14 Day Journaling Challenge

Welcome to my 14-day journaling to self challenge. I am doing this because I am used to being in isolation. I had to separate myself after major surgery, and after chemo and radiation.

What sustained me then and now is keeping a journal. Any act of creativity works, but journaling is simple, and doesn’t require a lot of space or time.

Journaling untangles my knots. It wakes me up to beauty.

I don’t know how it works; it just does.

I know a lot of you journal already. Some of you began your first journal in my English class when you were sixteen. I say we rediscover the practice. I want to invite you ALL to join me for the month of April.

Let’s do something creative together, while apart.

It’s an antidote to fear. And a ladder to clarity.

Turns out that this idea of a journal challenge is not mine alone. In a case of simultaneous discovery, one of my heroes (and a cancer survivor), Suleika Jaoud is also doing a journaling challenge. The reason I’m so late to launch this idea is that when I found out that she was doing it, I hesitated. I let my idea wilt. But today I realized that the brave over perfect move is to keep going. I can build a mini-revolution WITH her by doing a challenge with you. It will be one steeped in creativity, and in resilience and resistance journaling!

Here’s how it works: 1-11 minutes of free-writing each morning. No rules. It starts when you start.

If you haven’t already signed up, here’s the link to sign up to receive for FREE daily journal prompts!

I’ll also be posting prompts each day on Instagram (@susierinehart) and Facebook (Susie Rinehart Home of the Brave)

You do not need to share what you write. But send me pictures of your journal or anything you feel ready to share. I would also love it if you passed the idea forward and invited others to join. They’ll need to sign up for my newsletter at www.susierinehart.com to receive the prompts, or they can follow me on instagram (@susierinehart) or on Facebook: Susie Rinehart, Home of the Brave.

In creative solidarity, let’s write!

Love,

Susie

Sign up to receive FREE daily journal prompts here!

Day 1

Live the questions. This time in isolation is a moment to dream and scheme, but not to fix or figure out everything.

As Rilke wrote, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Your Prompt: Write down the questions you are living with right now. Fill a page with questions and give yourself permission not to answer a single one of them.

Day 2

Dueling emotions. These times remind me of the paradox of being human. On any given day, I feel joy for beautiful moments. I also feel pain for what we have lost and what we are losing each day.

One of my favorite authors, Terry Tempest Williams, writes about the human capacity to hold opposing feelings at once in her book, An Unspoken Hunger.

“How are you feeling?” (Terry asks her uncle Alan at the age of 9.)

“I am very happy, and I am very sad,” says Alan.

“How can you be both at the same time?”

“Because both require each other’s company. They live in the same house. Didn’t you know?”

They live in the same house! That amazed me! I thought something was wrong with me because I couldn’t sort out my mixed emotions. It helped me to journal about these opposing experiences happening inside me and embrace my negative feelings, not just the positive ones.

Your prompt: Write about what makes you sad and what makes you happy. To illustrate how these two feelings can live in the same house, use sentences with two opposing feelings connected by AND. For ex) I am sad that I cannot work AND I am happy that the pace of life is slower now. I am sad that I cannot be with my mom AND I am happy we have coffee together over Facetime. I love my babies AND I want to get far, far away from them right now…Keep going!

Day 3

Peace of Wild Things. I first learned poems by heart to have something to recite when I woke in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep. When I was diagnosed with a rare brainstem cancer, I used to wake full of worries about my health and my children’s wellbeing. What helped was to recite “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry over and over until I fell back asleep. It worked better than melatonin or magic. The other thing that helped was to get outside and sit in the peace of wild things.

Today’s prompt is not about memorizing poetry (though let me know if you want to and I’ll give you tips to make the process easy). It’s about how when we spend time in Nature, we can find grace.

Your prompt: Go to a place outside that brings you peace. Sit quietly in silence.

Close your eyes. Do nothing. You don’t need to be productive. This moment is for you to feel the bigger context of Nature.

When you open your eyes, write down what you hear. Look at the sky above you and remember that the earth is still spinning. Write down what you see.

