The amount of information I have documented about my feelings and experiences over the last two years in my habit tracker and journals has been invaluable to me on my healing journey. Today, I’m sharing my process for synthesizing the data I’m capturing and deeply integrating the lessons learned along the way.

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100 Liminal Days is an experimental project of embracing my current transitional season after exiting my business by sharing an honest, real-time account of my self-initiation experience in daily posts. I’m sending shorter weekly recaps only via my newsletter. Visit Day 1/100 to learn more and sign up in the footer of this page to get the weekly recaps delivered to your inbox.

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I have been using my Notion Mindful Rhythms Habit Tracker + Journal consistently for more than two years to track habits like sleep, food, meditation, workouts, emotions, and more. I have also been writing Daily Pages (two handwritten pages of stream-of-consciousness journaling) almost every day for the past 52 weeks. These commitments have given me loads of data about myself and an easy way to reflect on my growth, my blindspots, and my dreams for my life.

In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron suggests not reading our past Morning Pages, but I’ve got a different perspective on this. If you are new to Daily Pages, perhaps follow Cameron’s advice, but don’t throw out your journals, and consider doing what I call a Journal Lookback once per quarter.

The Quarterly Journal Lookback

As the final assignment in the Mentally Fit class I shared about on Day 3/100, we were given the opportunity to do an intentional lookback on our progress by rereading our journals. This project felt so self-indulgent to me at first! Reading my daily stream-of-consciousness writing was a little cringy at times, and in others, I couldn’t believe I was the one that wrote something so deep and profound. Regardless of the quality of the writing, as I began this assignment, I felt some resistance to feasting on myself in this way. But the more I read and followed the instructions for meaningful reflection, the more I recognized the gift I had given to myself by documenting my life and taking the time to review what’s coming up.

Erick Godsey’s Tips for Looking Back

Godsey calls it the Dharma Review and suggests three key guidelines for note-taking through the lookback:

1. Notice and rewrite the little Whispers Still Active for you (those dreams you wrote about that still stir something up in you when you read them)
2. Call out Days of Note (days when something significant shifted for you) and write notes about what is emerging
3. Zoom out and notice the connections and relationship between what emerges from the different Days of Note (I like to highlight them in the same color when a particular theme is relevant)

I started my latest Journal Lookback in August and got a little sidetracked with completing it, but I’m writing about it here to give myself accountability to make sure I complete this process this month so I can be prepared to do it again in October and align with four quarters each year. For this Lookback, I went back to April to begin. I’ve already spent about six hours on my current Lookback and I’ve only made it to the beginning of June! It’s time-consuming, but again the value is immeasurable.

I do agree with Cameron’s advice not to share your Daily Pages with others, so I’m not revealing the details of my journals, but want to share a few examples of how it’s going for me.

A Few of My Whispers Still Active

Book Reports to Retain More of What I Read

More than once I wrote about wanting to start blogging about books I’m reading as a way to help myself retain more of what I read, and when I saw this trend in my journals, it felt like something I still want to do. I added it to my Whispers Still Active note. Since then, I’ve started this 100 Liminal Days project which isn’t too far off from that goal to write book reports! I am writing what I am learning as I work through The Artist’s Way book. It feels good to see myself doing something I’ve thought about repeatedly.

Overcoming Procrastination: Painting My Studio

This is something that has shown up in my journals over and over – I keep writing about how I want to paint the walls in my office/studio and improve the organization with some storage solutions, but have continued to put this off. I think I’ve held back on this project because I didn’t want to spend money, but seeing how important it is to me through the Lookback sparked me to have a conversation with Emily. Together, we decided to budget for small office makeovers for both of our spaces. I’m bumping this up on my priorities and might even share the before and after pics on the blog!

Noticing How I’m Sabotaging My Goal to Make New Friends

One of the other things about the Lookbacks is that you can see how you are getting in your own way. So much of this inner work I’ve been doing has meant that I’ve retreated into solitude more than usual. I don’t want to be antisocial, but I do want to be intentional and expand my circle of spiritually-minded friends that align with my new path. And through my Lookback, I see how I’ve repeated behavior that is counteractive to this goal.

I was able to see in various instances that I canceled plans that may have been meaningful connection points with more of the types of people I want in my life. One example came up where I canceled plans with my neighbor who I’ve wanted to get to know more. She’s an artist and works in her studio in her backyard which is adjacent to mine, and she invited me over to see her studio and cowork with her one afternoon.

The reason I canceled? To go help another friend (aka a crazymaker) who tends to make their emergencies everyone else’s, too. I ran to the rescue as I tend to do and by the time I canceled my plans and arrived to help, they had figured things out and didn’t really need me there anyway.

Seeing this and noting how I wrote about the guilt I felt for canceling plans with my neighbor raised my awareness that I’ve still got some room to grow where it comes to maintaining healthy boundaries in my friendships and learning how to stick to my commitments.

Days of Note – An Activation

Making notes of the days that held the most significance for me was a really exciting process. One of the coolest insights from this process was when I saw how a particular dream I had and then interpreted manifested in my waking life.

I had what felt like a 30-second dream on April 23rd. In the dream, I was standing on a cliff overlooking a valley so deep I could not see the bottom. It was snowing heavily around me, and in front of me with his back towards me, stood a Native American chief with a big headdress and long fringes hanging from the sleeves of a leather shirt and pants. He was wearing moccasins and standing on the very edge of the cliff, holding his arms out in front of him in the shape of a circle. The pose is a qigong pose called Embracing the Tree.

With the chaotic snowstorm all around us, I watched him holding the circle, and a rush of wind came from the heavens, down through the circle and into the canyon below him. As it passed through his arms, I heard a sharp, loud sound that reminded me of the sound a sail makes when it finally catches wind. It was a pop – almost like thunder – and the fringes of his shirt were flapping softly as if controlled by a constant flow from above as the air passed through what now resembled a portal. Then I woke up.

I interpreted the dream which revealed to me that I am experiencing an activation – perhaps even an initiation. The interpretation showed me that even with chaos all around, I am being called to hold open a steady portal to the spiritual world. I also learned that there’s an element of safety that I am participating in creating. I wrote in my journal that I think something about my spiritual purpose and calling creates safety for myself and others. This was exciting to see but I had no idea how that would look in real life.

The ritual I decided on was to go to Mount Bonnell, a high cliff in Austin that overlooks Town Lake, and hold the meditative qigong pose called Embracing the Tree. I set it on my calendar for the following Saturday at sunrise.

The afternoon after I had this dream, I received a text message from my pastor with the invitation to preach this summer. This was a rare opportunity and one that I wasn’t sure I was qualified to do, but I said yes. The preaching opportunity wouldn’t come until August, but my preparations began immediately and more Days of Note coincided with this process as I wrestled with my internal resistance to preaching.

But what’s funny is that it wasn’t until the Journal Lookback that I recognized that the dream and the invitation coincided on the same day!

Reviewing my journals has helped me to connect these events and unpack more meaning from the dream as well as my experience preaching. And now that I have preached the sermon I prepared, I understand that the future work I will do has a spiritual element and most likely includes more sermons.

It is really cool to see these connections and use this as a chance to learn how to recognize similar patterns moving forward, too. The power of the Journal Lookback is big! If you are a journaler and decide to try a Lookback, I’d love to hear about your experience. This is a new process for me and I’m excited to see what else I’ll learn.

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