Flashlights and Shadows: Journaling Part 1, Using Journaling as a Tool for Exploring the Self
I know this might sound like the sort of thing an alien walking around in a human body would say, but I don’t exactly understand what a human actually is or what we’re up to. The best that I can tell is that underneath all of our personalities and the crazy thoughts that rush around in our minds, causing distraction, anxiety, and other emotions, in our heart of hearts, we are our attention span. I have heard our attention span described as a flashlight that shines on specific things. Our attention span shines on social media, then it shifts to the work task that we are paid to do, then to the email that we have to respond to, then it focuses on the person who is speaking to us. When we are having a conversation with someone we can feel when their attention span drifts away from us. When we engage in public speaking, we draw the full beam of many people’s attention spans towards us. Maybe marriage is simply a promise that we will pay close attention to another person for the rest of our lives.
Thinking of our attention span this way has been helpful in recognizing how various algorithms attempt to capture our attention so that our focus remains fixed on the content they present. The things that we give our attention to are also the things that we give our lives to. If we give attention to a child, our spouse, our work, our hobbies, or our sports team, or our own development we are giving our lives to those things. This is one reason why a valuable, interesting, and in-depth conversation with another human can be and feel so satisfying. This is also probably one of the reasons why we feel annoyed when somebody takes our attention for granted, or hijacks a meeting to speak at length in a disorganized fashion. We can feel like a captive audience to the chaos of their disorganized mind. There are hundreds of ways we can signal to another person that the quality of their thoughts, or their current behavior, is not captivating enough to hold our attention. We can look at our watch, our phone, yawn, or look around the room, as if the beam of our attention’s flashlight is searching for something to hold its gaze. I may have written a draft of this article during a boring meeting so that I wasn’t wasting my valuable time or attention.
I have built a career and a reasonably successful life out of focusing my full attention on people and listening fully while asking occasional careful questions to help both of us to better understand their thoughts and problems. Along the way, I have become an accidental student of the art of listening and conversation. One of my observations is that people can tell how closely I’m listening and the quality of my listening. When they have the full beam of my attention, my mind and questions act as a lens that helps them focus their own minds. When we speak with people with well-trained and educated minds who are giving us their full attention and asking insightful questions, they raise the quality of our own thoughts. This is one of the reasons a deep and meaningful conversation can be life-changing. Two fully engaged people can sharpen and influence each other’s thoughts through the powerful tool of a productive and insightful conversation. High-quality conversational partners are not always readily available, however. In fact, the higher the quality of their thought content, the more in demand their attention usually is. So is it possible to still focus one’s mind and move one’s thoughts forward towards a progressive end goal without a high-quality conversational partner?
One of the ways that I have found to do this is through writing. The act of writing is an act of using a pen as a lens to focus one’s thoughts. People who write regularly speak with a different cadence and degree of articulateness. Writers speak differently because they have wrestled with capturing their thoughts into high-quality words and precisely shaped phrases. In a beautiful example of this concept, Patti Hill once said that writing is like wrestling an octopus into a jar.
Journaling is the art of having a thoughtful conversation with yourself. It can be done many ways, and I will explore another method in part 2 of this series, but one method is to use journal writing to turn the beam of one’s attention to the inside of the flashlight of our attention span itself.
Get "Stitches" Stephensen’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
In Julia Cameron’s book, “The Artist’s Way,” she describes the activity of writing “Morning Pages.” These are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing done first thing in the morning. She notes that “There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages–they are not high art. They are not even “writing.” They are about anything and everything that crosses your mind– and they are for your eyes only. Morning Pages provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. Do not overthink Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page…and then do three more pages tomorrow.”
By journaling in this way, the beam of the writer’s attention shines inward on their own thoughts as they flit through their mind. The pen is like the lepidopterist’s net that is used to capture these thoughts and pin them down onto the page. As these thoughts are captured, eventually the mind calms down. This way of journaling is similar to the method of meditation where as the individual sits quietly and observes their thoughts, they don’t get pulled into them, but they gently let them come and go. Sometimes our thoughts can be like a swarm of bees: thoughts of arguments, unfinished jobs, problems that puzzle us, an irritation with a coworker or family member, etc. And as we watch these thoughts in meditation, or in this style of journal writing, the bees settle down and transform from an angry swarm to calmly coming and going.
There is a similarity between Julie Cameron’s method of journaling with Morning Pages, meditation, and the psychologist Carl Jung’s concept of shadow work. This is a Jungian concept that refers to the process of exploring and integrating the “shadow” aspect of our psyche. The shadow is composed of the repressed, hidden, disowned, or dis-integrated aspects of our personalities. These can include undesirable traits, instincts, emotions, thoughts and desires that might be socially unacceptable or morally objectionable. Just as not all of our stream of conscious thoughts, nor the thoughts that come to us while meditating are negative, the shadow is not inherently negative; it can also contain positive qualities that have been suppressed or neglected for various reasons.
Shadow work is the process of shining the flashlight of our attention into the hidden recesses of our minds, bringing these obscured areas into our conscious awareness, acknowledging them, and re-negotiating our relationship and understanding of them. The goal is to achieve greater self-awareness, self-acceptance, and personal growth. By understanding our shadows, Jung taught that we can develop a more robust understanding of ourselves, our motivations, emotions, and behaviors. If we explore and integrate these thoughts well, we can potentially reduce some of our internal conflicts and foster healthier relationships with ourselves and others.
One curious discovery I have made since changing my journaling to this style has been that it has helped me restructure my relationship with various intrusive thoughts that were bothering me. Now, when these thoughts enter my mind during the day, I calmly tell them that this is not the time, as I am busy. But I don’t simply suppress these thoughts; instead, I tell them to come back when I can pay attention.
The next morning, when I open my journal, I sit there for a moment and tell myself, “Okay, all you crazy thoughts, you are now welcome to come out; I am listening.” I shine the flashlight of my attention on as many of them as I can and write them down. As I have done this, my intrusive thoughts have improved their behavior considerably; I have felt less like an alien walking around in a human body with a strangely behaving human mind. I have improved my understanding and compassion with my own thoughts, instead of feeling so puzzled at some of their behaviors. My thoughts have felt more integrated and coherent. One morning, as I was journaling in this way, I captured the thought, “Maybe feeling integrated with my own thoughts, even the crazy and distressing ones, is part of having integrity.”
