Post Ten- Journal Reflection / Inner Journey Blog

During this second semester 2014 in my English course, Journey in Literature, we learned to distinguish two kinds of journeys: an external and an inner journey. These two journeys are connected with the same idea: the identity concept. But now I am going to talk specifically about my inner journey during the course. We were assigned a journal in which we shared our thought and feelings to reflect about our inner journey. This exercise helps us to experiment an inner journey in which we had more confidence in our English writing. The exercise consists in write down the first things that came to our minds in ten minutes based on six rules of the “First Thoughts” from the book: Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. The rules were the following: 1) keep your hand moving, 2) don’t cross out, 3) don’t worry about spelling, punctuation and grammar, 4) lose control, 5) don’t think and don’t get logical, and 6) go for the jugular.

When I did my inner journey through my English journal I wrote 41 entries and 24 compasses.  While I reviewed my journal I felt that I could reflect about my own life and what define my own person. I also note a lot of changes in my writing process. Specifically, I increased the amount of writing using the same amount of time. I personally improved my writing skill because I felt that I experimented the experience of lose the control, don’t get logical and go for the jugular. I also liked a lot the activity of the compasses because briefly I could express my feelings and thoughts. The compasses were like a concept map in which you could briefly summarize what you felt instantly. In the compasses you also assigned rankings numbers (one = bad, two = medium, and three = excellent) to your emotional state, spiritual state, physical state and mental state.

I consider the journal helped me to understand my inner journey. It helped me to reflect about my inner process. I think practice is fundamental to learn and through the journal we can practice the English. An important in sight through my inner journey was when I wrote about my journey to the National Institute of Health (NHI) at Washington, Maryland. I wrote in the journal about this experience during five days. I could not stop to write in the journal about my feelings and thoughts during this experience. When I wrote about this experience I related my inner and external journey. I reflected about my experience as a traveler. I wrote about my experiences in the interviews at NHI, the airplane and the airport, the city and the hotels. During this experience I lived a lot of things that helped me to grow in my inner and external journey. For example I was stuck in Dulles at Washington Airport for three days.  These days I experimented different situation that I have never imagined I would live.  First my flight was cancelled for mechanical issues, second there was not flight to get back Puerto Rico later because the snowstorm, third the airline did not coordinate well my flight to Puerto Rico the next day so I get stuck one day more and finally I got a flight to get back to Puerto Rico three days later. These were hard and intense experiences. This was the reason I wrote in my journal about it, because during my experience I just observed and take time to write in the journal to help me to reflect and to relax myself.

I had the opportunity to learn a lot about the identity concept with this activity. I discovered through the journal that identity means what really defines every human being. Identity is the notion that characterizes a person. The inner journey is part of the identity notion, because it represents the portion of the process that differentiates each person. I think this exercise is perfect to practice the English writing process. However, I suggest as a future idea that may be student could make a free drawing, abstract or concrete, that express their feelings and thoughts three times per week similar to the compass. Finally, I learned with the journal that the inner journey represents our personality, feelings, thoughts, emotions and desires. The inner journey is the travel through our mind to discover what define us.