Use Your Journal To Record Your Experience

Use Your Journal To Record Your Experience

It is important to incorporate journaling into your daily life. The purpose of a journal is to draw out what is within you. Journaling is a wonderful process because it combines both left brain and right brain activities and synthesizes both experiences. Writing tends to be logical and sequential. Yet, when you get lost in it, your right brain creativity kicks in.

You may want to keep several types of journals. You may want to keep an unlined journal and a lined journal. This is where you get to be creative in your life. You can have many different journals or you can buy a journal with several sections to it.

You want to select a journal or journals that quicken your heart when you see it. Beautiful. Colorful. Quirky. Retro. Select a journal that triggers a response in your heart when you see it and expand on that feeling with the journaling process.

Your journal is about creative self-expression. It is a way to speak your truth. This is the season of your life when speaking your truth is critical. When you schedule a time every day to journal and you follow through with it, you are creating space for you in your life. Creating that space communicates to yourself that you see yourself as a sacred being. ?

Here is what you want to keep tabs on with your journal:

~You are a valuable person. Journal about the tangible and intangible things that are valuable about you, within you and to you.?? ?
~When you discover quirky little things about yourself that you like, write that down. Get in the habit of saying, “I like that about myself.”
~Make a list of things you like.
~Make a list of colors and write down how they make you feel. Play with colors. Write down words you associate with colors. Become aware of colors in your life.
~Delve into your childhood in a positive way and remember the things that brought you joy. Remember all the things you did that got you in trouble and write them down and chuckle over them all over again. Reconnect with your childhood.
~Feel free to cut out pictures from magazines and paste them in your journal or doodle or draw in your journal. It is not just for written words.
~Make a list of things you want and be sure to add everything outrageous that you can think of. List things and experiences that you want. Write down all your hopes and dreams.
~Journal to get the junk out of your head and your emotions. Brain dump and clear out what is going on in you behind the scenes.
~Have a self-dialog journal. Start out with person A, which is you. Write something down and let person B answer Person A. If you can, use your right hand for Person A and your left hand for Person B or vice versa. This way, you become more aware about your internal dialog.
~Keep a gratitude journal. I prefer to call it an awareness journal. Each day, list five to ten things you are grateful for. As you write down your list, enter into that space of awareness of what is going on with you and in the world around you. Look for things you do not normally look for. Then experience the emotion of gratitude for all of it. Wallow in it. Enjoy it.

Develop the habit of journaling and you will reap many rewards for it. As you are consistent with journaling, you will find many new things about yourself that you did not know existed. You are an explorer of yourself. Journaling is a way to record your exploration.

This article is part of a 40 page report by the author on “How to Reinvent Yourself at Midlife and Maintain Your Sanity.” If you would like a free copy of the full report, please visit? http://www.CoachIyabo.com/reinvent

Iyabo Asani is a life and business coach. A former lawyer, she left the practice of law after twenty years and now, she helps empower smart boomer men and women to attract abundance by discovering their gifts and talents within their Inner Genius.

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Michael Hughes: Record Afghansitan requires Smashing dangerous delusions

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T.S. Eliot once posited that "war is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted". Yet U.S. policy in Afghanistan, borne out of ignorance and/or willful neglect, appears bent on doing both as America's miscalculations continue to breathe life into a rag-tag acephalic insurgency - misbegotten strategies that shall likely yield a foreign military presence in Central Asia until the end times.

This same carelessness or purposeful pretermission is evident in recent U.S. efforts to shepherd the negotiations process between the Taliban and the Afghan government, as American policymakers make decisions without weighing predictable blowback and without understanding the core tribal values of Afghan society.

The American public has been trained by the media and U.S. policymakers to digest the world in Manichaen sound bites primarily driven by the election cycle as decision-makers and members of the press seem to be operating based on their own political agendas rather than on finding the most sound and peaceful resolution to the war, which has enabled policies based on unfounded predications to prevail.

It is past time for these false underlying assumptions to be shattered. The biggest of which is the belief that the U.S. must continue its lockstep support for the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, for he is the crux of the problem. Allowing Karzai to lead negotiations is an exercise in futility considering his regime's illegitimate ascension and consolidation of power via fraudulent elections in combination with rampant corruption has fed the insurgency, hence he is seen as a viable and trustworthy authority by neither the enemy nor the Afghan people.

