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Dharma Diary
Bunks
Australia Veteran
I started keeping a "dharma" diary a few months ago. I just felt like I needed it at the time. Does anybody else do this?
I have stopped for the time being but I like to pick it up occasionally and read back over what I wrote.
The most profound feeling I get when doing this is that it feels like it wasn't me that wrote those things. It was somebody else.
A very good lesson in impermanence and "not-self". I can recommend it.
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Comments
Namaste,
I did, but found it to encourage holding onto the unskillful feelings I was experiencing so I deleted it. I am thinking of starting one again when I'm finished my latest round of treatment. At the beginning, I found my Dharma Diary a great asset.
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I think I use this forum as my Dharma Diary.
My good, bad and ugly come out here....and I certainly can look back at some threads and I think....damn....she was testy that day.....hahaha....who is that ?
I feel such comfort here discussing and writing all things Dharma.....
Gratitude and much love to all of you.
My Dharma Diary reads: "This is what's happening right now." The title on the front cover, the back cover, and every page is "Mindfulness", and it has the most secure lock of any diary or journal I've ever written in... no one can access its contents but me!
I have a 'hard copy' diary or journal, but since the advent of the internet and forums, I do my writing here rather than there. I used to get on myself for not journaling like I used to but every single day I 'write' online, fwiw of course, and I put a lot of thought into what I write. Still I did buy a special little diary with cool handmade paper just for dharma thoughts
it started out as a meditation diary.
I did chakra therapy including a tiny amount of yoga and a lot of other practices such as visualizations and other connections to the chakras. For example the manipura chakra is the seat of emotions and is invoked by sitting by a fire or certain music and certain vowel sounds (bowel sounds? hehe).
Anyhow I kept a journal and it was kind of cool. The yoga had the result for me of feeling some way to connect with the universe despite being very depressed.
So I think a diary would be a way to exchange energy with the universe. Mandalas upon mandalas. Diaries upon diaries. Sandcastle magic.
I think it was Jack Cornfield who went on a Meditation retreat and took a blank book with him, in which he was determined to record every life-changing thought he would have and sitting quietly round a camp-fire with everyone that evening, he chanced to be sitting next to the centre's Head Lama who asked him what the book was. Jack explained. The Lama asked to see the book and when Jack handed it to him, he promptly threw it into the fire.
"You can't preserve bubbles" He said.
No record therefore exists of all the wondrous life-changing thoughts Jack had because preserving bubbles is pointless...
I kept a rather well-recorded life until the early years of my marriage.
Not dharma diaries, just journals where I wrote literally everything that took place in my life, and my reflections about it.
I dropped the habit when I began to notice that so much writing was interfering with my actual living the facts.
Trying to keep track of my life was actually getting in the way of savouring life as it unfolded.
I stopped taking so many photos for the same reason: trying to capture the perfect snap meddled my enjoyment of the landscape.
So I quit.
Our cellar is full of old notebooks I never bother to read, and though sometimes I regret not having records of my first trip to Asia, my pregnancies, my boy's birth... it's all with me.
Yes, and I remember feeling a little embarrassed about the way the previous mes had been thinking at times! Also the reason I gave up writing poems!
Interesting.
Anything can be an asset or a bubble ready to be thrown on the fire with the nearest heretic.
There are different ways to journal. In one sense our lives are a book or revelation of the karma that gives us being.
Each of us has something to offer, ourselves, others and if of sufficient insight even the cods, gods, aliens and Buddhas from other realms . . . or so I have been told . . .
I was keeping a Dharma journal for a while, but most days I was too embarrassed to write down what I was really thinking, doing, speaking, etc, since it was so obviously unenlightened. Call me a Buddhist perfectionist, I guess.
So there's a softy core to you, after all..
..
@zenguitar. Keeping a spiritual diary can be helpful. It is important to be accurate. So you can identify the good, not so good and in between mental states. Even if you think the mind stuff is mainly negative there is also that which is positive. Over a few years you will really see the difference as your practice matures.
There are different ways to go about a journal. For example you can only put down your inspired or more enlightened thoughts or quotes from relevant teachers and exemplars. What you consider relevant or deep wisdom will also change or how you understand it will change over time.
It is not there to bolster your lobster or alter ego but . . . to reveal your relevant self, which has a graduated refinement as well as a perfection moment to moment . . .
Ok so I'm giving it another go
dhammablogger.blogspot.com.au/
Metta,
Raven
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