Journal Meditations

Working with inner silence.

Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance,
And there is only the dance.
- T.S. Eliot

Zen Mountain Journal explores the use of journaling in creating a life,
in nurturing a friendship with yourself and
in exploring the hidden currents that underlie your life.

Man does indeed know intuitively more than he rationally understands. The question, however, is how we can gain access to the potentials of knowledge contained in the depth of us, how we can achieve increased capacities of direct intuition and enlarged awareness.
Just as an acorn contains in its unconscious the dream of the oak tree and that dream expresses the coming into being of the oak tree, working with a person, we have to have a method of drawing forth what is in the seed of the person, the unlived potentials.
- Ira Progoffv

Below the push and pull of our everyday lives there exists a vast reservoir of experience and wisdom. It is individual to each of us. It holds the lessons of our successes and failures, and it holds something else — a potential, a gift, a uniqueness — that is seeking to manifest. It usually doesn’t communicate in words. It offers feelings, images, moods, colors — the vague shapes that seemingly arise out of nowhere. It wants to guide us. It waits. It is reticent, shy. It responds to relaxed silence, not to demands. Journaling can help us better understand the symbols and messages that emerge. Writing down the thoughts that form can add clarity and logic to what comes bubbling up.

Combining journaling and meditation is an act of self-love, self-referral and self-healing. Friendship with yourself, with your quiet interior, is the basis of resourcefulness. A friendship with your quiet interior allows you to better understand the patterns of your life. A special power comes from diving deep into that world and accessing the wisdom it contains. It requires nurturing.

Your inner world guides you without you knowing it. Our thought patterns determine the quality of our lives. Journaling can help us understand patterns that have been associated with times of deep peace and accomplishment, and patterns that have repeatedly been associated with setbacks and turmoil. Journaling techniques — which rely on quiet time, reflective time — can allow us to better understand the options life presents.

Interviews, stories, reflections and art — and the questions they leave behind

Zen Mountain Journal is published two or three times a week on Substack. You can sign up here.

For the thirty year history of Zen Mountain journal, visit here.

. . .

Life is a desperate struggle to be in fact that which we are in design.
- Ortega y Gasset

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing oneself is wisdom.
Mastering others is strength; mastering oneself is true power.
- Lao Tzu, The Tao Te Ching, Chapter 33