Light Lessons: Four things to consider in how writing can inform energy paths
Journaling has often been described as a tool for personal growth. The analogy to the physics of light has long been playing in my mind. Writing is the physical action of taking what is preying on your well-being and transposing it to be read by yourself (or others if you so wish), bringing a fresh perspective. This will illuminate the mind, reflect on mental and emotional well-being, and offer new light on building spiritual energy.
With apologies to those with far better physics than mine, light is subject to phenomena: reflection, refraction, absorption and diffusion, diffraction, all offering revelations on how it interacts with its environment, particularly when moving from one medium to another.
The analogy here is journaling enables us to reflect on past experiences and refract new perspectives to influence our future actions and state of being. Can we absorb the negatives? How do we diffract them? And focus on the positives?
Journaling can enlighten our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Light goes beyond seeing to listening and feeling the passing of experiences. How do we use their passing, which entails reflecting, refracting, and diffracting to absorb as we search for renewed focus?
Reflection: Examining what was
In physics, reflection occurs when light bounces off a surface, returning to the source or going back to replicate what originally travelled to the surface. Can be construed as analogous to journaling’s role in self-reflection, looking back on experiences, actions, and thoughts to understand how these events reflect on your current state. I use my journal to examine what has happened, uncover patterns and behaviours, offer fresh opportunities to understand how past choices have influenced the present actions. Am I learning and using the lessons reflected?
- Physical Wellbeing: Physically, journaling reflection helps monitor patterns in our habits — exercise, sleep, diet — affecting our health. It shines light on behaviours promoting or diminishing our physical vitality.
- Mental Wellbeing: In terms of mental health, when done openly, it is an opportunity to understand cognitive patterns, perhaps negative thought loops or limiting beliefs. By recognising these negatives through reflecting, we become aware of where we can make adjustments in generating mental clarity and developing a positive language to reflect and reinforce achievements
- Learn from the past, reflect now and deliver positively into the future.
- Emotional Wellbeing: Structuring reflection through journaling is an opportunity to examine one’s own emotions when revisiting experiences to create greater awareness. We identify emotional triggers and understand how they influence our actions and reactions.
- Spiritual Wellbeing: Reflection helps us sense how values and belief systems generate the core energy flowing through us for emotional, mental, and physical well-being. It helps us align our actions with the core meaning in what we seek to achieve, allowing us to connect more deeply with ourselves and the people around us with whom we share reciprocal values and deeper love.
2. Refraction: Shifting Perspective for the Future
In the physical world, refraction is the changing of course, the ‘bending’ of light as it passes through different mediums altering its speed and direction.
In the context of journaling, the shift represents reframing or changing perspectives. When we look at our reflections with new insight, we can change the course of our thinking, creating new possibilities for growth, evolution or some may even go so far as to seek transformative change.
- Physical Wellbeing: our physical habits, eating, drinking and exercise, on health setbacks, we can refract, learn from, this information by setting new goals, trying different methods, or adopting better routines to promote good, if not great, health.
- Mental Wellbeing: mentally we challenge automatic thoughts or cognitive distortions by reframing them. Instead of seeing setbacks as failures, we view them as learning opportunities. This can sound a platitude but with journaling we can slow down and analyse situations more objectively and look at the mediums we travelled through, refracted, to get where we visualise now.
- Emotional Wellbeing: changing our relationship with our feelings. The art of writing will assist us sense emotions as temporary and malleable. Allowing us to cultivate healthier, proactive, emotions instead of reactive ones.
- Spiritual Wellbeing: when we shift our perspective on life’s deeper questions. The majority of us are caught up in the purposes of living; paying the bills, and maybe a career path. Journaling, refracting, allows us to transcend everyday concerns to focus on what matters. Beyond purpose today to meaning longer term connection, and inner peace. We move from a reactive state to one of intentionality, re-aligning with our higher self or purpose.
