I have kept a diary off-and-on for a decent portion of my life.
Recently, as I was cleaning out some boxes my mom had saved for me of my grade school days, I came across journals from both at-school creative writing time and personal diaries. Reading through them was such a nostalgic and eye-opening experience that it solidified just how much I want to make keeping a diary a stable part of my daily routine for the rest of my life.
I came up with this method after deciding what I want to focus on in my morning journaling routine, then picking and choosing from a few recommended routines of people I admire. I complete in this order (usually). It’s my initials, which makes it easy to remember for me too. 🙂
DMG Diary-ing Explained
- D is for Dreams: Record any and all dreams I can remember. Because, 1) I want to get better at remembering them by the intentional practice of writing them down and 2) I have some pretty crazy, random, detailed dreams, and I may wish to use them as story material eventually.
- Also, Rachel Hollis journals every morning, writing down 10 dreams that she wants to make happen as if they’ve already happened, to put dreams out there in written words and make them more likely to manifest. So, if I can’t remember my while-asleep-dreams, then I can write down my for-my-life dreams.
- M is for Morning Page(s): generic musings, memories from the day before, maybe helpful thoughts I needed to get out of my head during/after meditation. Just anything on my mind that morning, written without judgment or censoring. I put the “s” in parenthesis because ideally for Julia Cameron’s morning pages, you write three whole pages, but depending on the size of the notebook, that could take over an hour and I want to free write for between 30 minutes and an hour. This should get me one page at a minimum but sometimes won’t be a full three.
- G is for Gratitude: Three to five affirmations of what I’m thankful for that morning, and should be specific (i.e. something brought to mind within the 24 hours before, not looking forward to something or just saying I’m grateful for my husband, Reid, in general, but expressing gratitude for something in particular about being mindful of the present moment).
I’ll be sharing selections from my diary as blog posts at times when relevant. So, if you see the Ds, Gs, and Ms anywhere, now you’ll know why!
Photo by Cathryn Lavery on Unsplash
