A journal can be a powerful transformational tool, providing opportunities to help you deeply meet yourself.  You can use your journal to explore and work through all types of difficulties, as well as to build upon and celebrate your strengths and successes.

Here are some techniques that you can incorporate into your journal:

1. Stream writing.  Choose a topic or issue and write for any length of time without censoring.  Let words freely spill onto the page.  When you write from your heart and your soul, you bypass the analytical mind and gain entrance into the rich and mysterious realms of the unconscious.  You will visit the heights and the depths of your being.  Feelings, images, insights, and profound realizations may surface.  You are likely to experience many aha! moments as a result of stream writing.
    
2. Unsent letters.  Here is a powerful tool for expressing what you are reluctant or afraid to say to another person.  Like stream writing, this is another opportunity to do uncensored writing.  You may write an unsent letter to a parent or an ex, for example, giving voice to thoughts and feelings that you've been suppressing for quite awhile. These letters offer a means for you to release pent-up feelings, or share secrets, memories, hopes, and dreams.
    
3. Lists.  Lists are a way to succinctly capture and express ideas, feelings, observations, and anything else that you want to focus on.  They are a short method of articulating essentials in your life.  On any given day you can make a list of joyous moments, what you are grateful for, lessons, or challenges.  In addition, you can list resources you could draw upon or what you might do the next day to center yourself.
   
    You can also use items from any list as a prompt for a longer piece of writing.  For example, if you make a list of favorite activities, and one of them is hiking, you can write a lot about hiking.  You may write about how hiking benefits you, what your best and worst experiences have been, and what trails you'd like to explore in the future.
    
4. Sentence Completion.  Completing sentence stems is a technique that can help you get to the core of a feeling, situation, or issue.  Here is another writing tool that gives you access to your deeper knowing.
   
    You can create the beginning of a sentence about anything at all.  For example, I'm afraid of........I wish that........What I need to do for myself in this situation is........What I'm learning in this relationship is........Keep completing the sentence without stopping to think about what to write.  Take five minutes for each sentence, and work with as few or as many as you would like.    
   
   Sentence stems can build on each other, as well.  If you wrote that you wish that you had more energy, the next stem might be, To have more energy, I can......... You'll be surprised at the insights that will come to you from using this simple technique.