The Golden Thread: Writing, Happiness and the Progoff Intensive Journal Method

I still have my first diary. It is cloth bound in a fabric festooned with red strawberries. Stickers of teddy bears, pigs, a cat, a rainbow and an alligator are arranged artfully on the inside cover. The first entry, written when I was 12 years old, starts with a poem:

A diary is personal where thoughts can be concealed

A place where a mind and pen can write what is thought and feeled.

It doesn’t get much better from there. Reading the ramblings of my pre-teen self is an exercise in humility. No prodigious talent is hidden in its pages, just angst-ridden entries about crushes and the drama of the school yard. Yet, that first strawberry notebook led to a lifelong habit of keeping a diary. Since then I have filled more than twenty-five volumes.

Lately, I’ve been writing less. I seem to be running out of things to say. My words feel repetitive, thoughts circular. Ironically, I am preparing to write a book - a memoir of sorts. How can I write a book if I struggle to pen a journal entry? Julia Cameron, the guru on the art of writing, recommends filling three, single-spaced pages each morning to warm up the writing engine. My engine, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to want to start.

While grappling with this recently, an email dropped into my inbox. It was an invitation to join a journaling workshop based on the Progoff Method. I signed up immediately. It’s been two weeks since I finished and not only are my writing juices flowing, I am savouring other unexpected gifts, including that most elusive of emotional states: happiness! What happened? Let me see if I can recall the golden thread…

The Workshop

“Is the life you are living, the life that wants to live in you?” asks Evelyn, our facilitator, to the twelve heads bobbing on the Zoom screen. “Get a blank piece of lined paper. Write the date at the top and for fifteen minutes answer the questions:

Where am I now in my life?

What am I moving towards?

Where is my life leading me?”

“Try to get grounded in the journal,” she continues. “Tune into the inner and outer aspects of your life. Try to position yourself in your life. This exercise is to deepen contact with your Selves. We know more than we understand. How do we access this axis in ourselves?

Begin with the sentence: ‘This is a time when…”

I write. This is a time when I am trying to listen to the story in me that wants to be told…

A bell rings. “You won’t be finished,” Evelyn says, “but we must stop somewhere. Put this piece of writing behind the green divider marked ‘Period Log’.”

The Period Log is one of twenty-five sections of what creator Ira Progoff called a “psychological workbook.” The Progoff Journal (which I was mailed after signing up for the workshop) is a black three-ring binder with a starburst on the cover. Inside the binder are green, yellow, orange, blue, red and purple dividers. Each colour is labelled. Green is the “Period Log’, yellow is the “Daily Log”, orange is for “Dialogue Dimensions”, blue is “Depth Dimensions”, red is “Life/Time Dimensions” and purple for “Meaning Dimension.” Within each colour are further dividers with intriguing names like “Mantra/Crystals,” “Twilight Imagery” and “Now: the Open Moment.”

Ira Progoff (1921-1998) was an American psychologist and professor who studied with Carl Jung. He first formulated the intensive journal concept in 1966. He described the workbook as an “open-ended means of gaining perspective on where you are in the movement of your life.” (Progoff, At a Journal Workshop (1975), ix). He believed that journal writing was one way to access the ‘intangible’. Meditation was the other.

Evelyn: “Close your eyes. Get still. Breathe deeply. Rhythmically. Listen to the meditation….”

…My life

Is like the shaft of a well.

I go deep into it.

The life of each of us

Is a well.

Its sources are deep,

But it gives water on the surface.

Now we go inward,

Moving through the center point,

Through the center point,

Deeply inward to explore

The infinities of our well… (Progoff, The Well and the Cathedral, 67)

Evelyn encourages us to watch and listen for images that are surfacing. I find myself moving effortlessly inward.

“Attend to the symbols, fragments of music, sensations that are emerging. Note them. Don’t judge or analzye. We are looking inward but we are not looking merely for things that can be seen. We are looking inward for direct knowings and sensations of every kind that may come to us when our attention is turned to the larger twilight realm of Self that lives between unconscious sleep and waking consciousness.”

Moving through the center point

Into the well of our Self

As deeply

As fully

As freely as we can.

Through the center point

Exploring the deep places.

In the Silence…In the Silence. (Well and the Cathedral, 71)

The bell rings. We record what emerged in our ‘Meditation Log.’

The workshop continues with a similar rhythm over six days. We write. We meditate. We read our words aloud to ourselves or to the group. We explore recurring images. We record our dreams. We do writing exercises with names like Steppingstones and Dialogue with Body. We look at life patterns and crossroads and tap into “the underground stream” of creativity; we practice non-judgement.

As we move through the days, I can feel my sense of self expanding. Life choices that I regret become more integrated. I learn to see how every aspect of my life has shaped me and brought me to the place I am now. During one meditation I receive an image of a large green field. After “stretching it out” (as Evelyn put it) I sense this is a symbol of my life. My future is as open as a vast field.

Discovering coherence in my life was one unexpected gift. Another was experiencing the connection of my life to something larger. I wrote and meditated my way into a renewed experience of contact with ‘the unity of being’ and with all of creation. Progoff wrote, “…as we move inward through the well of Self, we are taking steps towards wholeness as we are deepening the relationship between our individuality and the universe” (The Well and the Cathedral, 161).

Without any reference to doctrine, the Intensive Journal Method became a profoundly religious experience. The deeper I explored the depth dimension within myself, the more my heart opened. I was filled with compassion for the world and its various crises. More writing and meditation in the final days of the workshop gave me a channel to explore how to connect my life with the needs of the planet.

“What do you want to do with your life that will be of consequence for the world? asks Evelyn. “Make a list under the heading ‘Ultimate Concerns’. The phrase ‘ultimate concerns’ was borrowed by Progoff from theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich. According to Tillich, ‘faith is the state of being ultimately concerned.’ Take out another piece of blank paper. Write the date on the top.”

My list is long, but one item burns more brightly than the others: “I want to write a book that gives witness to the power of love in times of loss.”

I remember how certain I was when I wrote that. How happy. Henri Nouwen once said that “writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us.”

Today, I write this post to keep something alive. So, for you and for me, a recap of the Golden Thread to Happiness:.

Create time and spaces in your life to go inward in stillness and silence. Allow images to bubble up from the intangible.
Connect with your life and ask it periodically where it wants to go. Listen to your life. Give it a voice.
Accept and cherish everything that has ever happened to you. It got you to this present moment.
Find your ‘Ultimate Concern’, the thing that you want to contribute to the world, and do it.

And write in your diary. Start with “This is a time when….”

Books Cited

Progoff, Ira. At a Journal Workshop: Writing to Access the Power of the Unconscious and Evoke Creative Ability (Los Angeles, CA: Jeremy P. Tracher, Inc., 1975).

Progoff, Ira. The Well and the Cathedral: An Entrance Meditation (New York: Dialogue House Library, 1977).

Nouwen, Henri. You are The Beloved: Daily Meditations for the Spiritual Life (New York: Convergent Books, 2017).