Journatation

Journatation: Step by Step

While meditation brings about
a kind of mindfulness,
journatation brings another.
It’s about the relative nature of time.

Where meditation focuses on the now,
that ever-passing point
we hold prisoner, stuck
between never and forever,

journatation acts as
the wide-angle shot of the moment,
focused on the connection
between the listener and the muse.

To journatate, you must get into the habit of,
immediately after a night’s sleep, filling
X pages of a spiral-bound notebook with
whatever comes to your mind.

You must do this daily, without fail,
so that you eventually become frustrated
that you have to write, and you feel like you
must force your Self to write.

Some practitioners define X as three, others
will escalate X from 1 to 2 to 3 to 5, depending
on the day of the week, so that they have more
time to write on the weekend, and build to the frustration.

It doesn’t matter, the main task is to find yourself
in a position where you are frustrated, feeling
like you are being forced to empty your mind
into the paper of your journal, even if it hurts.

You continue to write anyway, hand sometimes hurting,
pouring whatever comes to your mind onto that paper.
Sometimes it’s jibberish, sometimes it’s the same
phrase over and over until something new pops up.

But writing through this frustration releases
creative spiritual artistic results.
The act of pouring your mind into the journal
establishes a connection between

the you and the muse. The connection
is actually meant to transmit a message to
an eventual Reader, but the connection
appears, all the same, and is an end in itself.