During this semester professor Pittmann assigned us a journal project. I spoke a little about it in the very first post of this blog. The main ideas of the project were to be able to write freely, monitor our feelings and examine the spiritual, mental, emotional and physical aspects of our life. In order to accomplish this we used a laboratory notebook (which has blank papers with no lines) to write down our feelings and thoughts in a free manner. Also we drew life compasses so we could visually analyze how we were in each aspect of our lives.
A life compass is composed of the four basic aspects of life. These are: spiritual, mental, emotional and physical. In each compass we assigned a number from 0 to 3 (0 being bad and 3 good) to each aspect and then added them up in order to see how we were generally feeling.
Example Life Compass
In my experience, this journal has helped me to see how I think. In ten minutes of any day my thoughts are quite random, my mind gets pretty crowded with thoughts about work and things I would like to do, with the journal I was able to see and analyze in detail my thoughts. The journal also helped me to write bigger, looser and quicker. I must admit that at times I felt the journal was a nuisance because I had loads of work to do from other classes and my laboratory, but I was able to manage it by "dumping" all my stress into the journal as I wrote.
The life compasses helped me visualize in which aspects of my life I was stronger and weaker. The final statistics show that I am stronger emotionally and have a good balance between my physical and emotional aspects; my weakest part is the mental area. After calculating my compass totals I could see that this semester has been a real roller coaster. I felt good many times but I also felt "down in the dumps" many other times. I enjoyed analyzing my compasses.
I'm totally agree with you when you say that you've a lot of work from other class and use the journal to make a pause and reflect about life, the same happen to me with all the work from architecture the journal become my escape in difficult days. Your graphics help to understand your process and that help to support your points. When I was reading I can feel each word you use to describes your situations.
ReplyDeleteI really like how you explained and showed the charts of your feelings, also you showed how does a life compass look like.
ReplyDeleteAlso it's a little contradictory the fact that you say at the beggining that when you start to write in your journal you are very thoughtful because of the stress you have but when we look at your percentages the most lower is the mental.
When you was saying that you use to be thoughtful when you are stressed I was imagining myself because I've pass through that too.
I like your point of view because I felt the same way when I was writing this.
Also I can notice the voice of the reflection it give me more idea of your experience.
Nasherine Flores
I liked how you made your charts because they catch your attention very quickly and that something that a writer should have always in mind. I liked how you explained the charts.I will like to hear more about how was the experience of actually writing with a million things in mind and writing in class. As I was reading this post I could identify with it because the stress was too much and I used the journal to let that stress out.
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