Write down the ways in which Nature doesn’t seem to be affected by current events. Relax into the grace of the world.

When you wake in the night in the coming weeks, return to this moment, the words you wrote, and the peace of wild things.

The Peace of Wild Things
–Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Day 4

What can we learn from birds? These times are calling us to adventure. But the unknown can be scary. And we don’t feel much like singing. This prompt is inspired by my friend Elizabeth Johnson who says, “Our current migration into the unknown is full of so much, including a spectacular launch.”

In The House of the Soul, Evelyn Underhill writes, “Migration is not an easy or pleasant thing for a tiny bird to face. It must turn deliberately from solid land, from food, shelter, a certain measure of security, and fly across an ocean unfriendly to its life, destitute of everything it needs. Perhaps one day we will rival the adventurous hope of the willow wren and chiff chaff; an ounce and a half of living courage…”

Your prompt: Think back. Tell me about a time that you willingly set off into the unknown without knowing the outcome. Getting married counts. Breaking up counts too. So does a spectacular road trip. And so does having a baby, or training for a marathon, or running away from home.

What was your call to adventure? Describe the experience in as much sensory detail as you can. If you feel like reflecting on what you learned from that time, go for it. But remember, there are no rules.

Day 5

You do not have to be good. Tense times make it difficult to motivate. You are probably beating yourself up right now because there are people with more difficult problems than yours. Stop it. Give yourself a little self-compassion. It will help you to serve others better.

Your prompt: Use the first line of Mary Oliver’s famous poem “Wild Geese” which is “You do not have to be good…” and extend it with your own words. Imagine you are writing a gigantic permission form to yourself and you want to list all the ways you do not have to be good. Lower the bar. You do not always have to be a self-improvement project.

Here’s my attempt at extending the first line of “Wild Geese”:

Wild Geese in the Time of Corona

(With deep apologies to Mary Oliver and Adrie Kusserow.)

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk
on your knees through your Clorox-wiped floors, repenting.
You do not have to be good at sewing masks.
You do not have to be productive.
You do not have to wear pants.
You do not have to feel shame for losing your cool
or your mind.
You do not have to pick up the laundry you threw out the window,
or the iPad.
You do not have to keep your voice down.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours. And I will tell you mine…

Day 6

Tell the Truth. I’ve been thinking about my voice as an instrument of how I author my life. Why was it so powerful when I was young and so difficult to find now? I am hungry to express myself more freely lately. I want to swear more, dance more, and laugh more. It begins by saying No! to the things we don’t want to make room for the things we love.

We unapologetically express ourselves when we are really young and then we slowly silence ourselves. (Don’t you remember being 8 and singing into your hairbrush or shouting NO! at your parents?) As we grow and try to fit in, we stop telling our truth and we start lying.

We lie to hide our struggles or we lie to please others. We lie when we pretend to be someone we’re not. We lie when we curate our lives on social media. Gradually, by constantly lying, or at least not telling our inner truth, we lose touch with who we are. We stop using our own powerful voice. But we can reclaim it. We can find and use our own voice again. It begins by saying ‘No.’

Once, my friend called to invite me to the same Super Bowl party that we have gone to every year. I didn’t want to go. But she is a dear friend who always shows up for me. I was afraid to tell her the truth. But I tried it out. I told her, “I love you. But I hate football. I’m not coming.” And I waited for the ground to fall out from under me. Instead, she said, “Good for you! Let’s go for a walk next week instead.” I said ‘No’ and all that happened is that I got a better invitation.

Your prompt: Today’s prompt has 3 short parts (you can pick one or do all three):

Write about when you were young (about 7, 8 or 9) and you expressed yourself freely. Can you remember when you said what you felt like saying? Did what you felt like doing? More importantly, do you remember saying No? Did you ever refuse to wear the clothes your parents wanted you to wear? Or refuse to smile for the camera?
Write about a time when you wanted to say ‘No’ but you didn’t for fear of disappointing or offending someone. (If you express in writing the things you didn’t say after a meeting or a tough conversation, you’ll feel better and build muscles to use your voice respectfully and wisely next time.)
What do you want to say No to in your life right now? How might you tell your truth more?

