Life Review

Intensive Journal

Posted on June 15, 2021April 27, 2024 by Dr. Toni

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.”

Getting Clear

Posted on July 19, 2019August 20, 2024 by Dr. Toni

Getting Clear The procedure to clear a negative or troubling belief.
You may like to print this out first, then fill in the form: THE GETTING CLEAR WORKSHEET I have something that is bothering me. I am willing to look at it and identify it. What is it? What just happened? _________________________________________________ For example, someone may be playfully teasing you, but you perceive that they are trying to “get at you.” You may even get angry at them and tell them to stop “pushing you around.” Therefore, you have a belief, or a perception, that people push you around, that you will be attacked, put down, or made to feel stupid, less than, or inferior in some way. This means that YOU may believe, or have a perception that (a) people can and will do something bad to you, and (b) that you are “not good enough,” that you are less than in some way. Therefore your response and feelings will come from what you believe. Check out what it is that you believe. Now you fill out this sentence… This is how I interpreted, or perceived, what just happened: _____________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ I felt: (angry, sad, happy, fearful) _____________________________________________________ After you identify what is bothering you, how you “perceived” what happened, and what emotion went along with that perception, ask yourself this question: Is this perception coming from a place of Truth, or is it coming from Fear? Is there Fear somewhere behind all of this? Truth ______________________________________ Fear _______________________________________ What am I afraid of? What do I think is happening or going to happen here? _____________________________________________________ Answer this: When did I decide to believe this? What do I believe about myself? what happened in my life that I decided life was just this way? _____________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ Answer this: Did anyone make me believe this, or did I decide to believe it in my own mind? _____________________________________________________ If I believe in this, will I continue to make it keep happening? Yes _________ No _________ Could I have made a different decision about life, or myself? __________________________________________________ I could have seen it this way: _____________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ or, this way _____________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ Fill out the following sentences… When I think this way, or believe this (for example, that people will push me around, or try to get at me), I create this kind of experience: I ____________________________________________________ I ____________________________________________________ I ____________________________________________________ I ____________________________________________________ And then I feel: _____________________________________________________ Now you see what your perceptions are, and what strategies you created to cope with what you believe is going on. Strategies are always created to try to keep you safe in some way. You also see what you create by believing this way. And you see what you create from holding onto a perception, which creates a certain emotion. If you have sadness stored in you, you will continue to see life’s experiences as sad, etc., and to create more sad experiences. Now, you say to yourself, “Do I still want to keep on reacting this way?”
“Do I really believe that (for example) people are out to get me?”
“Do I really believe that I am stupid? Yes ________ No ________ Ask… Does believing this help or hurt my life? Helps ________ Hurts________ If everything is a mirror for me, a mirror for what’s going on inside of me, the beliefs and issues I have about myself and life, then what this experience is showing me about myself is: _____________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ Then ask yourself, “What new belief would I rather have?”
Write it here… I would rather believe that _____________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ What emotion will I feel if I believe this new belief? How will I feel? _____________________________________________________ Am I willing to experience that emotion? _____________________________________________________ In order to believe this, and feel this, I will align myself with a Higher Truth. I will see and understand that : I AM _____________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ That Life is _____________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ That Other People _____________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ When I believe this way, I feel _____________________________________________________ I am now WILLING, READY, and I fully ALLOW this old belief, _____________________________________________________, to be completely and easily and 100% released. In its place, I am willing and allow myself to have this perception _____________________________________________________ and I believe that ______________________________________. I now allow myself to feel _______________________________ . I accept this new belief and have made a new choice for myself and my life. I give thanks.

Posted on August 30, 2018 by Dr. Toni

Elders: Taking Stock of Our Lives

If you live long enough, it’s inevitable: you will, in one form or another, do some stock-taking of your life. A sizing up. An account balancing. Or a simple, “how’m I doing?”

There is no particular time or year of life when it comes along. In fact, I think for some it is an ongoing monitor that pops up now and then all through adulthood. But in later years, it becomes more urgent.

Even moreso, as I learned recently from personal experience, when a life-threatening or “just” a serious illness interrupts the steady flow of days. Then a reckoning feels important.

For me and a few others I’ve spoken with about this, it usually begins with a narrative of one’s life.

I never had big plans for mine – actually, I never had any plan. I have a strong memory of a certain day in my mid-teens realizing it was highly unlikely I would grow up to cure cancer. Teens do that sort of grandiose thinking but even then I knew I didn’t have the wherewithall for saving mankind.

When college decisions were at hand, I had no earthly idea what I wanted to study and not a single thought about what I wanted to do with my life.

