Starting a Meditation Journal

A meditation journal is a powerful tool to cultivate mindfulness, get in touch with your inner self, and track your meditations. Discover how to start your meditation journal today, plus get links and recommendations to some of my favorite meditation and mindfulness journals.

What is a Meditation Journal?

The answer, unfortunately, isn’t as straightforward as you’d think. You see, a meditation journal is essentially anything you want it to be.
I know. That is the least helpful answer ever. But hear me out.

Depending on your personal goals and needs, a meditation journal can be any of the following:

• If you have an established meditation practice or are looking to start one, then a meditation journal can be a way for you to reflect upon your daily practice. After each meditation, you can use your journal to write about what thoughts and sensations came up for you during your meditation. I’ll go into more detail on this below!
• You might view a meditation journal as kind of like a mindfulness journal. This kind of journal can be a complement to a meditation practice, providing prompts that allow you to understand your own mind better and cultivate more mindfulness throughout your day.
• And you might also view a meditation journal simply as a way to record your meditations. You can write when you meditated, how long, and what kind of meditation you did.

In this post, I’m going to cover how to start a meditation journal from scratch. For this blog post, I’m mostly going to cover the first bullet point above creating a meditation journal that allows you to reflect upon your daily practice. This type of journal will require you to have some kind of notebook, whether it be a plain notebook, a hardcover journal, a notebook with inspirational quotes at the top of the pages, or something else that strikes your fancy, I use my Goodnotes6 on my iPad.

However, if you don’t want to start from scratch, there are some awesome guided meditation journals out there. These journals give you everything you need to create a meditation journal today. Some allow you to reflect on your daily meditation practice while others help you to embrace mindfulness in your life, so choose what best fits your needs! I’ve also linked to some of these below, so you have plenty to choose from!

Now let’s get started on how you can create your meditation journal today! 

How to Create a Meditation Journal

Getting Started

Before you begin creating your journal, it’s important to step back and gain clarity on your intentions. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• What do I want to get out of this meditation journal?
• How can this meditation journal support my growth?
• Do I want to track progress through time, or do I simply want a space to record my reflections? (Or both?)
• What do I need to ensure I continue to keep up with both my meditation and meditation journaling practice? How can I ensure I get what I need?

Now, let’s break down these questions a little deeper:

What do I want to get out of this meditation journal?

This question is meant to clarify your purpose or intention for creating a meditation journal. Do you want to have a space to record and reflect upon the images and emotions that arise during your meditations? Why? Will this allow you to become more aligned with your true self? Keep asking yourself “why” until you get to the root of your reason. If you’re having trouble, you might rephrase the question like this: “After six months of meditation journaling, where do I want to be? How do I see myself? How am I different?” If you see yourself being more peaceful, self-assured, confident, compassionate, and/or loving, that may be your why.

How can this meditation journal support my growth?

This question spins off the above question. Do you feel like you allow stress and anxiety to take up too much space in your life? Then maybe this meditation journal will support your growth by helping you to cultivate more inner peace and tranquility. Do you feel like your brain all too often replays events of the past or worries about the future? Then this meditation journal could be a way for you to cultivate more mindfulness. There’s no right or wrong answer here. How this journal can support your growth will be personal to your journey.

Do I want to track progress through time, or do I simply want a space to record my reflections? (Or both?)

If you love data, then you might enjoy keeping track of different elements of your meditation. Here are a few things you can track:

• Length of meditation
• Time of day
• Type of meditation
• Emotions before/emotions after
• Guided/unguided

Again, this one’s entirely up to you. If you want to track it, go for it! If not, skip it. Do what you feel best supports your needs.

What do I need to ensure I continue to keep up with both my meditation and meditation journaling practice? How can I ensure I get what I need?

Keeping a meditation practice and adding an element of journaling to it requires dedicated time and space. So how can you make sure you get the time and space you need? This question is meant to set you up for success. Let’s remove any barriers and obstacles in the way now so you can continue to have a successful meditation and journaling practice moving forward.

Unstructured vs. Structured Meditation Journal

In this section, I’m going to first outline how to create a free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness meditation journal. This is for those of you who thrive on finding your creative flow and don’t want anything too structured. Afterwards, I discuss how to set up your structured meditation journal, for those who crave a little organized structure in their routine. There’s no right or wrong way to approach your meditation journal; it’s all just personal preference!

Unstructured Meditation Journal

This is quite possibly the simplest and most straightforward way to start a meditation journal as it doesn’t require a lot of pre-planning from you. In fact, if you have a notebook and a writing utensil, you can start writing today!

