Learning Lessons About Life with the Intensive Journal™ Method

By Diego

I am a low-wage retail worker with a physically demanding, full-time job that I’ve had for nearly 25 years: clearing my store’s immense parking lot of shopping carts. This requires me to be on my feet eight hours a day, five days a week. In my personal life, I’ve also had to deal with some lingering mental and physical issues: For nearly 20 years, I’ve had to struggle with a rare autoimmune disorder that has rendered me legally blind. I also have had to contend with obsessive compulsive disorder and a general sense of “feeling stuck” for which I see a therapist. I take refuge from it all by going to movies and studying Aikido, a Japanese martial art.

When the pandemic hit, the resulting lockdowns ended my moviegoing and my Aikido training. They’ve also forced me to see my therapist through my smartphone which was not as comfortable an experience as seeing him in person. In addition to the quarantine, my mother, who lives with me, had heart surgery and had to spend the months in recovery at my sister’s place, leaving me on my own for the first time since I went away to college. Not going to the movies didn’t affect me much, but my Aikido training had come to define much of my life. It was the only thing in my life that made me feel special. And the solitude I came home to left me, at times, with a sense of languor and ennui, when I was not, of course, being a little more than anxious over my mother’s health. And while I knew that things would very likely work out for her and that my life would eventually return to normal, the long hiatus has raised some unsettling questions: With my life stripped down to the lowest common denominator, who am I, really? And what would I do with my life if I could no longer do the things that I love in this world? And, more importantly, how would I be able to cope if the people closest to me were no longer around?

I had first became aware of the Intensive Journal method in college. I had seen copies of Ira Progoff’s book, At a Journal Workshop, at the campus bookstore and in the psychology department’s library but I was too busy to find the time to read it. After college, I eventually did pick up a copy and I was intrigued by the method it outlined but I could not do the exercises it offered effectively. I just could not find the right atmosphere I knew they required. I had done other forms of journaling and diarizing, mainly Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages and exercises from Dorothea Brande’s book Becoming a Writer, which I had been doing regularly until recently. (I am also an aspiring writer and the journaling I did was more for maintaining that identity than for any deeper purpose.) I had also turned to self-help gurus like Stephen Covey and Tony Robbins to give me a sense of direction in life. But after years of personal stagnation, I began to see the futility of what I was doing. I turned back to Dr. Progoff’s book and tried to work with the exercises again but I came to the realization that in order to get the full benefit of the Intensive Journal process, I had to take an in-person workshop.

The first opportunity to take an Intensive Journal workshop came in July 2008. I took a train and a bus to a retreat center in Fullerton, California where my first real experience with the process took place. I enjoyed being out of town, something I don’t often get to do, and I found the atmosphere of the retreat center and the workshop itself ideal for the inner work I would be doing. The workshop leader introduced me to not just the singular exercises but to the feedback process that the exercises and techniques were all part of. And I understood that process much better than I did when I first read Progoff’s book. But when the workshop ended and I returned to my daily life, I found it difficult to maintain the regular practice of the Journal process on my own, outside the workshop’s environs. The Journal workbook eventually fell into disuse, yet I still felt that there were things about the method that made it still worth learning. But, it would be a long while before I could afford another opportunity to attend another workshop again.

That opportunity came this year. Between the stimulus checks and help from my family with my basic expenses, I was able to afford another Intensive Journal workshop. Though doing the workshop through Zoom was a different experience than the one I had 13 years earlier, I found myself coming away from it with a better understanding about the method than I ever did. In fact, the Zoom format of the workshop drove home a point that Dr. Progoff and the workshop leader—who was in fact the same one I had in my first workshop—had been making: the experience of an Intensive Journal workshop was one where participants in a group can be alone together. We were alone in our homes, yet through Zoom, we were all sharing the same experience of diving deep within our own inner selves in privacy and in silence. In that atmosphere, I can explore the depths of both my conscious and my non-conscious mind without distraction from the outside world. The workshop leader simplified the exercises, reducing them from the wordy explanations and instructions of At a Journal Workshop to just simple prompts and short guided meditations that I had no problem following through on. And she was always available to answer questions about concepts and ideas that I read in the book but had trouble comprehending at times.

In the beginning of the workshop, I started out by understanding where I was in the present moment: I was a college-educated, middle-aged man working as a low-wage, “essential” worker, living during an unprecedented global pandemic. I saw how interesting the times I was living under were, as the old Chinese curse says. And then I saw its effect on the various aspects of my life: my relationships, my physical health and well being, my spiritual life and my significant life situations, circumstances, and experiences.

After that, I started looking back into my past: first by outlining the path my life has taken, dividing it into periods, marking each off with a life-defining event. Then, I took a period from my life history and do the same thing I did with the present period of my life: reflect on the person I was in that period as I was living it in all the important aspects that I’ve mentioned earlier. There, I begin to see the clues as to what my life was and find some idea as to what my life wants to be: In my teens and twenties, I had a plurality of ambitions and dreams I wanted to fulfill: writing, filmmaking, martial arts, achieving optimal physical health and fitness, and attaining spiritual enlightenment—all in a not-too-long period of time. But the Journal process has shown me how much my views, desires and priorities have changed. It has shown me how impermanent and unimportant they had become, though some of them—my writing and my Aikido training, in particular—still mattered to me. From my work with my my past, I began to talk to myself—on paper—about the parts of my life that we all have and to deeply explore my personal issues in a way that broadened my perspectives about them. I found that some of the things I wanted I was neither ready for nor was I living in the right time or under the right circumstances for them to happen.

Switching gears, I then started looking within, first by going into my non-conscious life, into the places where I dream. And then I look into the moments in my life that gave me a sense of meaning and deep insight. In looking at those dimensions of my being, I found that I had a rich and vibrant inner life and a wellspring of wisdom from deep within. There were certain issues I could not talk about with my therapist: I had obsessive thoughts that were too disturbing for me to share with him but in the Journal pages I could explore them safely. Also there were spiritual and philosophical issues I had that I was not sure I was ready to talk with him about. In the Inner Wisdom Dialogue exercise, I discussed them with that source of deep knowledge that lies within me, that lies deep within all of us.

In retaking the workshop, I saw that there was a structured process that first had to be learned and understood before I could strike out comfortably on my own. As much as I wish I had learned it the first time, I’m glad I took the opportunity to truly understand the process better by doing the workshop a second time. And while I know that I have a long way to go to learn this process fully, I feel confident that I understand the method well enough to do many of the exercises and techniques on my own. I also learned that the method cannot be done entirely alone. To truly master the process, I had to be in constant contact with a certified workshop leader and regularly take even brief group sessions when possible.

Since finishing the last workshop, I have come to see the Intensive Journal process as an indispensable method for inner growth and personal development. With its wide range of techniques and exercises, it has become, for me, a psychological and spiritual Swiss Army knife with tools that I still have yet to learn how to use with confidence. The workshops I’ve attended have given me a greater understanding of how journal writing can be used to foster personal growth and have made me all the more eager to experience Intensive Journal workshops in the future. I can’t wait to see what new insights and ideas I will gain from the process.