By Ellery Littleton
This article presents a summary of some of the basic ideas of Ira Progoff’s “Intensive Journal Process,” and includes a very brief outline of one of his extensive journal-writing exercise cycles: 12 Entries.
Ellery writes: “The first Intensive Journaling workshop I attended in 1981, was two weeks long, 9 to 5, five days a week. At first, I didn’t think I could possibly write about myself for two weeks; at the conclusion of the workshop, I realized I had barely scratched the surface.”
Ellery Littleton teaches several programs at The Haven. His next is Writing up a Storm: Haiku, March 6–7.
***
Long before there were analysts’ couches, encounter groups, gestalt, bodywork, and the myriad other approaches to personal growth and transformation, people who wanted to search for meaning and perspective in their lives often wrote their thoughts, feelings and dreams in a journal.
Particularly among creative people – from Leonardo da Vinci to Anais Nin – journal-keeping has historically been a vehicle for releasing tensions, resolving conflicts, working through crises and connecting with the intuitive inner self – the “person within the person,” as philosopher/psychologist Ira Progoff described it, who can be the source of so much sound guidance and wisdom – your best counselor and spiritual advisor, in fact.
Progoff, who died at age 77 in 1998, was the godfather of the contemporary journal-writing movement, which has blossomed incredibly in the last couple of decades. His best-known book, At a Journal Workshop (1975), is the basic text and guide to the application of what he called the “intensive journal process.” It still stands as the best, most complete work in the entire ever-expanding library of journaling guides. It is rather like the King James Version of journal-writing books – long, complex and challenging – the source of many of the most enduring and useful concepts in the field.
Writing in a journal about one’s ideas, feelings and experiences is almost always useful, “but an unstructured journal usually just goes around in circles,” Progoff said. “To become a valuable tool of psychological self-care, a journal needs a design that will help a human being answer the question ‘What is my life trying to become?’ “
A student of Carl Jung, Progoff was committed to the adaptation of humanistic Jungian ideas to the process of journal-writing, and began by encouraging journal-keeping among his private patients in the 1950s to help them “sort out their lives.”
Over the years, these rudimentary journals evolved into the sensitively structured, multi-layered, cross-referencing set of notebooks which now form the basis for Intensive Journal Workshops, offered across North America and around the world by the New York-based Dialogue House, established by Progoff in the 1960s. Each workshop participant receives a specially organized looseleaf notebook, which leads them through specific writing guidelines. The process is designed to help people “tap into the underground stream of their interior lives to work out their beliefs, find answers to problems and deeper meaning in their existence.”
“It’s a highly useful, practical method, leading to some profound insights,” Progoff said, “but it’s not a self-concerned approach because the answers usually lie in connection with finding meaning in – and connection to – something larger than one’s self.”
Intensive journal workshops encourage individual privacy, although people are periodically invited to read portions of their journal, so they can experience the emotions that surround reading their entries aloud. No judgments or analyses are invited. “I try to help people get over the habit of constantly judging and diagnosing themselves and others,” Progoff said, “and look at things objectively as they are. The workshops provide a place where you can sit quietly to let the muddy waters of life settle and clarify themselves.”
This atmosphere of meditative silence provides an environment that helps people search deep within themselves, and tune into a larger awareness. “At deep levels within us we know more than we are aware of,” Progoff frequently stated. “The process helps people open themselves to this non-intellectual perception, which draws them fully into their own life story.”