Mindfulness Exercise—Wisdom Well
LET YOUR INNER STUDENT FIND YOUR INNER TEACHER
A 4 Step Mindfulness Exercise to build your Wisdom Well and find inner guidance daily
This Wisdom Well mindfulness exercise combines journaling and meditation techniques to create the ideal space for your inner student to find your inner teacher.
Traditional Mindfulness exercises encourage us to ‘watch our breath’ and become mindful of our thoughts and feeling, like observing clouds passing through the sky.
If you know yourself as the observing witness of thoughts, emotions and sensations, you can bring peace and enlightened understanding to life.
Wisdom Well Mindfulness goes one step further.
Once we observe our thoughts and feelings in a mindful, compassionate way, we create a wisdom space to seek out “How wisdom sees” especially our suffering and stress. This invites profound inner transformation.
It’s possible to do this mindfulness exercise in an eyes-closed to meditate style. Still, I’m sure you’ve noticed how difficult it can be to distinguish wishful thinking and ego thoughts from true intuitive wisdom.
When you add journaling to your mindfulness exercise, guided by the four steps of the Wisdom Well way method, this helps you distinguish ego from deeper truth.
Deeper wisdom has the power to resolve and dissolve our inner obstacles.
Here is an outline of how you can use the four-step Wisdom Well method as a mindfulness exercise with journaling.
PREPARATION for your Wisdom Well mindfulness exercise with journaling
Create a Wisdom Space –
I highly recommend you experiment with creating wisdom spaces to do your mindful journaling and meditations. Here are some of my favourite ways to create Wisdom Well spaces to meditate mindfully and journal for wisdom.
- CHAIRS – Put two chairs out to work with, where you move from one chair to the other to represent shifting from your surface mind to the deeper wisdom of your Wisdom Well.
- PAPERS OR PILLOWS – Place two comfortable pillows to sit on or two papers to stand on. These represent two spaces to move between, one is the surface mind, the other represents deeper wisdom
- NATURE – Find a spot in nature to sit to tune in and mindfully journal. This can be soul nurturing. Look out of the window at the clouds, lay on the grass, sit on a beach, find a comfortable spot under a tree; there are so many ways to incorporate natural spaces into your mindfulness exercise.
Pen and paper – creative or practical.
You get to be as creative or as practical as you like.
On some days, I grab any pen and paper to do a quick mindful journal exercise as bullet points or short scribbled notes. Other days I feel more inclined to make my journaling more creative, choosing a beautiful notebook and a nice pen; I may add doodling or sketching.
What’s important is you enjoy the process as a gift of self-care, serving your personal and spiritual growth.
Choosing a topic –
It helps to establish a clear topic for your Wisdom Well journaling.
If you have more than one topic, make a bullet point list and choose one at a time to work mindfully with. If any of the topics are particularly emotional or stressful, I recommend warming up with an easier, perhaps more practical topic first.
Then once you’re in the flow, work on the more emotive topic.
When you get used to Wisdom Well building, and mindfully journaling, you’ll discover you can work with virtually any topic.
You can explore:
- spiritual questions that you want to see for yourself
- journal to transform inner obstacles like procrastination, fear, anger or shame.
- seek solutions to further your career,
- understand your personality,
- heal a relationship.
- deep dive into business building strategy to find more clients or work smarter rather than harder.
There are no limits to what you can explore.
Questions to ask mindfully
Here are a couple of questions that you might ask yourself to find a topic.
These are master coaching questions.
- What matters to you the most right now?
- Where do you want to see changes in your life?
- If you let yourself dream freely, what would you like an ideal day and week to look like?
- What spiritual teachings feel unresolved, where do you have doubts and questions?
- In 10 years, if you were to look back, what would you regret not creating in your life?
A mini mindfulness exercise to add
- Think about the different aspects of your life, such as career, spirituality, relationships, finances, family, etc.
- Divide a piece of paper into sections representing the different aspects and size them in terms of time spent. So if you’re spending 80% on your career, you might want to draw 80% of your paper as career.
- Reflect on your completed paper and use this as an opportunity to think about if and what you might want to change.
