Art Journaling for Self-Awareness

 I recently found one of my older art journals from a couple of years ago and flipping through it has reconnected me to so many wonderful lessons and reminded me how much I've transformed. Not just transformation in my art, but in my personal life as well. That's one of the things I love about art journaling. It gives us a place to document our growth as humans, and to do it in a way that includes lots of fun art supplies. 

For example, this page - TRUST -- was created on a day when I was exploring some of the reasons I have trust issues. What you can't see is the first two layers of handwritten journaling. I don't remember what I wrote word for word, but I know the first layer was pencil and I was free-writing about my life long trust issues and then that turned into a Sharpie where I made a list of all the people in my life who have betrayed my trust and, in some cases, broken my heart. This went back as early as elementary school. 

Eventually, I wrote about how I see myself in the exchange and what role I might be playing in all of my trust issues. I remember writing the line -- "Are my trust issues a self-fulfilling prophesy?" And this is when the transformation started to happen. It's when I realized that I had to own my issue with trust and seriously look at what role I was playing in all of it. 

My art journal helped me get to a place of self-awareness. I had to move past the surface stuff like: 

• That person hurt me.
• People keep hurting me. 
• I can't trust anyone.
• and on, and on, and on. 

Creating this page forced me to face some hard realities and then move past them in a way that allowed me to start my healing process. I wanted to be able to trust again because in this world of so much disconnection from what matters, I still believe in humans and the good that resides in each of us. I'm a bit sappy that way, I guess.

Art journaling is how I work through my "stuff" and it's how I play with art supplies, practice, and explore in order to discover what's right there in front of me (or sometimes, what's hidden deep beneath the surface).

What about you? What things have you been able to discover (and uncover) about yourself through your art journal? Leave me a note below!!!