In life and work, when you feel depleted, overwhelmed, contracted, or lost, what you may be craving is connection—with yourself.
Whereas when you feel spacious in your presence and perception, you are more capable of holding the whole of life: the ups, the downs, the words and behavior of others, the changes of emotional weather within, and the ever-shifting waves of life.
You’re also able to act from a wider vantage point and feel more energetically centered at work and home. You are less reactive to circumstances, not allowing them to dictate your sense of yourself or the world. Instead, you are grounded in your inner truth.
One simple tool for returning to that truth is self-exploratory writing—a practice that invites clarity, emotional spaciousness, and inner alignment.
The Underrated Value of Simple Practices
The habits that serve wellbeing and inner harmony are so basic, so mundane, and so immediately available, we tend to overlook them—good sleep, anyone?—in search of a magic fix or a peak moment experience. Culturally, we undervalue what matters the most.
Burnout is a consequence of a culture, or internalized culture, that does not prioritize wellbeing. Managing burnout becomes a coping strategy. Within that context, self-alignment and self-care are the origin points of a woman who knows her innate value and that the paradigm won’t change unless how you regard yourself does.
Inner spaciousness can be cultivated through practices such as meditation, breathwork, mindfulness, contemplation, myofascial release, dance and movement practices, grounding—and reflective and expressive journaling.
Writing To Support Emotional Wellness
Author Natalie Goldberg wrote to the power of spontaneous writing to access your first thoughts: “The aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what your mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel.”
When we recognize that emotions are energy in motion, we can get curious about them on the page, which can also help clarify what motives are at play in decision-making. Exploring your feelings, especially the ones you often resist, can deepen your self-understanding, expand your emotional bandwidth and resilience, and point you toward aligned action with your values and intuitive knowing.
Reflective and expressive journaling, which focuses on what’s truly on your mind and heart, has been shown to increase emotional awareness and emotional wellness while enhancing your overall outlook. Ultimately, it becomes a practice in emotional intelligence.
Cultivating An Orientation of Gratitude
People who orient in gratitude experience lower levels of stress and depression and better relationships. With practice, you can improve your ability to tap into the state of gratitude, elevating your “set point” of perception.
Practicing gratitude enhances wellbeing—for example, supporting better rest, less inflammation, and peace of mind while reducing symptoms of anxiety or depression.
Writing to express gratitude can help shift attention away from rumination and heavy emotions, and train the brain to more readily access appreciation. Not only this, but the positive effects on mental wellbeing compound like interest, creating accumulating benefits over time.
Processing Complex Emotions
Writing can also help to unwind and process trauma caught in the body’s cellular memory.
When we feel safe, writing about traumatic events or emotional experiences can help to organize chaotic thoughts, release locked-up emotions, and facilitate mental clarity and resilience long term.
Expressive therapeutic writing has also been shown to support physical health and immune function across a range of conditions, while reducing stress, anxiety, and symptoms of PTSD.
Visioning Yourself in Growth
Expressive writing which focuses on self-reflection, gratitude, and imagining a positive future increases experiences of life satisfaction and happiness. In one study, people who journaled for 15 minutes a day felt significantly less anxiety, distress, and depressive symptoms.
When you uncover and explore a new insight on paper, remember a gift that’s gone dormant, or admit future visions or goals for yourself, you are bringing them into your awareness to galvanize energy towards them.
Neuroscience has found that when it comes to goals, people who very vividly describe or picture their goals on paper (men tend to do so more) are significantly (1.2-1.4 times) more likely to achieve those goals. Part of the reason is writing them down improves the biological encoding process by which your hippocampus drops a pin and says, remember this.
Creating Spaciousness Through Reflection
When you put what is inside on paper through reflective journaling, you create spaciousness—within yourself and between you and your thoughts. Often, you can discover how you truly feel through writing and increase your self-awareness.
When you are honest on the page and guided with revealing questions, you have the ability to externalize and explore the narrative, examine triggers, reveal thought and behavior patterns, recognize values, and reveal truths. Increasing your self-awareness, you can begin to see where you are locked into the past, or into thoughts and emotions, so you can come back to presence.
As Goldberg writes, “When you are present, the world is truly alive.”
Start Now: Five Prompts For Embodying Self-Respect
Why not start now? Here are five journaling prompts related to embodying self-respect that you can write to today.
- What is one way you are keeping your word with yourself? How does it feel? What supports you to honor your intention?
- What promise to yourself are you bending—or breaking? How does it feel?
- What nurtures your sense of self that you regularly nourish?
- What nurtures your sense of aliveness but you are not prioritizing it?
- What is one thing you ache to give more attention and energy to? What are you doing instead that is a lower investment in your fulfillment?
In the practice of yoga, more than half the task is getting onto the mat. With expressive or reflective writing, more than half the task is getting onto the page.
So often, we stay stuck in the same mental and emotional energetic loops, but self-exploratory journaling in response to powerful questions can open new doors of awareness which allow us into more of ourselves—and more of our lives and our unique leadership.
Aimee Hansen is co-author of This Book Is a Retreat: 101 Soul-Nourishing Questions to Reconnect with Yourself to be released on August 22, 2025 (prior to that, available for pre-order), a co-creation with USA Today bestselling author, Marianne Richmond. She is the founder of Storyteller Within and has led the Journey Into Sacred Expression women’s retreat on Lake Atitlan, Guatemala for the past ten years. As a lover of the questions that open us, she’s inspired hundreds of women in writing their hearts into expansion.
(Guest Contribution: The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com)
