The Importance of Journaling 

[Your Personal Journal is listed under My Journals on the left side menu]

As we begin this course together, it is important that we mark our progress and insights in the journal provided to each student.  By journaling, we record the significant information we are gathering and we express how this deep learning process is helping us develop a personal meditation practice that is satisfying,  sustainable and transforming our lives.

Our first journal entries will focus on these topics:  (1) What led you to join in this course? (2) What outcomes are you hoping for? (3) How do you understand the term “InterSpirituality” and how does this tem resonate with you?

In your writing, please explore your own personal insights that have been molded by your tradition, teachers, mentors, role models, spiritual styles and personal life experience. Expand your exploration to include the internet, books and conversations with your teachers and friends. Record your findings in your journal and then write a brief summary that will be the foundation for beginning your meditative practice.

Your Contemplative Practice

Please remember that the purpose for the journal topics and questions is to stimulate your journal writing. Your writings provide a conceptual context and a foundation that can yield a deeper level of contemplation.  While your contemplative session begins conceptually, it can deepen into profound insights emerging from the depths of your own consciousness.  You might then might experience a transformative equanimity from a universal non-conceptual wisdom that surpasses the limits of your individual conceptual mind.  These sublime states of universal wisdom consciousness and their sources have been called by different names by the world’s great contemplative traditions.

Then open yourself to the transcendent reservoir of support and insight residing within the vast and untapped potential within your consciousness, and (if appropriate for you) a “universal source of wisdom.”  In so doing, your contemplative consciousness might yield a transformative insight and experience that surpasses the capacity of your normal perceptual and conceptual mind.  This 7-step process is designed to help you create your own meditation practice and spiritual path.

(Note: Your personal journals are listed on the left column menu.)