(2024-11-05) Foxwizard Journaling

FoxWizard on journaling amidst the metacrisis. And if you're questing, it's worth kind of having a sense of what you're doing. And I find one of the most indispensable dispositions one can have is that towards daily journaling.

This is a way that you can cultivate and regenerate the capacity to think for yourself, but also to sense into what is emerging for you

Why would one want to journal like a wizard? Why? To learn better spells, to advance, to level up, to have greater impact via one's intentionality, to translate and transmute conceptual reckonings into manifested reality or something like that.

Journaling is one of the most profound ways to develop metacognition, to think about what you're thinking about, to cultivate one's own clear thinking, to ongoingly regenerate the capacity to think for oneself. And really with journaling, can have an earlier detection system for when things are going awry.

that allows you to be a little bit more intentional about how you cultivate fulfillment, depth, growth, satisfaction, and right relations and so on

people hire me is because I'm offering something that is different from what the mainstream consensus narrative is. I'm often, and here's another episode I'm going to be talking about, you know, there are some of us that are a step ahead of the hype cycle.

journaling is particularly important in my domain. It allows me to clarify what thoughts are my own thoughts, how I've arrived to them, what biases might be influencing them

Morning Pages by Julia Cameron...most adults were once creative, and may need a process to kind of tap into and rediscover that creativity. It's a 12 week program and there are two key concepts that emerge from this. The first is morning pages and the second is artist dates

Artist dates are where you schedule some time for yourself doing something that is well-feeling, that fills your well of inspiration.

For many of us, it's genuine time in nature.

For others, it's like time at the pub with friends

For other times, it's like time to actually lie down and stare up at the clouds or look at the stars and things like that. For others, it's like going to peruse their local bookstore, actually taking a book that they've purchased, a physical book, going to their favourite cafe and sitting down and reading it.

the second part of it was morning pages. Now morning pages as a journaling technique.

The whole point of morning pages to write three pages of uninterrupted stream of consciousness writing. It's a really, really good pattern to get into.

What we're trying to do here is outpace the inner editor

so one of the, the, the only-- the best way to cultivate a habit of morning pages is 750words.com. 750words.com. My friend Buster Benson created this quite a while ago. is wondrously, authentic, irreverent, it's not doing any of the growth hack patterns that you typically see with these online websites. It's pure, it's private

there are other practices, by the way, like this is, this is a morning ritual for me, the journaling. Other people have, an intentional walk, and it's partly the body processing things and... If there's enough space for reflection and for noticing without being too forced about it, you can notice what emerges. You have to find the practice that works for you.

as a wizard, journaling is really key.

one of the things I love doing is bring my journal to a cafe.

this early, in the day allows you to orientate the actions or the activities of your day. You then have more intentionality and you're less prone to falling into automatic patterns

We're on it all on a developmental journey. The development is partly cognitive complexity, it's partly the depth that we have deepening our sense, it's partly wisdom cultivation, it's relationality, it's integration of all of our parts, it's healing of our traumas

partly the reason why we journal is so that we can be better.

We want to cultivate the ability to foster a deep sense of befriendment to all of life.

I would oscillate between paper-based journal. And then previously I used an app called Day One

there's a compounding effect that happens if you maintain this practice over years

Day One has this feature where it will say, On This Day Last Year. And it means that once you finish journaling, you can look back at what you were angsting about or writing about on this day, the previous year.

Like the insight that you get as to one's own patterns, but also it allows you to get fatigued by your own bullshit.

Three years in, you should be so sick of your own stories.

bullshit narratives

I use Obsidian

I try to do this most days. I'm not militant about it.. sometimes I quip that I have “a daily journaling habit that I do once or twice a week”

But if a whole week has gone past, it's almost like the canary in the coal mine is carked out, it's not makin’ song anymore

it's a tripwire to catch me before I potentially fall into some darker patterns of being so perpetually busy that there's not actually time for myself or not time for self reflection

I do feel like we are in an epoch in life where we largely via institutionalizations and habituation and just the patterns of the late stage distraction economy in modernity, we largely do not think for ourselves

So let me go through the template that I use each day knowing that take what you will that might be helpful. So I'll include some images in the post for this.

So the first thing I do is I explore the category of vibe. And I love the term vibe. It's so ... how do we say this? It's so nebulous.

