Emotions Journaling

On the left side of a page, write your feelings. Try to feel each feeling for at least 10 seconds, imagining that feeling it will reprioritize things in your life, surfacing something beautiful. Even if it’s a “negative” feeling. For each 10 seconds you feel the emotion, put a hash mark next to it.

So the left side of your page shoud look like this:

As you feel, you may be able to guess what’s being reprioritized. This is not a cognitive thing. You are not trying to strategize wha you should do about the emotion. You are guessing what is already naturally being prioritized and deprioritized by feeling it.

Try to imagine that your emotion is right. Embrace it. Give it the benefit of the doubt. You may be tempted to disbelieve the emotion — to look for a “story” that, if you disbelieve the story, your emotion will go away. Don’t do that! Instead take the emotion seriously. If it seems to be prioritizing X, say “okay, maybe X is more important than I thought. Maybe these other things are less important.”

You can put those guesses on the right side of the page, using an caret (∧) for things to pay more attention to, and a downcarret (∨) to mean the opposite. So your right side might look like this: