If you would like to read a more in-depth introduction packed with tips and tricks to get the most out of this practice of meditation journaling, you can check out excerpts from our official published journal The Building Blocks of Meditation Journal : Sharpening Your Skills of Observation down below. However, if you would like a very brief bullet point summary of some key takeaways, the following two lists will do just that.

Benefits of Journaling

• Guides you to observe and adjust your meditation to continuously progress in your practice
• Equips you with a custom toolbox of best practices to overcome common obstacles with confidence
• Clarifies which factors lead to stillness and which factors lead to challenges
• Helps detach from craving for inner experience and a resulting ineffective approach
• Helps you recognize patterns overtime by comparing the entries from meditations that were challenging and also ones where you had good inner experiences

Best Practices & Mindset to Adopt

• There is no such thing as a “bad” meditation, just a chance to learn about your mind and how to train it
• Focus more on what you did to get to a good experience and not the details of the experience itself. Focusing on your process helps you repeat and continuously improve, while focusing on the results creates attachment to inner experience, high expectation, disappointment, and stagnation in your practice
• Be as detailed or as brief with your entries as you want. Consistent journaling is more important than detailed journaling
• You can use talk-to-text to record your entries more quickly and easily
• Any time you discover a tool that helps you overcome an obstacle and discover stillness, add it to the “meditation toolbox” to easily review your best practices
• When you feel stagnant in your practice, revisit your toolbox to review what methods have worked in the past
• After you have a decent amount of entries, take a look at the lower star rated entries in the “by rating” view of your meditation toolbox and see what common factors lead to obstacles. These are things to avoid or adjust
  • Do the same with higher star rated entries to figure out what conditions are conducive for stillness for you and repeat
• Be kind with yourself. Ratings are to clarify your path to effective practice, not to judge your experience as good or bad
• Some days will be more difficult than others due to the mind collecting more emotions and experiences that need clearing. Focus on your process and not results. Our mind has a different starting place each day. Based on its current state, we will learn how to adjust appropriately with more practice, observation, and integration of what we learn

Meditation Journaling : A Detailed Intro to the Benefits, Best Practices, & Structure of This Journal