The Mindful Soul Center (formerly Conscious Life Space)

There have been times in my life where I dumped a lot of words on many pages and there have been times when I’ve come across my old journals and read them. I like to Journal, it can be cathartic. There is so much you can learn when you look back and sometimes the insights we gain can be profound.

The Value of Journaling

During a particularly stressful period of my life, I journaled daily and wrote pages and pages of info. It was barely readable. Two years later, the pages screamed back at me –

Wake-up!

I realized that I was writing the same shit over and over again for a few years.

My life was a series of repeatable patterns and the repetition wasn’t serving me or anyone else. it wasn’t a pattern worthy of my valuable and limited time on this earth.

Get it together or continue on in an endless loop of despair. The truth was I didn’t even recognize that I was trapped spinning around again and again. I was exhausted and even a bit deluded. I thought my life was progressing and changing and it was in some areas of my life but it wasn’t enough. For the most part, it was stagnant. A few years earlier I experienced a significant event that changed my entire life in one second. My whole being was exhausted.

I could’ve chosen to ignore the fact that I was stuck in a loop and continue to write the same things over and over again but I chose to acknowledge where I was at and to participate in my life consciously, taking full responsibility for everything. More importantly, I chose to break the pattern.

Even though Journaling had value in allowing me to spill my guts on paper, the real value was the realization that I needed to wake the fuck up. Had I not learnt this lesson from journaling, would it have been another traumatic or tragic event to put a fire under my ass? Something else I’ve learned is that we do not require tragedy to live our best lives even though it seems like we’re conditioned to believe that. Human beings have a tendency to focus on what’s wrong or what could go wrong.

Journaling allows us to let go of some of our thoughts or to make sense of them. It’s a record of what’s happening in a specific time of your life. The paper is objective and doesn’t judge us. The pen to the paper and getting it out there will allow you to have a simple record of what was happening in your life during the time you kept the journal and it can help you to find patterns, record a memory and offer you a guide to know yourself better so you can then choose with intention that which you want.

Patterns, thoughts, the mind and the brain.

You might’ve heard that we have approximately 40,000 – 60,000 thoughts each day. Many are like recordings playing in the background. Some of them are not even our own. We pick up on others thoughts and feelings through indirect and direct experience of the world around us. Our own unique experience of the world is through limited senses and they are both conscious and unconscious. We are perpetually and continually exchanging energy with everything around us.

These thoughts are created by our perceptions of our own personal experiences, stories other people have told, history, our past, the present and even our future desires. Many come from outside of us until they become our own even when they aren’t necessarily true or even correct. Our thousands of thoughts and beliefs create the stories we live and tell.

Our unconscious brain processes approximately 11 million bits of information per second. That is 660 million per minute, 39.6 billion per hour, and so on. It becomes an abstraction, It’s unfathomable really. Yet it is believed that only (which still is quite a lot) 40 bits of information is processed by us each second of every day consciously = 2,400 which turns into 144,000 in one hour and 3,456,000 in one day! It’s no wonder that all of this information can start to spin around in loops from time to time. That’s why we need tools to help us sort out the clutter. Journaling, meditation, yoga and other practices can help tame our sometimes wild minds.

Within the big story of your life, there are hundreds of thousands of stories with greater and lesser significance. There are loops, plot twists and turns. How they play out is up to you. These stories can repeat themselves with different characters if we aren’t self-aware. Each event or series of events are chapters in the stories of our lives that we give meaning to. We create patterns, we change them, we recreate them and sometimes we break them. Can we even recognize them? Can we be self-aware? It’s challenging unless we choose to live with intention and from time to time do the inner work.

The Challenge 

Even though we can learn lessons from the great tragedies of Shakespeare and other greats or even the great traumas and tragedies of our lives, we don’t require them to live our best lives. We can stay ahead of the curve when we live with purpose and intention. That’s why this challenge was created to help you (and me) be conscious and aware – to be proactive even amidst the chaos of the world.

One Circle a Day

Our lives are cyclical and fluid in nature. Around and around we go, until one day we go with the flow. I fibbed, it’s not a single circle but three. It takes 3 minutes each day for the first 28 days. It’s fun and easy and has benefits.

How it works – watch this video:

Go here to participate and grab the PDF and instructions:

Join the Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/groups/themindfulsoulcenter (not required)

The Journal

This PDF journal is 10 pages and includes:

Instructions

1 page of instructions – I’ll release the 2nd page of instructions for the last two days of the challenge as we nearer to them. 

Weekly Circle Journal

4 pages with 14 circles – one for each week. This is where you record your first and last thoughts each day.

Mood Tracker

1 page for the entire 28 days to record your mood. There are also two additional sheets for your future use with 30 and 31 days.

Lined Journal Pages

2 lined pages you can print (front/back) to record your thoughts and feelings if you want to go deeper or use them for the last days.

Benefits

Doing this everyday will:

• Help you create the habit of journaling.
• Give you insights into your own beingness.
• Increase your sense of self-esteem simply because you showed up and did it.
• Ultimately help you to become more intentional. 

Success! We’re always successful when we do the inner work and take some time to explore our thoughts on life on the inside and out. 

In the end, you might recognize some patterns or repeating thoughts. Good or bad or indifferent – don’t judge it. You also might find that your moods are shitty or they might be great or somewhere in the middle. Wait till the end of the month to explore and assess where you are at right now with more depth. If you’re impatient, then by the end of each week assess the week. No judgements. There is a lined journal page you can print to write on included in the PDF if you don’t have a notebook. 

If you find this journal and the book helpful, I’d love to hear from you. Please leave a comment on the Mindful Soul Center’s Facebook page https://facebook.com/themindfulsoulcenter or mention your progress on Instagram by tagging me @themindfulsoulcenter or send out a tweet @mindfulsoulctr. Enjoy!

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