A guided journal that provides writing techniques and exercises that are matched with Buddhist meditation instructions and teachings.This guided journal uniquely combines personal writing and meditation, two of the most beneficial self-help processes available. The two practices augment each other naturally, and many Buddhist teachers recommend a practice journal, but many people don't know how to approach structuring a practice that draws from the benefits of both. In this book, Beth Jacobs--who has taught and written extensively on both Buddhist psychology and therapeutic writing--provides a variety of writing techniques and exercises that are matched with specific Buddhist meditation instructions and teachings. She describes meditation practices and Buddhist concepts along with writing exercises that bring the material to life. Writers will find exercises that deepen their experiences in general and writing in particular. Meditators will find Buddhist concepts clarified and techniques expanded. All readers will discover a laboratory of writing as experimentation, with structures that open ideas, break habits, and combine experience in novel ways.
Trade paperback. This guided journal combines personal writing and meditation, offering prompts to reflect on experience mindfully through journaling.
“In this intelligent and sensitive work, Beth Jacobs blends two mindfulness practices—insight meditation and expressive writing—while honoring the principles of each. Dozens of beautifully designed processes introduce writing to meditators and meditation to writers with a synergy that elevates both. The result is a work rooted in evidence-based theory and standards-based practice, infused with a palpable devotion. A welcome and deeply needed addition to the literature in journal therapy.”
—Kathleen Adams MA, LPC, director of the Center for Journal Therapy, author of
Journal to the Self, and editor of
Expressive Writing: Foundations of Practice“I have been a journal writer for sixty years and have often claimed it as my primary form of meditation. From within her long practice of Zen, Beth Jacobs now braids how words can lead to wordlessness; wordlessness can lead to words. There is a languid dance where the veil of language can be wafted aside by attention to breath. Trust this dance, and Jacobs’s guidance in it; you will learn about Buddhism and journal writing—and, of course, about yourself.”
—Christina Baldwin, author of
Life’s Companion, Journal Writing as Spiritual Practice and
Storycatcher: Making Sense of Our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story“Beth Jacobs provides the reader with a roadmap to our own creativity from the Zen perspective. Her work is both seriously playful and playfully serious, informative and performative, and will go straight to the heart of the reader/writer and meditator who dives into the exercises that Dr. Jacobs generously offers.”
—Seiso Paul Cooper, author of
The Zen Impulse and the Psychoanalytic Encounter and
Zen Insight, Psychoanalytic Action: Two Arrows Meeting 