Day 7

Dissolving can be painful. One Summer in my twenties, I became fascinated by metamorphosis. I studied the life cycles of insects obsessively. I found out that a caterpillar doesn’t just go into a cocoon, grow wings, and come out as a butterfly. It dissolves completely inside the chrysalis until it is nothing but green liquid. No wonder transformation is uncomfortable, I thought. In the process of becoming something new, we have to dissolve first.

That same summer, I kept a dragonfly nymph in a cookie jar filled with pond water on my kitchen table. I fed it tadpoles and waited for the dragonfly nymph to hatch its wings. I kept waiting for it to behave differently or give me some sign that it was ready. Out of the blue, it crawled out of the water one day and flew out my window at a speed of over 30 mph. A dragonfly may begin its life in water, but it contains everything it needs to fly inside it when it’s born. The dragonfly taught me that transformation is not something I make happen. It’s something I allow to happen. *And I just found out that some cells resist the change to something new. We therefore have a biological reason to feel some resistance to change ourselves! This fact makes me happy.

Today’s prompt: Don’t say demolition, say transformation. How is your old self dissolving right now? What hurts in the process? How would you act if you believed that everything you need is with you right now to transform into something new? How can you imagine these days as a time of transformation for the world, too?

Day 8

Letter to Fear. Without fear, there is no courage. I begin most of my mornings by writing down my fears in my journal. It allows me to face them and move beyond them rather than letting Fear sabotage my day and my dreams.

Your prompt has two parts:

Part 1: List all your current fears. Write at the top of the top of the page, “I am afraid that….” and let your pen roll.

Part 2: Now write a letter to Fear. Begin with the words, “Dear Fear, thank you very much for trying to keep me safe. But right now, I need to tell you that I am in charge and these are your boundaries…” Write the letter from your boldest, bravest place outlining what Fear can and cannot do in your life.

Day 9

Letter from Joy. I believe that joy is our birthright and our most natural state of being. As we grow, we learn to push down our desires and our whims so we can stay safe. But then we forget who we are. One way to remember who we really are is to ignite the embers inside us and write down our dreams.

Your prompt: Write a letter to yourself from Joy. Begin with the words, “This is your true, joyful self speaking. I’m here to remind you of your dreams. You want to live by the ocean. You want to learn the names of constellations. You also want to…” Continue the letter with NO RULES, as if money were no object and coronavirus was far behind us in the past…

Day 10

Write a letter to you from your Persistence.* Our persistence has been with us from the beginning. It has never left our side. But we forget that sometimes. We need to remember that we have faced adversity, overcome struggles, and endured pain before. And somehow, we are here today. We made it. We are so much stronger than we think. If you don’t believe me, listen to your persistence.

Your prompt: Begin with the words, “Dear… I am your Persistence. I am the part of you that never gave up and this is what I want you to know…” Then write down as many examples from your life when it has been challenging. Write about hard times that you’ve made it through. They can be small, like opening your locker on your first day of middle school. They can be medium, like finishing that 10km race. They can be big, like loving again after betrayal and heartbreak. Write fast. Don’t look back. Keep your hand moving.

*I got this idea from Elizabeth Gilbert at a workshop I attended.

Day 11

Map of Place. I love maps. I love the way they look with the green spaces, lakes, and lines that connect us. I also love the possibility of travel and adventure that they evoke. But I am terrible at finding myself on one. Then I met my friend Molly who is an artist and a mapmaker (mollymaps.com) and she taught me to make my own maps in my journal as a way to remember a place and a feeling. It feels particularly important to map places where you feel apart of Nature, not separate from it.