The U.S. has also somehow failed to project the negative implications of safely escorting certain Taliban elements from their sanctuaries in Pakistan to Kabul to negotiate with Karzai and his newly-appointed peace council, specifically how the overreliance on Karzai to run this show has caused the proceedings to be perceived as a Pashtun power grab.

It's hard to comprehend how the U.S. would fail to forecast that its enthusiasm for a Taliban power-sharing arrangement might trigger angst amongst the warlords of the Hazara, Tajik and Uzbek minority groups in the north. Former commanders from Afghanistan's Northern Alliance told the The Sunday Telegraph that non-Pashtun warlords were rearming their militias in response to these discussions for fear their old enemies might return to power.

U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke himself denied that this initiative would prove to be any sort of panacea. He accused the media of falsely portraying recent reconciliation talks with Taliban contacts as a formal peace process. Holbrooke explained how the enemy's composition is so frighteningly labyrinthine the situation defies the construct of a standard settlement process. A typical negotiations framework will not suffice to bring stability to the region like it did in other conflicts he named, each complex in its own right.

"There's no Ho Chi Minh. There's no Slobodan Milosevic. There's no Palestinian authority," Holbrooke said in reference to well-known peace negotiations involving Vietnam, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Middle East. "There is a widely dispersed group of people that we roughly call the enemy."

Holbrooke listed a few of the main disparate components of the opposition including al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), the Haqqani Network and Laskhar-e-Taiba. In a disarmed moment of honesty Holbrooke then uttered:

"Now, I've just listed five groups. An expert could add another 30. So the idea of peace talks ... doesn't really add up to the way this thing is going to evolve."

One would hope Holbrooke would be such an expert, underlining the gist of the dilemma which is, namely, that U.S. ignorance of Afghan history and culture has caused it to prescribe contraindicative remedies, once again, to conditions it helped create in the first place.

Unfortunately, the predilection to internationalize the negotiations process while Afghanizing the war, although understandable considering the Karzai regime's illegitimate status, is not the answer either because the Afghan people will not accept a foreign-designed settlement.

The biggest misunderstanding on America's part is found in their inability to grasp that neither Karzai nor the Taliban are seen as indigenous, because Karzai is viewed by Afghans as a U.S. puppet and the Taliban movement is perceived as a Saudi-Pakistani phenomenon. Hence, the only political solution feasible is one that is Afghan in nature.

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures; hence the New World Strategies Coalition (NWC) has submitted a white paper that outlines an Afghan solution in which a game-changing approach is prescribed that turns convention on its head by advocating a series of All-Afghan Jirgas be held to decide a new leader and a new form of government and to restore Afghanistan's sacred tribal structure.

The first couple of rounds would be conducted offsite in nonaligned unoccupied countries and the finale held in Afghanistan to announce the new government. This native solution would be 100% designed, developed and implemented by Afghans, for Afghans with zero involvement from any other foreign power.

NATO presence is required not for offensive purposes but to serve as an interim protective force only. As noted by everyone from Holbrooke to Petraeus, the U.S. cannot capture and kill its way to victory. If anything, the current military onslaught is serving to only strengthen the enemy.

The final conventional thinking that must be addressed is this near unanimous obsession on a "regional" agreement that should include countries like Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China and Russia. First things first - let the Afghans choose their own destiny. Regional economic pacts will be critical to Afghanistan's long-term future but let's not make the same mistake made at Bonn, in which Afghanistan's future was architected under UN auspices which allowed other global actors an opportunity to dictate Afghan affairs.

The bane of Afghan existence for the past 30 years has been the meddling of foreign powers that have imposed non-indigenous ideological and religious doctrines beginning with the U.S. and Soviets using Afghanistan as a Cold War chessboard in the 1970s. Saudi Arabia took advantage of Afghan dislocation from this conflict to fund the rise of Wahhabi Islamic orthodoxy by erecting countless madrassass in Pakistan's border regions which led to the birth of the Taliban and the flourishing of Al Qaeda, while Pakistan's intelligence agency used U.S. funds to create the mujahideen which eventually led to the warlord avarice that plagues Afghanistan to this day.

The key to Afghanistan's future thus lies not in forging an unholy alliance after breaking the back of the Taliban, but rather in first smashing asunder devastating assumptions beginning with the misnomer that Afghans would ever choose to live under a regime of corrupt Westernized bureaucrats and religiously psychotic warlords who espouse belief systems anathema to thousands of years of Afghan tribal sensibilities.

Michael Hughes writes similar articles as the Afghanistan Headlines Examiner and the Geopolitics Examiner for Examiner.com.

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