concept journaling

9.2. Concept: Journaling — Transcript (English)

Summary:

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Transcript

In the previous lesson, we talked about different types of memory and the differences between the flashlight of attention and what it can point at.

Baseworks focuses on building perceptual skills through practice.

So to sharpen your attention to notice subtle sensations, and this increases the resolution of what you can actually perceive.

By jotting down what you see, you’re training your attention and this builds a clear picture of your body and how it moves.

So let’s talk about the practical side of journaling.

You might be asking yourself, do I actually need to journal?

And Baseworks journaling isn’t something you have to do every single time you practice, but it’s a tool we encourage you to try, especially in this course, because it can really deepen your experience.

Even though it might seem daunting at first, let me dig into why we feel it’s very relevant and how adding a time commitment can change things in a meaningful way.

So when you write about your experience during practice, you’re doing two really important things.

First of all, you’re helping your brain hold on to those transient sensations or insights that can otherwise fade away from your memory.

This is quite important because if you don’t remember how something felt like, how are you going to notice when it changes?

And second and most importantly, if you noticed it once, you’re definitely going to notice it again.

So in this way, you’re priming your brain to pay attention to this new type of stimulus.

Now let’s dig into how journaling works in this course on our online platform.

After you complete a practice lab or a session in this segment, you’ll see the journal entry form.

It’s quite simple.

Just write down what you felt or noticed during and after your practice.

The way that it’s set up is that it’s chronologically outlined so that you can always refer back to whatever journal entry you made at any specific date.

I personally think this is very useful because reflecting back on how you feel during a specific period, say for example, if something’s been going on either physically with you or emotionally, or there’d been a change in the weather or something which might have affected your practice in some way, you’ll be able to make correlations between the quality of the outcomes of the practice and how they connected to those other circumstances that surrounded the situation that you had at that time.

And let me clarify that journaling isn’t an assignment for this course or this platform.

It’s just a tool that we created to make it easier for you to have your thoughts consolidated in one place.

We’re not going to read your journal entries or make conclusions about how you think or experience what you’ve been doing on the platform.

Your entries are private and they’re for you to reflect on your own experiences.

We may sometimes use anonymized data from journals for our own research or to look for patterns or experiences or as inspiration to create educational content, but never in a way which identifies you.

And we’re taking your privacy quite seriously here and you don’t actually even need to use the UI on our platform.

If it’s more comfortable for you, just have a notebook beside you and jot down your journal entries into that notebook.

So to dig a little bit deeper into what you should write about, journaling is all about your unique experience.

Everybody’s body and the way that they see things are completely different.

So there’s no right and no wrong.

To help you get started, we’ll give you some prompts.

But a cool part of this process is figuring out what stands out to you.

Think of it like exploring a map of your own body and mind.

So let’s check out these ideas.

In relation to physical sensations, did you notice something new in your body during a movement?

Maybe you felt a specific muscle working or maybe you sense heat or relaxation in a certain area?

And what about the space that you’re in?

Did you become aware of how your body was positioned in that space?

Maybe you really felt for the first time that your arms were aligned in a straight line during a specific form, or you felt how your weight shifted between your feet in a more tactile and meaningful way.

And how about energy levels?

How did your mood or energy feel before, during, or after the practice?

Maybe there was more focus, or maybe you were distracted and couldn’t quite get into the rhythm?

Both of these are valuable observations to take note of.

Did anything in the practice remind you of a habit or a pattern in daily life?

Maybe you realized how you hold tension in your shoulders, and that was maybe similar to how you feel stressed out when you’re at work.

Or maybe you get a new perspective on a particular skill or move and some other physical practice.

These are just starting points, and the goal is to reflect on what stood out to you, even if it’s hard to put into words.

Sometimes you might even find it more useful to invent your own phrases to describe a sensation like a stretch you pull in my thumb or a floating feeling in my rib cage.

And we encourage that.

The act of naming these experiences makes them more vivid and easier to notice over time.

Journaling also connects you to the idea of cyclicity that we talked a lot about earlier.

When you revisit a practice lab, you’re exploring the same movement with a fresh new perspective.

Journaling helps you track how that perspective changes over time for the exact same task.

These small discoveries lead up to building a clearer picture of your body and how you move and how these micro-discoveries feel like micro-achievements.

So for the rest of the segment, you’ll get to try journaling.

We go through three practice labs of increasing lengths and after each one, take some time to write in the journal entry form, reflecting on what you sensed or felt before, during and after the session.

And we recommend to plan your time so that you have a few minutes after each practice to write down your thoughts.

It doesn’t have to be long, but it’s a lot better if you don’t feel rushed when you’re doing it.

If you want to share something with us, you can always include it in your segment reflection or add it to the forum, but the journal is really just for you.

So when you get to journaling, try to approach it with curiosity and an open mind. no pressure to get it right, this is your chance to explore your experience, discover new patterns, and likely even surprise yourself with the stuff that you notice.

So let’s move on to the next practice lab to see what comes out of this journaling experiment.