? This website was one of my dreams that came to me less than three months ago... Your dreams can take you many places. Just imagine what you can do...

Many Hugs!

Cathleen