3. Absorption: Internalising Insights
In the physics of light, absorption is about how a material takes in light energy and can convert it into heat. Absorption in writing for ourselves represents the way we internalise insights from our reflections and refractions. It is about what makes happen, how we generate energy, and use this energy to turn words into deeds.
- Physical Wellbeing: After reflecting on, refracting through, our habits, we can absorb new practices into our routines. Building the habits of consistency in journaling can help us solidify commitments to healthier behaviours. This is not just about running faster and jumping higher right away but also about visualisation, where journaling will build mindfulness and thinking about your exercise regime. Self-care starts with taking a deep breath, refreshing, reflecting and refracting, making good habits an integral part of our lifestyle.
- Mental Wellbeing: absorption involves internalising beliefs, reinforcing the ‘right’ attitudes. The art and science of journaling strengthens positive thought patterns, enables shifts in our mindset when we sense the need to shift. It helps us absorb lessons and go forward positively with a sense of confidence developed from self-knowledge and being open to positive change.
- Emotional Wellbeing: absorption is embodying emotional intelligence. Journaling can be a key for us to process, learn from, emotions, allowing us to manage them more effectively over time. It promotes a deeper self-awareness and influences how we interact with the world given the manner we learn about our self.
- Spiritual Wellbeing: embodying the wisdom gained from spiritual reflection — absorbing other people’s knowledge and taking it forward with your own thinking. Journaling helps us internalise spiritual lessons, how values we have absorbed show through in daily life, aligning with our deeper values and reinforcing meaning well beyond the chasing of purpose in paying the bills.
4. Diffraction: Expanding Consciousness
Diffraction occurs when light spreads out after passing through a narrow opening, creating an interference pattern broadening the light’s reach. In journaling, diffraction can be construed as expanding consciousness and self-awareness after deep reflection and refracted insight. Sensing beyond the narrow confines of our usual vision, range of listening as we delve into our thoughts and emotions.
- Physical Wellbeing: this could mean expanding health inputs, challenging ‘accepted’ practice. Rather than focusing solely on exercise or diet, we begin to integrate a more holistic view of physical wellbeing, incorporating rest, nutrition, mental health, and movement into a unified concept of health.
- Mental Wellbeing: building from the physical, diffraction broadens our cognitive perspective. The journal will lead to greater flexibility in thinking, allowing us to entertain different viewpoints, reduce rigid thinking and internally ask the ‘what if….?’ Questions. It can allow us to adapt and adopt more creative problem-solving approaches.
- Emotional Wellbeing: diffraction is the basis for an increased capacity for empathy and emotional depth. The nature of journaling helps us process our own feelings as we use its honesty to challenge our self-image, reflecting, refracting and absorbing. We become more compassionate and understanding toward others: The I involved in we, widening our emotional intelligence spectrum.
- Spiritual Wellbeing: diffraction is the expansion of our spiritual perspective. The usual sense is convoluting spiritual with religion. But the power of spirit goes far further with a journey inward to reinforce how the meaning in our life is reinforced and renewed well beyond the purposeful living regularly advocated. Through journaling, we can move beyond individual concerns to a more connected, expansive view. It is not just existing but also how we contribute to the greater good for those we care about and love, leading to a sense of oneness, transcendence, or interconnectedness with the world around us.
Taking the Physics of Light into Living Well
Just as light follows universal laws of physics, our inner lives follow similar patterns of reflection, refraction, absorption, and diffraction. But do we understand these laws, lores?
Writing, journaling, and reflecting on the past and passing of time.
Refracting to find new insights for the future.
Absorbing the lessons to be learned.
Diffusing these insights into all aspects of our lives to renew meaning and grant greater clarity in how we act purposefully.
Writing, journaling, becomes the medium, the lens through which we harness the dynamics to reinforce learning from negatives and reinforce positives.
By reflecting on what is past, passing, refractive for new insights for adapting and building resilience, and absorbing the lessons to be learned, we foster holistic well-being — physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.
Through writing for ourselves, we illuminate our inner landscape, shed light to reveal the clarity and complexity of who we are, allowing us to move forward with greater awareness and intention.
