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“She hears voices.” “He talks to himself.” Until recent years such observations conveyed suspicion of ... insanity! Or maybe the dazzling brilliance of an eccentric genius. Few people want to be thought of as the first or qualify for the second. Could that be why so few people know about this powerful journaling technique? Posing questions in your journal and then writing down the answers may be the single most powerful tool available for insight, healing and problem-solving. The more you use it, the stronger it grows. This technique is recommended by all leading journal experts for developing insight, solving problems, enhancing creativity and more. Let’s take a quick look at a few Power Questions and how to use them. Later posts will explore specific questions in more depth. The first step of the simple process is to describe a troubling or puzzling situation, then follow it up with a question like one of these: What can I learn from this? An ideal question to pose after recording an...

When I saw this picture in a viral PowerPoint going around the email universe, it was love at first sight. Perhaps that's partly because I just returned from a couple of weeks of studying colonial New England history and it came alive for me in ways I'd never expected. My world became larger when I “blew off the dust” from pages of history I'd never explored. In this picture I also see the potential for my own volumes of writing to be stored away on a shelf (physical or virtual) for decades — maybe a century or longer. This picture gives me hope that at some point, someone will blow the dust off those words and they will enrich the future just as olden stories enrich my life today. Who knows? I write primarily for my own enjoyment and edification, and then for the enlightenment and entertainment of family. Should future generations derive unexpected value, so much the better! Write now: explore some old pages. If you are fortunate enough to have family history documents, t...

Old woman or young girl? You know how sometimes the same information keeps coming at you from all sides? The classic illusion puzzle illustrated above has taken over my life lately. It began as I wrote in my journal yesterday morning and realized that I could look at a situation from 180º around for a point of view my  more to my liking, then I could clearly see both points of view. "It's all in how I look at things," I wrote. That reminded me of another favorite illusion, and rather than finding it elsewhere, I made my own. Notice how the bars and word look shaded? Click the image for proof they're not.  Click and wait 4 seconds for alternate view Within the next twenty-four hours, I noticed references to this sort of reframing several places. Unfortunately, the notes I made on the sources were mental, and like most great story ideas that aren’t written down, they vanished. (Note to self: write things down! ) One was in a book I read. Another was in a blog, and the...

“Lifting the cloud of depression is one of the documented benefits of expressive writing, aka life writing, especially in the form of journaling, rants or freewriting.” I got sidetracked after I wrote that sentence and before I sat back down to finish this blog post, I checked my e-mail. There I found the latest edition of Amber Starfire’s stellar Journaling Through Life Ezine . The first sentence in her feature article reads, “A recent article on health said that feelings of helplessness and lack of control are significant factors contributing to depression, particularly for women.” Well, hey! You know the saying, “Great minds run in the same channels.” Back in the ‘70s when I was a psychology grad student, Locus of Control was all the rage, and research papers and theses (including mine) in psychology departments all over the country incorporated Rotter’s Locus of Control Inventory. A strong correlation was found between a strong external locus of control and depression. Transla...

The Tree of Life Writing   Since a picture is worth 1000 words, the picture above should represent about three blog posts worth of insight. I first recognized the interrelationships among the various aspects of life writing over a year ago and included a simpler graphic with a post, The Life Writing Progression , on July 5, 2009. Sarabelle gifted me with this picture last month while I was preparing material for my Writing for the Health of It class. I’d been thinking about the core Story (capital S) that defines us, and how everything we write grows out of that Story and expresses aspects of it. I was considering how some of our writing is deeply personal and earthy, best left out of sight and unshared. That root writing leads to insight and imparts power to our words and voice as we write publicly visible stories and essays. When I began pondering the role of memoir in tying together the loose ends of life, and recalled that memoir is composed of the brush strokes of smaller stori...

Would you believe there are more than 1000 words and phrases to describe feelings. 1000? That's right. And most are single words. I've compiled a list of that many. The list does not include any metaphors, and undoubtedly there are at least another hundred words not there. The list has history. It began in June 2007 when I read a blog post th at prompted me to ask people to send me lists of emotion labels. Results poured in as friends and readers submitted lists with hundreds of words and phrases. It took a bit of doing to compile them all and eliminate the duplicates. I was fascinated to see how little overlap there was among the various lists. I've since had several classes make lists as an exercise, and the master list continued to grow. Now that it has reached the 1000 mark, it's ready for public consumption. If you think of any words not listed there, please send them to me so i t can continue to grow! You may wonder why it matters to know all these words. Genera...