Delightful Detours And Discoveries

This article was previously published on Shoe’s Seeds and Stories

A few years ago I reviewed Mari L. McCarthy’s book Mindset Medicine, so I was thrilled when I was able to be part of WOW’s current Blog Tour for McCarthy’s book Journaling Power.

I am a sporadic journaler. Sometimes I will do it for years, and then I will take a hiatus, but somehow I always come back to it. My current practice includes writing down every evening at least five images from my day (a practice I discovered from another journaling book) and writing down at least five gratitudes. In McCarthy’s “Night Notes”, the author suggests writing down gratitudes, but also a list of your accomplishments of the day. I immediately embraced this idea. So now every day I write down what I have done, which is generally way more than I thought, instead of thinking about my to do list with that “Ugh, I didn’t do that again” feeling.

My other practice is to actively review what I have written. You see, in the past, I have generally just used my journal as a dumping ground for my bad thoughts. Now, acting on the advice of a professional, I actually read over what I have written (a few days later and not in the heat of the moment) and try to catch my negative thought patterns. It does work.

McCarthy’s book took me in a different journaling direction.

McCarthy writes that she wrote the first edition of Journaling Power “because I felt compelled to tell others what I had learned about the therapeutic benefits of pen-to-paper journaling”. The author aims to reach even more people with this updated 10th anniversary edition. “…

Journaling Power will show you how to use your fingertips to leverage a holistic power that has magnificent healing effects on your mind, body, and soul. Without any nasty side effects!”

The book uses McCarthy’s own healing journey as an example of what can happen when you use her techniques. There are plenty of journaling exercises that invite you to write about everything from your relationship to food to what roles you play in your life. Along the way you’ll learn about topics such as how to tackle your inner critic and how to change from “or” to “and”.

I didn’t do all the journal prompts, but I did a lot of them. One I had fun with and which was surprisingly more enlightening than I thought it would be was journaling to the title of a song. I chose “Un-Break My Heart”, something which I had been thinking about lately, the tendency to close our heart as we age.

Probably though the most important part for me was the section on setting goals. I am not good at setting goals, but as McCarthy writes “Having a vision is central to your success” and “Writing down your vision, your goals, and your action steps will accelerate your progress and make success more attainable”. So I worked on some of McCarthy’s journaling prompts related to to this. Surprisingly what I ended up focusing on was my financial goals. But working on financial beliefs is too a part of healing.

McCarthy ends the book by stressing how important it is to keep on journaling. “People who get transformative results through journaling are people who journal every day”. There’s plenty to motivate me and others. I can go back and do some of the prompts that I missed, but not only that, there is a bonus section of “Advanced Journaling Techniques”.

So why not give it a whirl? Or as McCarthy says #WriteON!

I received a copy of this book for a fair and honest review.

There’s a great interview with McCarthy on WOW’s blog.

Purchase a copy of Journaling Power: How To Create the Happy, Healthy Life YOU Want to Live, 10th Anniversary Edition onBookbaby or Amazon. Be sure to add it to your Goodreads Reading List.