Yesterday, in our Community Mini-Retreat, "Journal for Inspiration," we started by processing where we are now. One of the prompts was, "In my journey of..."
Over the past few years, I've been on a journey of healing. As I saw this prompt, I recalled how around the same time last year, I was finally starting to recover from a couple years of being depressed. I remember journaling in my custom wellness journal about starting to feel better and realizing, "even though I feel like I've been piecing myself back together, from my healing, I'm not going to just go back to who I was before my trauma... I'm going to become something different. I don't know what..." It was like looking at myself as a blank canvass...
So yesterday, I used this prompt to reflect on where I've come in my journey since that reflection. Who have I been growing into? Much of my healing has been about getting back to knowing who I am, loving myself, and releasing the habit of erasing myself or changing myself for others.
So, I wrote out in my custom wellness journal, "In my journey of..." healing and growth, I have changed. It's true. I'm not the person I was before the trauma. Well, I am and I'm not. I've been shifting from being a shadow of me to all of me. I've been shifting from living in my head to in my heart. I've been shifting from following my fear to following my body.
It was empowering to pause and write about my journey in my custom wellness journal, because honestly day to day, I don't often see the progress I've made. The past year has been very up and down - certainly not a steady line up. I've had stretches of frustration, self-doubt, self-hate. I've had times where I felt like I went backwards. All the more reason it was important and helpful to take a pause yesterday and look back in my custom wellness journal.
There's something to recognizing that we are in a journey, and to look back on where we've come in our journey, where we are now, and where we want to go.
How about you? In your journey of...
"In my journey of..."
Posted by Alina Liao on