The goal here is to reflect upon your meditation, and if you choose, you can go a little deeper and explore the emotions, thoughts, and images that arose for you.

So what do you need to do? Keep your meditation journal and a writing utensil next to you during your meditation. Once you’re finished meditating, turn to the next blank page and begin writing. (If it isn’t convenient to keep your journal next to you, it’s okay to move to a more comfortable writing spot.)

Here are a few things you might write about in your journal:

• What emotions arose during your meditation?
• What images did you see?
• What thought patterns did you notice?
• What challenges did you encounter?
• Did anything unexpected arise for you?
• What benefits did this meditation offer?
• How did you feel immediately after? Five minutes later? Ten minutes later?

If you want to track specific details about your meditation, you can also write down the time, place, and length of the meditation. You might also want to track details like whether it was guided or unguided and what particular type of meditation it was.

Another option is to make your journaling a type of continuation of your meditation. For instance, let’s say you did a meditation with affirmations for self-love. When you pull out your journal, you could write down the affirmations that resonated with you and continue to write more positive self-love affirmations.

Or maybe you did a visualization meditation and you want to keep the visualization going. You can write about all the images that came up and are continuing to arise for you. I like to do this in first-person, like everything in my visualization is happening right now. So if I’m walking in a beautiful meadow in my visualization, I’d write something like, “I’m walking in a gorgeous meadow with a sprawling sea of pinks and purples and yellows spread out as far as my eyes can see.“

What I like about this method is that the possibilities are endless. I also like the flexibility. One day, you might want to reflect upon a particular image that came up for you during your meditation, and the next day, you might want to write solely about the thought patterns you noticed as you were meditating. This practice gives you the freedom and versatility to spend your time writing about anything you want.

Structured Meditation Journal

While the above method of keeping a meditation journal gives you the freedom and flexibility to write about anything, there’s something kind of calming about having an organized, structured element to your journaling practice.

And luckily, it’s super easy to create a structured meditation journal from a blank notebook!

To start, let’s look back at the questions you answered in the “Getting Started” section above. Did you note anything you wanted to track? How can this journal support your growth? What’s your why? You want to make sure all of these elements are incorporated into your journal in some capacity.

Now let’s set up the first page of your journal. I like to keep this pretty simple so that I can simply write in my headings the day off instead of creating a bunch of pages in advance. But if you want to get creative, go for it! I encourage you to do what makes your soul happy. If you want to add in some stickers, washi tape, or pretty illustrations, you can do absolutely anything.

Here are some of the different elements you might want to incorporate into your journal:

• Date
• Time
• Length of Meditation
• Mood/Emotions Before Meditation
• Mood/Emotions After Meditation
• Type of Meditation
• What was your intention for this meditation?
• Reflection: How did your meditation go?
• What thought patterns did you notice come up during your meditation?
• What emotions did you feel during the meditation?
• What images arose for you during the meditation?
• What benefits did the meditation offer?
• Final Thoughts

Make sure you leave the bulk of your notebook space for the questions that will require longer answers. If you like to create your pages in advance, I’d encourage you to only make a few to start. You might find that you want to change some of the questions or leave more or less space for some of your answers.

Monthly Reflections

This is optional, but I also like to include some space for a monthly reflection as I find it helps me to get re-centered when I check in with myself every once in a while. You can do this after meditating or choose a different time of day when you have some quiet time to reflect.

Here are some questions to ask yourself during a monthly reflection:

• Is my meditation practice supporting my highest good? Why or why not?
• Have any unexpected problems or issues arise in the past month?
• Is my meditation practice supporting my growth in the way I hoped? Why or why not?
• What internal changes have I experienced in the past month?
• Is there anything I want to change about my meditation practice?
• What profound lesson have I learned in the past month due to my meditation and journaling practice?
• Have there been any unexpected positive benefits?
• Is this practice worthwhile?

It’s important to check in with yourself to make sure that this practice is always supporting your highest good. If not, why? Do you feel like meditation has become something you “have” to do rather than “want” to do? Then maybe it’d be helpful to stop tracking your meditations and release the pressure to have a perfect meditation streak. Or maybe you’ve only been doing one type of meditation, and it’d be helpful for you to incorporate other types into your practice.

Whatever your answers are, hold love and compassion for yourself. None of us are perfect. Remember that each day is a beautiful opportunity to start anew.

Featured Photo by Samantha Sheppard on Unsplash