Meditation Journal

In his book, A Million Thoughts, and in this virtual retreat, Om Swami refers to a journal on meditation. You can download it below.

Meditation Journal

The focus of the Meditation Journal is to raise your self -awareness and help you progress in your practice.

It will compliment your meditation practice, and you will derive immense benefits following this exercise. Ideally, it is recommended that you fill up your meditation journal at least for 40 consecutive days with discipline just after you finish your daily meditation. 

Highlights of the Meditation Journal:

• Raise Self Awareness – daily notes that touch upon areas of habits, gratitude, self-compassion, skills, and goals in life.
• Improve your Chances of Success in Meditation – Meditation Journal with two parts of detailed and measurable journaling.
• Understand the Hurdles in your Meditation Session – The First part of journaling is to be done immediately after meditation to ensure the correct feed of data. It has a list of hurdles/blocks that interfered in your meditation session. This part of the journal is a tool to measure your progress and understand flaws and improvement areas in meditation.
• Meditate and Reflect – The second part of journaling is for your observation and awareness of self during the day, on the virtues that you follow in parallel to your meditation practice.
• Keep on Improving your Practice with Every Session. You can improve and move towards perfection in the quality of your meditation. There is a measurable block that you can use to record the quality of your meditation, immediately after your practice.
• Keep Yourself on Track – There are scoring, and meditation guidelines with do’s and don’ts that you can go back to, every time you are using the meditation journal. Help yourself to not compromise on your resolve and the quality of your practice.

There are a few more things that can be helpful to you for building up your practice. 

1. Practice of Resolve – Also known as Sankalpa in Sanskrit is a practice to build on your determination. When you start to make a new change or bring new habits in life, there is a natural resistance to change. You need more determination. This practice can help you.  To get more insights into the practice of Sankalpa, you can go here.
2. Practice of Letting Go – Also known as Tyaga in Sanskrit, is a practice to build your will power.  If you make a resolve of journaling for 40 days straight, you need the will power to take you through the journey to maintain quality and to complete your goal. You can read more about it here.
3. Reflecting on Self – To enrich your exercise on self-reflection in meditation journal, here are some questions you can think over. These are just pointers if you are looking for some inspiration/ideas to start with.

1. Handling Criticism – It is always an opinion of another person – Do they matter to you as feedback to improve? Or do they bother you? Here you can find methods that you can adopt to practice during your journaling days.
2. Your Opinion about yourself – Do you know, based on your thoughts, your emotions, and the state of your mind, you form an opinion? It is tough to be neutral.  Your conditioning directly affects the quality and nature of your opinion. You may want to go to the root of how do you form opinions. What is your opinion about yourself? How to contemplate on it? This might help. 
3. Self -Importance is generally frowned upon, but do you know a sense of self-importance directly affects your confidence. It is an important life skill. You can read more about it here.
4. Raising your happiness quotient – Do you know that it is in your hands to be happy all the time? Here are five principles that you can adopt to change your life and of those around you.

Meditation Journal is one essential step towards your success to become a seasoned meditator.  Feel free to share your experiences, and you are welcome to write your feedback in the comments below.