Goodness me, has the year really gone by or what? To give you guys a quick update, there has been a few changes happening with me lately and I’ve been taking it easy for awhile. I’m feeling super rundown and my energy levels have been extremely low because I feel like even though my body can recuperate somewhat in response to more sleep, my mind is still racing as soon as I wake and I can’t seem to switch off. Don’t worry, it’s all under control, it just means I need to step back a little bit, so you may find that I’m only active on some platforms for the latter part of the year.
I know a lot of you wait with bated breath for the prompt cycles, and thank you to everyone who has participated in them and have enjoyed them. Here are the July and August Daily and Self-care prompt cycles:
As promised in the previous prompt cycle post, I was going to suggest a few ways you can reflect on your year using the prompts. This part really isn’t compulsory, and you can easily do this every quarter of the year, too, or any sort of frequency within the year, just make sure you have at least 3 months worth of responses to work with. This is really just a nice way to dig a bit deeper into your mindful practices:
- Choose from either the Daily prompt cycle list of the Self-care prompts (depending on whether you wrote down after thoughts in the latter prompt cycles)
- Pick a prompt that you’ve really enjoyed writing about (or doing), or even one that you didn’t particularly enjoy
- Go through each month and have a look at your responses for that prompt
- Can you find an underlying thought or theme or message that this prompt might be giving you
- Use this information to make changes in certain parts of your life, or even just pay gratitude for these moments
- Repeat the process across however many prompts you’d like to analyse
- Write down what you’ve learned from these experiences
- Keep these thoughts somewhere safe so you can return to them during each of your reviews
And it’s really that simple. I find that oftentimes when we write a journal or diary, we traditionally don’t really look back on the entries quite as often. Sometimes I won’t look at entries in my journal until years have passed, and even then I’m having to sift through a whole lot of information to figure out what it is I’m trying to learn of myself. Having the prompts in the prompt cycles gives me a focus. I will usually do a 3-month review and pick 5 prompts that have really appealled to me. This whole process can take as long as you’d like it to, but I usually set aside an hour and a half to really dig deep, and sometimes, the messages I get tell me things that I may have missed, like maybe my anxiety has been creeping back and needs some attention to help me get back on track. Whatever you decide, remember this is for you to learn something of yourself, so be kind.
NOTE: If you’re new to the Prompt Cycle concept, go here for an explanation, but please note that I haven’t included calendars this year, as people have found them a bit confusing, sooooo I’ve created printables with each prompt typed out. If you’d prefer the calendar layout, send me an email and I can send that through to you.
Til next time…
dq