You’ll recall that in those days, late 1950s, girls were expected to get married and have babies which a goodly number of my classmates did within a week or two of graduation.

I knew that wasn’t for me so I went to work at a typing job. And then another. And another.

It never came to mind to note that I didn’t have a real career. No one told us girls back then that a formal, planned career might be an option.

Everyone understood that we could be office workers and waitresses or, if we went to college, teachers and nurses. Women doctors and lawyers hardly existed in those days so most of us didn’t think in those terms.

After seven years of pounding keyboards, I married and became the producer of my husband’s radio talk show. The 1960s, of course, were an exhilirating time of social upheaval and I booked musicians, political radicals, dissenters, women’s movement and civil rights activists, politicians and more as we reported on and chronicled the zeitgeist of the times.

It became the number one talk show in New York City radio and then I moved on to produce television shows for 25 years. In an unexpected instance of great, good luck, I got in on the earliest days of the commercial internet as managing editor of the first CBS News website.

I wouldn’t trade my “career” for anything. I met kings and queens and movie stars and heads of state. I worked with the best and the brightest in pretty much all areas of life – music, medicine, politics, art, entertainment, literature, science, fashion, theater and movies and more.

It was my job to learn something of what those people knew and help them make sense of it for television and, later, the internet. They, experts in their fields, were the college education I’d skipped and it has lasted all my life.

When I was forced into retirement 14 years ago, I had already begun this blog so all that changed, aside from loss of a paycheck, were more frequent posts and a shorter commute – from the bedroom to my home office.

Well, work was not quite all that changed. The biggest, most difficult outcome was the necessity to leave my home of 40 years, New York City, when – in the shock of a lifetime – I found no one hires 63-year-olds, particularly in technology. I had no idea then that ageism existed much at all until it happened to me, and certainly not that it was so widespread even among people younger than I.

Now I know and it hasn’t gotten any better since then.

You’ll note that I didn’t mention another marriage or children. That’s because there weren’t any and unlike most of my life, they were deliberate decisions. Regrets? None about not having a child or two but there is a wonderful and brilliant man I probably should have married…

Certainly I’ve made varieties of poor decisions along the way, and you don’t get to know the things I’ve said and done of which I’m deeply ashamed.

On the other hand, apparently my mom and dad instilled in me a decent sense of right and wrong, good and evil. In the particular political era of our time, I am regularly shocked out of my senses at the enormity of the lies, misdeeds, avarice, iniquities and crimes committed by almost every high-level elected official and appointee in our federal government.

I am grateful to know I’m am not capable of what they do, although I am fairly sure I can’t take credit for it – it’s just is.

Sometimes I think the way I made my living, mostly related to entertainment with some politics thrown in, was too frivolous – that I would be happier with myself at this age if I had chosen something of more benefit to the world and other people.

During this past year that I spent in close proximity to a lot of medical, health and hospital workers, I see they are put together differently from me. Their care, concern and patience is genuine, manifest every day with their unending kindness to cranky, tired, frightened, sick people who are often in pain and on their worst behavior.

I know me and I know I could never match the standard set by these amazing people who turn their entire working lives over to helping others. So it’s just as well I did something else with my life.

Not that I actually made a choice. A few years after I had conceded to myself that I had no idea what I wanted from life, sometime in my twenties, I made a decision to just follow my nose and see where it would take me through the coming years. It didn’t work out too badly.

Recently, I ran across a quotation from the musician Elton John that sums up my 77 years and continues to apply:

“If you let things happen, that is a magical life.”

“Let things happen” is, for me, just a nicer way of saying that I never bothered to choose how I wanted to live. I think that’s a failing – a fairly big one – but not something I can fix now and anyway, my life has been close enough to magical to be okay.

Have you done any taking stock?

http://www.timegoesby.net/weblog/2018/08/elders-taking-stock-of-our-lives.html

Falling Upward – Questions for reflection & Life Review

Posted on September 19, 2012 by Dr. Toni

Center for Action and Contemplation QUESTIONS FOR INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP REFLECTION FROM THE “FALLING UPWARD” WEBCAST May 21, 2011 Suzanne Stabile & Sheryl Fullerton Center for Action and Contemplation www.cacradicalgrace.org P.O. Box 12464, Albuquerque, NM 87195 (505) 242-9588 fax: (505) 242-9518

These questions are meant to elicit reflection and contemplation on the challenges and gifts of the “further journey,” as Richard Rohr calls it. You certainly don’t have to answer all of them, but as a whole they may guide you in preparing for and living into this time of life. You can reflect on them on your own and share them with a group or use each one as a basis for group discussion over several meetings.

