Ever since I was a child, I kept journals. I didn’t have several types of journals, just one, my personal and secret diary, of course. Used to write there childish things, dreams and small events from my life. I was writing grammatically correctly, but the style left something to be desired😊. After I passed my teenage years, I stopped writing. I started again in my forties, when I decided to start the healing path and created Oana gluten free.
“Oana Gluten Free”
In the beginning, I shyly wrote a short blog article or a post every now and then. A recipe sometimes. After a few years I decided to write daily on my Facebook page. It was very difficult for me for a few months, because I couldn’t find something to write every day. Sometimes I racked my brain to come up with a topic to write about, and then to put it into beautiful words. I remember that one day I posted a picture with the text: “That’s how much my head went today😁”.
I didn’t give up. Kept writing better and better texts. I took a storytelling course, a copywriting course, a nutrition course, I learned content writing, research and SEO, I learned to take good photos and edit them, and now I’m learning to shoot and edit videos for my brand new YouTube channel.
Wow! Only now, writing all this, I realized how much I learned! And it all started with the determination to heal myself.
What do healing and writing have in common?
There are studies that show that writing has physical, cognitive and emotional benefits. I didn’t know this when I started writing, but in my case, it seems to have had an effect. I am in remission, my lab tests are normal. What is “abnormal” are only the changes brought about by the disease before I went into remission, as well as those that come with advancing age. My memory is better and so is my mental and emotional state. Everything I’ve done since the day I made the decision to heal has led here. Giving up gluten, changing my mindset, all my searching, research, everything I’ve learned. And journaling, that is, writing. I kept different types of journals which helped me.
“The journal is a record of personal experience and growth, not a summation of things said and done,” said the writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau.
By writing, I became aware of myself, my emotions, what I want and how I can get there, starting from where I am now. Thoughts fly through the mind at speed, and if you put them down on paper, you discipline them. I had strong realizations as I wrote, as if my fingers were being guided by someone else. Many emotions hidden deep inside me would not have come out if I had not laid them on the screen “paper”. Sometimes, rereading a text, I can’t believe that I wrote it.
What I do differently from regular journaling is that I make everything public, on my blog and Facebook page. My awareness brought to light through journaling techniques helps me, but it also helps you, or so I like to think 😊.
Let’s see what types of journals there are.
Food journal
When I went gluten free, I kept a daily journal of what I ate, symptoms, energy level, daily weight. This journal helped me notice what was making me sick and what was good in the new diet I was implementing. I could thus create a menu that would not cause me pain.
I also kept an awareness journal of what I was eating. This journal helped me get rid of unconscious eating, those nibbles that fell into my hand. In this way, I was able to reorganize my kitchen, to no longer have the “nonsense drawer” from which I always gorged, to set the number of meals with which I feel full without feeling the need to gnaw like a munchkin.
I also kept a journal of the time I was on strict AIP. I started from a very painful flare and went into remission again with the AIP Autoimmune Protocol. In the journal of that period, I documented more the mental state I had, because AIP is powerfully healing, but it can be frustrating from the point of view of food pleasure. You can find this journal here.
With the help of the 3 journals I now have a healthy diet, have gone into remission and maintain a weight that I feel good about.
Activities Journal
I didn’t do very well with this journal. Have not been able to establish a rigorous schedule of activities that would help me be more productive. I still leave most of my activities to spur of the moment, which creates enough dead time during the day, or I can’t stick to certain scheduled activities because inspiration hits me and I can’t stop writing.
When you know you’re leaving home for work and coming back at a certain time, you have to stop what you’re doing and leave. When you work from home, it’s a different story. You need a lot of organization so that you don’t confuse work with stirring the stew or putting out the laundry. For me, the boundaries are a bit blurred, because stirring the stew is part of my work 😊.
Dream journal
I had periods of very intense dreams. An intense dream is a dream in which you have emotions that you feel during sleep, a dream after which you wake up overwhelmed by these emotions. They are usually dreams full of details, colors, action, characters, which are lost shortly after waking up, so they must be put down on paper immediately.
I remember having a dream 6 months after my mother’s death where I dreamed of her showing me the long road ahead of me. I had had 6 hard months after her death, with 2 operations, spondylitis flare, my helpless grandmother who was left in my care, the relatives who always wanted something from me… and missing her. In the dream she showed me the way, the path, then she disappeared. After that dream I regained my strength and could shape my life the way I wanted.
Let’s not mock about dreaming. Through dreams, our subconscious wants to communicate something to us. It is useful to write down our dreams, especially those that arouse strong emotions. Maybe we can’t “read” them like a book then, right away, but over time they can give us important clues about our hidden side.
Travel journal
I didn’t travel much, but when I did, I enjoyed absorbing the energy of the places I visited and the people of those places. Turned my experiences into blog posts like this one or this one.
I also learned to travel alone, which completely transformed my life, I became less dependent on loved ones, on comfort, on routine. And I created a separate category of the blog dedicated to solo travel, “Life and Travel”, as a diary of concrete facts, but also of emotions from my travels.
Journal of ideas
I have this journal on my phone so that it is always at hand. When an idea comes to me: for an article, for a post, for a new recipe, I stop wherever I am and whatever I’m doing, and write it down. Otherwise, it is lost. In 5 minutes, it flew without a trace 😊.
**
These are different types of journals that I have used so far, but there are other types of journals as well. You can keep a gratitude journal, a goals journal, a morning journal (in which you set the goals of the day that begins), or an evening journal (in which you write down the events, emotions or thoughts of the day that ends). Any journal that helps you organize your thoughts, activities, feelings or emotions is welcome. With the help of journaling, you can have a conscious life, that is, bring to the surface what is hidden deep inside you, which does not let you enjoy life.
