What to Remember

Before going on a day hike or joining a group on the Journey, remember that you’ve got these understandings with you:

Writing your life
Looking back to look forward
Tending our growth
Music is a bridge
Why a group?

Writing your life

Journaling is not keep a diary. A diary is a record of what happened today. Journaling is a tool for processing your experiences. As you write, a thought takes shape in your mind. You may start a sentence without knowing how it ends. It’s almost like getting a thread and pulling it out- the experience unfolds on your page, almost as if this space is an extension of your mind.

Journaling is about asking yourself questions – about questioning your awareness, and asking yourself, “why do I feel this?” without having an answer. You dialogue with yourself through the journal. In this process you’re engaging your deeper self, your intuition, and learning to trust yourself.

St. Ignatius told his missionary monks to stop at midday each day and reflect. They had to look for what they had missed in the day. Reflecting is almost like looking at a video of yourself and wondering why you did certain things. We’re trying to discern our deeper self.

A lot of stuff has been layered into our past that we’re not aware of. In wondering, we actually wander down the layers, down the passages, making new connections, and finding new realisations.

Looking back to look forward

Basically, every relationship requires time, requires presence. Our relationship with ourselves needs time. If we don’t spend time with a friend, that relationship fades. The problem is that we spend a lot of time with ourselves functionally, and very little time relationally, as friendship. We tend to confuse the functional and the relational. When we are with ourselves relationally, we can just ‘waste time’ and just chill together, like you would do with a friend.

Having time with yourself involves journaling, reflecting, chilling. What would you do with a good friend? In spending relational time with yourself, you might just go to a coffee shop and have a cappuccino and doodle in your book. It’s not self-indulgent. It’s like seeing someone afresh as you spend time with somebody.

Reflection time, journaling time, is really a time where the reality of our relationship with ourselves comes to awareness. With that awareness we can go further. When you have coffee with a friend, your look at them, you listen to them, you update your experience of them, because you want to connect with them as they are now, not as they were when you saw them last.

We can only be a friend to another as we can be a friend to ourselves. This is building friendship.

Tending our growth

When you plant something, you don’t expect it to come to fullness in a flash, in a moment. You’re aware that the growth takes time. In the early stages, the growth is particularly delicate and sensitive, and needs appropriate process and protection. A baby might be put into an incubator if it’s fragile. Seeds are germinated in seed trays in a hot house. New aspects of growth within us need care and protection.

When we want to speak about something, we need to be asking, “Why?”. Do we lose our growth to show off,  to impress, or prove our worth, or are we able to keep it in a secret place until it’s become more robust and able to move out into the light of day?

The temptation in a group is to talk about new growth immediately, but then it moves from the heart to the head and becomes information to trade with others. A better process is to nurture the growth and allow it to speak for itself when it becomes part of us. We’re not talking about our growth, we’re becoming our growth, and it expresses itself. Someone might say, “Wow! You have more confidence.” When growth is an experiential reality you don’t have to talk about it. In fact, talking about it seems strange. The change is obvious.

I try to give myself like a month before talking about it. If I let it cook, it becomes stronger than me. Ideas kill growth. The information takes the place of the reality, and kills the reality. If you see a travel videos of Thailand extensively, you might think that you’ve seen Thailand, you don’t need to go there. That’s what information does; it overloads us and steals reality from us. That’s why people concentrate on sharing experience, and not information or ideas. Even my intensions, I keep secret for a time. You need to test them with your reality.

Music is a bridge

Music is existential- you can only listen to it now. It creates a presence, it draws us to the present moment and we become present to it. Music is also evocative, because it draws emotions to the surface- emotions that we can feel and explore.

It also forms a transition from our busy lives to the space that we’re entering. So it needs to be music that’s non-vocal. It needs to be, not loud and crashing, but gentle and evocative.

Why a group?

A group is really a small group of people whom we don’t necessarily choose, like our group of friends. They are people who share a desire for a journey of growth. The group actually creates momentum, and it also gives a validation to the process. On our own, we can easily become distracted or bored. There is resistance when we reach areas which we’ve previously found difficult. In a group, there is a communal shared experience, and we can go as deep as we feel comfortable to, and yet the group process continues. It’s like being on a bus. Sometimes you’re more engaged and sometimes less engaged, but your still on the journey.

Sometimes the people who we might find difficult in the group reflect aspects in our own life that we have become hardened to, our wounded. And so we need them if we are to get a clear picture of ourselves.