Practical Magic | How to Keep A Magical Journal
The first principle of magical living is not forgetting. Here are a few ideas on how to use a regular journaling practice to record your own magical process of realising your immaterial intentions and desires on the material plane.
1. Log Your Magical Process
The first way you can use a journaling practice to enrich your experience of magical living is as a log of your own magical process.
This is one of the principal ways in which I began my own journaling practice three years ago. Once a week I would review the week that was in a Sunday evening ritual. Back then it involved going to a cafe, having a glass of wine, really giving myself an hour to devote to remembering all the things that I'd occurred that week. Noting down whether I had succeeded in making my intentions real on the material plane.
Here are a few prompts ideas:
How did I see the week going?
What were my intentions? What actually happened?
Were there any interesting synchronicities?
Did I experience any disappointments or learn any lessons?
Write down at least three people, places or experiences that inspired me, and any other things that occurred (conversations you had, things you saw, witnessed, or felt) that you are happy or grateful for.
What I found so incredibly and instantly transformative about this ritual was that two things:
First, I very quickly became much more grateful, content, and in a better mood because I had spent time remembering my own magical power to create, change and realise things.
And second, my memory vastly improved. Because I was bringing my conscious attention to the passing of time reflecting on a week at a time, my short-term memory massively improved. This is where the principle of being able to experience magic vastly increases by not forgetting it.
2. Log Your Magical Noticings and Experiences
You might also want to experiment with keeping a log of magical noticings and experiences. This is really about paying attention to the world at large and deliberately choosing to notice synchronicities. The relationship between things or events, noticing people or information or gifts that come into your life at moments in which you need them.
For instance, you might write down that you were really stuck because you needed some information on a technical process that you've never done before. And just by chance, someone posted something on LinkedIn that was a blog post about that very specific topic, or you happen to fall into conversation with someone who had experience in that thing. You could write: I needed something, and before I even needed to communicate it, the signal I was giving off invited in people who had that to share with me.
You may also want to note down any profound thoughts or conversations that you were part of or any ideas that changed you. Beautiful witnessing or sites that you saw; maybe describe a stunning sunset that is very rare to see in your neighbourhood, or the vital way in which you saw a child playing with a puppy in the street. These are all little mini-scenes of magic that can enrich our lives and can keep enriching them over and over again by noting them down. We tend to remember beautiful memories more when we bring more conscious attention to them. We are also sending out a signal that what we pay attention to we would like more of.
You can start small, just a few bullet points or sentences per day, and perhaps you can expand this into a gorgeously rich and indulgent daily, weekly or bi-weekly ritual.
3. See What Comes up for You
See whether you notice any change in yourself, how you see the world, and how you talk to yourself. Notice where your attention begins to naturally drift and linger versus before. And most importantly, see what happens to your sense of the passing of time.
You can use any kind of notebook, and I do advocate for writing things down by hand rather than typing if you're able to. Something really magical happens when we put pen to paper; it expresses the sense of active creation, active engagement, of having the mind and the body connected and working as one.
If you have any questions, any ideas, or anything that you would like to share, you can reach out to me on social media or send me a message here on my site, and I would love to hear how you are progressing with your own magical journaling experience.
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