I front end my journaling practice with this kind of felt-sense, the somatic bias so that I don't just bulldoze over with my thinking.

the body holds immense intelligence and wisdom

right at the start has felt-sense activities. So first of all, we start off with soma. So I do a felt-sense activity, I do a bodyscan

the body scan will offer me more of a slightly more precise location of what I'm feeling and where

Mood is then a more generalized sensation

Then I reflect on what mana colours I seem to be channeling. In Magic the Gathering, a system of mana, magical energy...Black, white, green, red and blue.

Each of these colors have their philosophies, their energies, their dispositions associated with it. And then there are color combos and each of those have their things associated with it. So this morning I was feeling very blue green red, which is a temur lovely disposition for a podcast.

Yesterday was pure black. And that just means I was kind of just in a really pragmatic mood

Then I draw my daily tarot reading

I draw three cards

I do this as narrative provocation

when I don't have my actual physical deck with me, I'll use the wondrous app developed by Tina Gong called Labyrinthos. Labyrinthos has a, in my experience, this is the most comprehensive, contemporary resource for understanding tarot.

The affirmations that come with each card and the provocation that they bring is quite wondrous.

With Tarot, when you do the draw, you don't fixate upon what the app or what the cards “mean”. Instead, you sense into whatever the meanings are and so forth, but you notice what you notice when that comes up

Now we get into the actual journaling part

There are two questions for this first section as we start to kind of get into it. I call this the OMM and AWE section. OMM and AWE.

these questions come from Michael Bungay Stanier the author of The Coaching Habit

The first question, OMM, O-M-M stands for what's On My Mind. And so as you're beginning to do your journaling, the question is, what's on your mind?

The second question is the AWE question: And What Else? And I love that this question is almost like you can be in awe of what's on your mind. And that question of “and what else” is what we keep on asking

Kim come up with today. She's gotten her obsidian, this lovely section called Stirrings. And there's a line that Kim has shared with me that's been so helpful. And that line is, “write towards desire”.

I was having this conversation with Kim. a while ago where I'm like, the world just seems to just want its productivity hacks and I just, you know, I really just want to, I really just want to be able to like help people tap into a more, for want of a better word, a more mythic way of living where there's a focus on relationality, qualitative meaning making, sense making, this unfurling shared sense of mystery and awe and wonder as we co-create a world more curious and kind. And she's like, why don't you write towards that?

The next section I go to after the OMM and AWE section is what I call The Shadow. And here's where I ask myself two questions. What am I avoiding? And what am I pretending to not know?

you will catch yourself bullshitting, or at least avoiding or pretending you don't know something. And I find this really useful early in the day, because it's often like there's really important work that I'm anxious about that I'm avoiding.

as we know from Immunity to Change, the work from Robert Keegan and Lisa Lahey, this hidden commitments and conflicting values is often what keeps us back from meaningful progress and change and just locked into these perpetuated patterns where change is incremental at best

I then get into the shape of the day, which I call day shaping. This is simply a time-boxing activity where I list out the hours, the waking hours of the day

without doing this time boxing, I'll be naively often optimistic about all the shit that I can get done in a day.

I then have what I call The Plot. And here's where I asked myself, what is the single most important thing that will progress the story? And by the story, I don't mean there's any kind of fixed narrative here. This is a non-narrative approach to life.

And by progress the plot, mean, how do we make stuff interesting? Like how do we actually catalyze meaningful progress here? (interestingness, hero)

And then I also in the plot, have the ((secret task)), which I write in double brackets. What was my secret task today?

my single most important thing today was record episode 3. And my secret task is to maintain the glint. Maintain the glint

There's a kind of a glint that we need to maintain —even as we dance our way into doom and despair— that allows for that trickster magic to manifest

So many people by default start their journaling practice by writing down things that they have to do. And this, at least from my experience, you might be different for you, but at least to my sensibilities, starting with constraining factors right at the front end of your journaling will add a sense of constraint

And then the bonus thing at the very end, if I get time to it, I have an end of day reflection where I ask three simple questions. Or: three sentence provocations. Today I did this, today I learnt this, and tomorrow I shall this. This is subtly an “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy” thing that I've baked into it. I to position any setbacks as learnings.

Another important thing here is all of this journaling practice ought to happen before you've even looked at the internet.

there is a mythic unfurling of yourself. And if you pay attention to what is emerging for you, if you notice the glimmers, if you notice the disquiet, if you heed the beckoning and the calling for what may bring you closer to alignment to what is authentic and true for you, then it might actually translate to a more meaningful progress.