1. A good place to begin is with your life story. Your story is not just what has happened to you but a narrative with chapters, events, characters, relationships, highs and lows, influences, decisions, good times and bad times, lessons learned (or not). It all adds up, not like a balance sheet, but in a holistic way that points to why you have lived, what you value, and what your life means to you. You are its author—and its editor. You can add commentary and interpretation. And you can write new chapters. In a way, telling your story in later life is the way you harvest your self and ask honestly if you have done what you were meant to do. And, if not, can you do something about it before it’s too late? Sister Joan Chittister, in her wonderful book, The Gift of Years, points out that “I am only what I have prepared myself to be beyond what I did. And what is that?”

Reflect briefly on your life story by answering these questions:

· Who are my people? Where do we come from?

· Where do I fit into my family?

· Who was I closest to in my family?

· Who are the people closest to me now?

· Who has had the most influence on me?

· How have the places I’ve lived shaped me?

· How did I find my work?

· Have I found my purpose or calling?

2. Think further about what you learned from thinking about your family and your story.

· What surprised you?

· How do you think your family patterns and life experiences are affecting the way you are thinking about this next phase of your life?

Center for Action and Contemplation QUESTIONS FOR INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP REFLECTION FROM THE “FALLING UPWARD” WEBCAST May 21, 2011 Suzanne Stabile & Sheryl Fullerton Center for Action and Contemplation www.cacradicalgrace.org P.O. Box 12464, Albuquerque, NM 87195 (505) 242-9588 fax: (505) 242-9518

3. It’s also helpful to take stock of your life now—about your bags and baggage.

· What brings you joy?

· What troubles you?

· What are your greatest regrets? How do you think those regrets are related to which generation you are part of (GIs, Boomers, Gen X, etc.)?

· How are your relationships?

· What is happening at work?

· Are you living your own authentic vision of the good life (or someone else’s)?

4. Draw a graph of your life by identifying trigger points (that indicate the choices you have made that have led to where you are now)—both high points and low points, including those times when you “fell upward,” when you failed or lost. The points could designate relationships, decisions about education, moves, travel—just about anything that is significant in determining the course of your life. Connect them on a timeline. Reflect:

· What do the dots represent?

· Which ones made the most difference in your life?

· Were there points that at the time seemed to be failures or losses?

· What lessons can you take from the choices you made?

· How can those lessons help you make choices from this point forward?

· In examining the “contents” of your life, what are some heavy things that you could leave behind as you enter the second half of life?

5. Necessary suffering seems paradoxical, but discomfort and suffering let us know that something isn’t right—that it needs attention, that we need to look at something that we’d perhaps like to ignore but really cannot. Or that we need to grow, even if it means experiencing “growing pains.” Only when the split between security and risk is painful enough that they can’t be ignored or medicated away will be open to other possibilities. In Center for Action and Contemplation QUESTIONS FOR INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP REFLECTION FROM THE “FALLING UPWARD” WEBCAST May 21, 2011 Suzanne Stabile & Sheryl Fullerton Center for Action and Contemplation www.cacradicalgrace.org P.O. Box 12464, Albuquerque, NM 87195 (505) 242-9588 fax: (505) 242-9518

the second half of life, the focus shifts to what our lives mean. That’s when deeper questions arise. Knowing that time is finite, it’s time to ask whether you are using the time on things you care about. Jungian psychologist James Hollis says that the disappointments of the second half of life prompt explorations of the soul and its values and thus make us more mindful of what really matters in the long journey of the soul.

· Have you faced “necessary suffering”?

· What was your experience of it?

· Did you let it transform you?

· Are you avoiding any necessary suffering (or change) now?

· What is waiting to be born in you if you were entirely courageous and didn’t fear the price?

6. To think about your life purpose and calling, reflect on these questions:

· Can you list three things in addition to your family that you care about most—for which you would live or die? What are they? Are they the things that will matter to your legacy?

· What has been the driving force of the first half of your life? Will it carry you forward? If not, what have you laid aside as impossible or impractical that you might want to revisit?

· What are your gifts and how are you using them on things that you care about?

· How could you contribute in ways you always wanted but held back from? What contribution do you want to make?

· What do you want to say or do that you haven’t said or done?

7. Imagine you are looking back at your life at your 90th birthday party. You are sitting around in a big circle, and you and those you’ve invited are telling stories about you and what has mattered to you. Write about what you see when you envision this event.

· What do those in the circle say you love? Was it music, art, spirituality, faith, education, vocation/work, hobbies, sports, friends and colleagues, family and spouse? Or what else?

· What are you known for?

· What do you see reflected on the faces of those around you?

· What are you thinking and feeling as you sit in this circle?

· What do you want to do in the second half of your life to ensure that your 90th birthday party is a happy event?