Your prompt: Make a map of a place where you feel most connected to the planet. It is not about accuracy, precision, or beauty; it is about meaning. Draw an aerial view or any view you imagine when you close your eyes. Go where your pen takes you. Let this map live in your journal as a portal to the place and also to a feeling of connection. Return to it often and rediscover that centered, grounded, BIG ONENESS feeling.

Day 12

Bad luck? We are used to thinking that life runs in one direction only, from beginning to end. But it helps to think about it from the end to the beginning to see how things work out when we could never have imagined that they would. It also helps us to practice being defiant. The world wants you to see things as bad or good, lost or found, poor or rich. But too often, we can’t tell what something is until it’s behind us in the past. Today’s writing prompt is really an exercise for the imagination.

Your prompt:

Write down the 3 best things in your life. They can be relationships, situations, or objects.
Circle one of them. Think of one piece of bad luck that eventually led to this favorite thing coming into your life. For ex) Brothers that never waited for you which made you tough and fast, a breakup that made you move towns, a health condition that forced you to think about how you use your time…
Write part of your life’s story from your hindsight perspective. In this version, the bad luck you had was an important step in you achieving one of your favorite things. You can begin, “I would never have X without that awful moment in my life when….Let me tell you about how one led to the other…

Day 13

How to Love this World. Spend a day imagining you are a bear waking up from a deep sleep. When a bear emerges from her den, all of her senses are on high alert. She investigates every leaf. She notices each new scent. A bird overhead deserves her full attention. One way to love this world is to pay attention to its smallest, natural delights.

Your prompt:

Open a window or get outside
Close your eyes. Breathe deeply, then open your eyes. Write down everything you smell, hear, see, feel, and taste
Next, read “Spring” by Mary Oliver. In it, she writes, “There is only one question; how to love this world.” Write a response to her question.

Oliver’s answer includes seeing darkness as a dazzling mysterious animal. It also includes paying attention to the smallest gifts of spring.

Spring
by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.

All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring
I think of her…

(Excerpted from House of Light. Read the full poem here.)

Day 14

Holy cow! We did it! We made it to Day 14. Whether you did all the journal entries or only a couple, you made it here, to this moment in history. That’s BIG. Thank you!! I didn’t do all the prompts. Life got in the way sometimes. But no matter how long and difficult my day had been, I wrote at least one sentence after I brushed my teeth at night. And the prompt I used for that sentence never changed. It was simply, “What are you grateful for today?”

I’m sure you have heard before the benefits of writing down the things for which we are grateful including better sleep, fewer illnesses, and more happiness. But there’s a trick to it that few people mention. You don’t get the benefit just from writing down gratitudes. The benefit comes when our brains re-live positive experiences and flood us with dopamine and serotonin.

Today’s prompt about gratitude is really a visualization that I urge you to practice. When you write down something for which you are grateful, focus on moments, not things, and get specific with time and place. For example) I’m grateful for the way Leo the dog sleeps on his back in the late afternoon sun. I’m grateful for quiet mornings. I’m grateful for my son’s spastic energy after dinner. I’m grateful for less traffic noise at night.

By focusing on moments, not things, you avoid turning the practice into a chore. Now, as you write, visualize the moment you are writing about in your journal. Re-live and re-experience it. This way, you trick the brain because it cannot feel gratitude and sadness at the same time. Did you know that? True fact.

With time, you will feel your worldview shift from negative to positive, from sad to satisfied, from scarcity to abundance. You will even start to seek out moments to be grateful for each day.

For me, writing down one gratitude each day has been transformative. It drowns out the bully in my brain, has made me less afraid to die, and wakes me up to the gifts of being alive. Not to mention, it keeps me writing!

Your prompt: What are you grateful for? What was unexpected or surprising today? Who makes your life a little bit better? How? Don’t rush it. Go for depth over breadth. Be as specific and detailed as you can be.

I’m grateful for everyone who has taken on this journaling challenge.

You are brilliant. Would you please SHARE with me what you have written? Noticed? Felt during this challenge? @susierinehart or [email protected]

Shine on! May you continue to journal in your own beautiful way.

Onward and Upward!

Love,

Susie