Last year, my friend Alyssa started a new venture, The Journal Deck. The premise of this love project is to bring journal prompts and oracle cards to life. Picking a card each day, The Journal Deck provides you a journal prompt to explore.
When Alyssa announced The Journal Deck, I was really excited. Personally, I think journaling is a fantastic way to work toward healing. My own healing journey is rooted in journaling, however this activity doesn’t always come easy to some. How can we reap therapeutic benefits when chronic pain and arthritis prevents us from putting pen to paper?
I’ll take you through my journey to illustrate just how I was able to keep journaling in my life.
Back in 2012, I started working my way through the book Mind Over Medicine by Lissa Rankin, M.D. In it, she has almost 100 questions to work through. (You can download a lot of the questions in her healing kit here.) These questions helped me identify areas in my life that I needed to work past, and to let go and others that I needed to more fully embrace. It wasn’t until working through my journal that I was able to readily identify the shifts I needed to make in life.
The Self-Care Spotlight podcast, presented by The Journal Deck, had me on and we chatted about self-care and journaling. Not having the ability to journal wasn’t something that Alyssa had completely thought of before. And to be honest, it’s not something I had thought about until I wasn’t able to do it.
Within the last year-and-a-half, my hands began to cause me more and more problems. Before, I could stream consciousness all day and write in my journal. Now, after a page of writing, my hands tense up and I start to have a lot of pain.
I have friends within the arthritis community who have experienced these same problems. Recently, I feel like it’s been a topic that has kept coming up more and more.
So if we aren’t able to write, does that mean we have to miss out on being able to log and reflect on our thoughts? Absolutely not.
At first, I missed journaling on a superficial level. I missed the therapeutic benefits or writing out my thoughts and identifying thoughts I didn’t consciously realize I had. It wasn’t until I couldn’t write that I realized how vital journaling was to my treatment plan. Not being able to write was impacting my health.
Each of us will have our own solutions, so I urge you to try different modifications. The following five tips have helped me. Perhaps they can help you continue to journal in some way, shape, or form!
Many of my arthritis friends — psoriatic arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, osteoarthritis, ankylosing spondylitis — can still gain the benefits of journaling by making a few modifications.
To learn how to modify and manage your journaling practice, click to read my tips in the following article:
https://www.healthcentral.com/article/tips-modify-manage-your-journaling-practice-with-arthritis?ap=423
I definitely urge you to check out these 5 tips and let me know if any of them work well for you!
Wishing You A Pain Free Day!