· How would you like your legacy described?

8. As Richard Rohr says, “Nothing can inhibit your second journey except your own lack of courage, patience, and imagination. If you don’t walk into the second half of your own life, it is you who do not want it.” So here are some additional questions to get you thinking about the second half of your life:

· What has been the driving force of the first half of your life? Will it carry you forward? If not, what have you laid aside as impossible or impractical that you might want to revisit?

· Can you list three things in addition to your family that you care most about—for which you would live or die? Are they old baggage or new bags ready to be packed for the further journey?

· What are you tired of?

· What is it that you are no longer whole-hearted about?

· What are your gifts and how are you using them on things you care most about?

· What do you want to say or do that you haven’t said or done?

“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”

–George Bernard Shaw Center for Action and Contemplation QUESTIONS FOR INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP REFLECTION FROM THE “FALLING UPWARD” WEBCAST May 21, 2011 Suzanne Stabile & Sheryl Fullerton Center for Action and Contemplation www.cacradicalgrace.org P.O. Box 12464, Albuquerque, NM 87195 (505) 242-9588 fax: (505) 242-9518

Bibliography

BOOKS:

NONFICTION

Joan Chittister, The Gift of Years

James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

Robert A. Johnson and Jerry Ruhl, Living Your Unlived Life: Coping with Unrealized Dreams and Fulfilling Your Purpose in the Second Half of Life

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk, and Adventure in the 25 Years After 50

Richard Leider and David Shapiro, Claiming Your Place at the Fire

Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me

Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation; A Hidden Wholeness

Susan Susanka, The Not So Big Life

FICTION

Thomas Lynch, Apparition & Late Fictions (the novella, Apparition)

Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

MOVIES

About Schmidt

Magnolia

Young at Heart

OTHER

CDs: Richard Rohr & Paula D’Arcy, A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life (available through the Center for Action & Contemplation: cacradicalgrace.org)

What is Life Review?

Posted on September 3, 2012 by Dr. Toni

Life Review (LR) is both a specific and general term, depending on how it is used. As a general term, it refers to the process of looking back to the past in order to inform and/or bring pleasure into the present. Such activities as personal story-telling, oral history, reminiscence, guided autobiography, life history interviewing, and structured life review are all examples of this general process.

LR activities can occur in many ways and in both individual and interpersonal contexts. LR may be intentional or incidental, active or passive, organized or free-flowing, individual or group; and the list goes on. It can involve recall of a single event or group of events up to a full life story, facts of when and how, as well as personal meanings and interpretations. The following definitions (while simplistic) provide a basis for understanding the main forms:

Oral History – A retelling of specific events (e.g., WWII, 9/11) so as to leave a record for future generations…
Reminiscence – Recalling the past to bring meaning, understanding and/or pleasure into present life or discourse with others…
Life Review – Typically an organized, intentional effort to recall one’s life story and retell critical events and present interpretations…
Guided Autobiography – Typically an organized, intentional effort to recall one’s life story and write down critical events and present interpretations…

As a specific term, LR refers to an intentional effort to recall one’s personal life story – the full story or at least large portions – with a goal of bringing new understanding and perspective to the present. Those undertaking a full LR effort do so because they recognize that maturation and self-definition are ongoing processes, occurring well into the 7th, 8th, and 9th decades of life. Advancing age brings an opportunity to look back, consider life’s ups and downs, and construct a sense of integration (if not acceptance) prior to death. For most, this is not a morbid process, but a hopeful and even joyful one – even for those subject to past difficulty and trauma.

Dr. Barbara Haight, Professor Emeritus at the College of Nursing, Medical University of South Carolina, is probably the most influential author in the LR field right now. She emphasizes a structured form of LR whereby the whole life story from childhood to present age is review in a systematic manner utilizing Erikson’s 8 Stages Theory http://www.learningplaceonline.com/stages/organize/Erikson.htm

“The reason for reviewing and looking back at each stage specifically is (to)…reframe and reconcile the memory of a stage that was not successfully completed at the proper time in the past. Through reframing, the Reviewer can make the required adaptation in the present…(and) may complete or reconcile the stage now under discussion and move closer to Integrity.”

Haight & Haight (2007) The Handbook of Structured Life Review

Haight frames LR as an interpersonal, therapeutic process, whereby a Reviewer speaks with a Therapeutic Listener (interviewer) in a structured format over a series of 1-2 hour sessions. The process is “therapeutic” in the sense of promoting personal integration (understanding) and emotional well-being, but without being “clinical” in nature. In fact, LR is arguably most powerful and meaningful when pursued for personal enrichment than for clinical/psychotherapeutic reasons.