WISDOM WELL WAY MINDFULNESS EXERCISE WITH JOURNALING:
Once you’ve chosen a topic sit with pen and paper, perhaps using a wisdom space to go through these four steps.
These mindful journaling steps are guidelines only; feel free to follow your intuition to adapt the process.
I never want you to feel rigidly bound by this work; it’s meant to be a helpful guide only.
This is a Mindfulness Exercise by Colleen-Joy can be used for meditation, as a powerful life coaching and spiritual coaching exercise.
It is designed to help us to find inner wisdom.
#1 DIG
When we dig a well, we need to get our hands dirty.
To dig your Wisdom Well it helps to start with where you are right now.
What are your honest thoughts and feelings on your topic?
Don’t try to be spiritual, good, or anything other than absolutely honest about your felt experience.
When you think about your topic, what is the:
- response in your body as felt sensations,
- in your heart as emotions and desires
- and your mind as thoughts, doubts and questions.
Spend a few minutes journaling to purge.
Consider a “Dear Wisdom” format, where you share personal feelings and thoughts in your journal.
Skipping this part can make it difficult to access wisdom later because our real feelings are like the rocks that we need to break through to get to the water.
#2 ASK
Asking questions means creating a solid bucket to send into your Wisdom Well.
Here you write down your question.
Think of this as finding the words for your intention, what you want help or guidance around.
It took me years to realize that the quality of the question I asked impacted the quality of my Wisdom Well journaling.
You might find that by just changing the question you ask, like changing buckets, you’ll be able to find more insight.
Master coaching has told me the art and the science of asking enlightening, empowering questions.
Some questions are like weak buckets; others are big and strong.
Experiment with different questions to improve your mindfulness journal exercise.
As a quick tip, open questions tend to do far better than closed questions. A closed question has a yes-no answer, like, “Should I….?”
#3 OPEN
In the first two stages, you kept your attention on your surface human experience; now, it’s time to open to your wisdom.
To do this, first set a clear intention (decide) that you are changing radio stations from the surface to your deeper wisdom.
It might sound crazy that intention alone can often do the job, but it’s true.
Intention directs our attention. And to go deeper than the surface mind, we need only change attention from surface thinking to deeper peaceful open wisdom.
Most people don’t realize that they can do this or that it is that easy.
What is more challenging is learning to translate the subtle peaceful seeing of wisdom into words. But this is also far easier than most people imagine.
When you are mindfully journaling during this stage, imagine wisdom speaking to you, and let yourself write words. Create a dialogue between the part of you asking the question and the deeper intuitive seeing providing answers.
Yes it is important to learn how to discern the difference between EGO versus true intuitive wisdom; my Wisdom Well way courses and classes create a safe space for you to develop this skill because it is a skill. But you can use your discernment.
If your words of wisdom bring:
- a sense of peace,
- wholeness,
- being equal to your life and others,
- and have a felt sense of openness in your body…
…that is usually an indication of accurate translations of wisdom rather than ego distortion.
As you mindfully journal insights, thoughts, and inspiration during this step, don’t be passive. Actively ask for clarification to make sure you get the most out of the mindfulness exercise.
#4 LIVE
Once you find insight or inspiration, especially if it helps resolve an inner obstacle, it can be really helpful to integrate the experience.
Here are a few options to experiment with.
BREATHING IN THE WISDOM
Imagine breathing in clarity and wisdom that you’ve found.
Feel the peace and the openness in your body and give that peace to any contracted discomfort. As if you’re sharing the light with the dark, the open with the contracted.
I like to picture wisdom being taken into my cells so that every part of my body, physical, emotional and energetic are integrating the new seeing and being
NEXT STEP ACTIONS
It can be helpful to ask yourself what your next steps are.
- How do you plan to implement what you’ve discovered?
- How do you plan to keep yourself on track?
MINDFUL APPLICATION
Lastly, bring those insights mindfully into your life.
Perhaps create some kind of reminder. Something to help you remember to apply the inner guidance you’ve found.
This could be:
- a little reminder on your phone,
- an artwork that you place to remind yourself,
- a colour that you choose to associate with the wisdom you’ve found that you intentionally wear over the next few days,
- an object you place on your desk as a symbol
I’m sure you can think of many creative, fun ways to live the wisdom you’ve found.
