Free Yoga for Grief Week 4: Grief Journaling

For the past three weeks we have focused on recon­nect­ing with your body, and you may have already begun to hear whis­pers (or even shouts) of wis­dom com­ing from within. You may wish to take note of these sig­nals, quite lit­er­ally, for it is easy for the mind to for­get insights almost as quickly as they arise when you are work­ing through grief.

In the book Lessons of loss: A Guide to Cop­ing Dr. Robert Niemeyer explains “Espe­cially when losses are trau­matic, they may be dif­fi­cult to dis­cuss or even dis­close to another. And yet the psy­cho­log­i­cal and phys­i­cal bur­den of har­bor­ing painful mem­o­ries with­out the release of shar­ing can prove far more destruc­tive in the long run.”

There is plenty of research to sug­gest that jour­nal­ing dur­ing grief and loss has ther­a­peu­tic value. Accord­ing to grief experts, the task of recon­struct­ing your per­sonal self-narrative is crit­i­cal in the heal­ing process. A grief jour­nal will pro­vide you with a venue for expres­sion with­out fear of being judged, as well as a record of your expe­ri­ence that will reveal recur­ring pat­terns and dra­matic growth.

Prepa­ra­tion: Choose a jour­nal and a pen or pen­cil that is easy to write with.

Write Fear­lessly

Grief jour­nal­ing is not about writ­ing per­fectly. Natalie Gold­berg offers these tips in Writ­ing Down the Bones: Free­ing the Writer Within:

1. Keep your hands mov­ing. (Don’t pause to reread the line you have just writ­ten. That is stalling and try­ing to get con­trol of what you’re saying.)
2. Don’t cross out. (That’s edit­ing as you write. Even if you write some­thing you didn’t mean to write, leave it.)
3. Don’t worry about spelling, punc­tu­a­tion, gram­mar. (Don’t even care about stay­ing within the mar­tins and lines on the page.)
4. Lose con­trol.
5. Don’t think. Don’t get logical.
6. Go for the jugu­lar. (If some­thing comes up in your writ­ing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It prob­a­bly has lots of energy.

For­mal and Infor­mal Grief Journaling

“Revis­it­ing the loss seems to pro­mote mean­ing mak­ing in a way that a sin­gle telling does not,” writes Dr. Niemeyer, so sched­ule at least fif­teen min­utes a day four times a week to write in your grief jour­nal (for­mal practice).

Keep your jour­nal handy, for you never know when insight or some­thing else you wish to record will arise.

It can be help­ful to prac­tice any or all of the pre­vi­ous week’s body-based exer­cises prior to writ­ing in your grief jour­nal. Even spend­ing 5 min­utes breath­ing mind­fully will help you tran­si­tion out of your head and into your body, where real wis­dom resides.

Get Unstuck

If you have trou­ble start­ing, try a “jump­ing off sen­tence.” Sug­ges­tions include:

• I remem­ber when….
• This is what I have to say to you….
• The first time I….

Extra Credit

Write your story of loss, but in the third per­son. Imag­ine you are on the out­side look­ing in. What new insights do you have about the “main char­ac­ter,” yourself?