As an inmate, you know how important freedom is. If you are reading this you are behind bars. If you are reading this you are in prison for things you may or may not have done. It does not really matter at this point in time. What matters is what you would do with your productive time. You can spend your time getting in touch with things you need to get in touch with or you can continue doing the things that you were doing before. It is your choice. You know where your choice can lead. If you want to truly experience real freedom, you have to understand that real freedom comes from within.

The real meaning of freedom

Did you know that a lot of people walk around in the “free world” but are actually in jail? That is right. They might not have concrete walls around them, they might not have steel bars in front of them, but the reality is that they are prisoners. They are prisoners of their biases, they are prisoners of their emotions and they are definitely prisoners of their ignorance. People often find themselves in abusive relationships, or jobs that they hate, or living lives that they do not really care for because they feel stuck. Unfortunately for most of these people there are invisible walls, there are invisible jails all around them and they hold the key, but throughout their lives day after day they never put in the effort to grab that key and turn the lock. The real meaning of freedom is having a free mind.

The real meaning of freedom is having a free spirit. When you write a journal from your cell block or from jail, you are basically exercising real freedom. You are claiming real freedom. You are working towards a free mind. If you free your mind and you are able to explore ideas, and explore emotions and places that you have never been to before, you are actually experiencing a higher level of freedom than other people in the “free world”. Seriously, most people are stuck in a rut. They live their lives the same day as the other. Eventually they are buried in a six-foot hole in the ground, and that is what they call their life. If you want something higher, even though you are behind bars, you have to seriously work hard at freeing your spirit and freeing your mind. The good news is that writing a journal is the first concrete step that you can take to real freedom. The good news is that it really does not take that much effort, only a few minutes every single day letting out what you are thinking about and exploring your emotions and writing them down can go a long way in you truly experiencing the full meaning of freedom.

Writing is a gateway to real freedom

Writing is a psycho-motor exercise. In other words, when you write your body is doing something and your mind is directing your body to do something. When you write you are basically centering your attention on a particular idea, and that idea is real because you can see it when you write something. This is a very powerful exercise. The more you do this, the more freedom you experience. Why? You turn your ideas into something you can see. You turn your ideas into something that you can read. More importantly, you turn your ideas into something that you can share with other people from all over the world, thanks to e-mail and the internet. That is how powerful writing is. You need to exercise your writing skills regardless of how much schooling you have or how much writing experience you have. Look at writing as a gateway to real freedom.

Express your emotions

At this stage in your life, you probably are experiencing all sorts of emotions. You are probably wondering why you ended up in jail. You are probably wondering why certain people look at you at a certain way. It is okay to feel those emotions, it is okay to feel them. It is okay to have those emotions run through your mind. What is not okay is for you to rehash those emotions day after day without you directly confronting them. When you write a journal, you go a long way in writing down these emotions and cataloging them. You are not judging them, you are just merely writing them down. The more you write them down the more you become aware of them. The more you become aware of them, the more you reach a point where you eventually can control them. That is how powerful a daily journal is.

Express your ideas

In jail, one of the biggest wasted resources that any society gives up is really the ideas of the inmates. Everybody has ideas. If you are alive you have ideas. Interestingly enough it only takes one idea to change the world. Unfortunately, society at large often tends to ignore the ideas of people that are in certain positions such as jail. When you write your ideas in your journal, you take part in all this. Your ideas become part of the greater set of ideas that are out there. Once you get released from prison, you can then take these ideas that you have written and share them with the world at large. You will never know, the idea that you may have had behind bars may just be the idea that can set the world free or set the world on fire. You have to remember that at lot of the most important people in the world wrote their ideas from behind bars. Who are these people? Apostle Paul, the person who wrote most of the New Testament in the Bible. Martin Luther King. Marco Polo. A lot of important ideas that shaped the world were written from prison. You are hardly alone. Celebrate your ideas. Write them down. These might be the ideas that can really help make everybody’s lives better. At the very least it gives your mind release, and it gives your mind the much needed exercise in crafting and communicating ideas.

No judgment and no hate

When you write a journal, there is no judgment. There is nobody hating you. There is no people judging you. It is basically and your ideas. You and the images that come to mind. When you write, you experience real freedom because a lot of the emotional baggage that you get when people say that your ideas may not work or they disagree with you, all of that goes away. Instead, it is just you and your ideas you meditating upon these mental pictures that you can write down and eventually share.

Track you progress overtime

One of the biggest advantage of inmates writing journals is that inmates can track the progress that they are making overtime. If you continue to write a journal and make it a part of your daily ritual, you can see improvements both in your writing, writing volume and also the ideas and information that you write about. If you keep at it over a long period of time, you can improve your skills and most importantly you can see personal progress in terms of your emotional well being, your stability over all and most importantly your spiritual balance. This is really what this whole exercise is all about. It is getting in touch with that piece of divine infinity locked within your being. We are all works in progress. We may have done things that we are sorry for, things that really did us harm, but at the end of the day it does not really matter. What matters is what we can become. When you write a daily journal, you get in touch with that sense of possibility. You get in touch with that sense of divine infinity that is locked within everybody.

If you are in prison, you know how boring it can be. You know how long each second is. It seems like every minute takes eternity, whether you are just hanging out in your cell or at the prison yard. It seem that each day takes forever to get through. It seems that each day seems to blend in to the next day and there seems to be no point. It seems that things are dragging and there is really no purpose behind you being in jail. This is precisely the kind of mentality people who want to punish you want you to think, but there is a way out of this. There is a way for you to make the best use of your time and come out of jail a better person. What way is this? Writing a journal. That is right. By simply writing an hour or thirty minutes every single day, you can begin a personal journey that will not only transform you emotionally but can also transform you spiritually and mentally. In fact, if you include daily journal writing into your daily workout schedule or daily activities, you can get out of prison physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually better than when you came in. Here is how you do it.

We are all works in progress

Let us face it, the main reason why you are in jail is the fact that human beings are not perfect. What put you in jail can put anybody else in jail. Do not beat yourself up. Whatever rush of emotions you felt when you did what you felt you needed to do at that time, can happen to anybody. In fact, the only difference between a person in jail and a person that is not in jail is a bad day. If a bad day happens to almost anybody on the planet, chances are they will end up at the same spot that you are in, so do not beat yourself up too badly. We are all works in progress. This is the key assumption you should have when you are starting your journal. There is nothing wrong with you that should prevent you from writing a journal. Writing a journal is neither beneath you or is it above you. If anything it is a gateway for you to truly get in touch with your real self and put in the necessary work to make the changes necessary to not just avoid going back to prison but also to become a way better person. The good news is the choice is completely yours. Nobody can make it for you. More importantly, nobody can take that choice away from you.

Figure out how you feel by writing about it

Part of the reason why people are miserable is because they are very unclear emotional communicators. They really have a tough time listening to the emotional signals that their body and mind sends to themselves. As a result, they are emotional time bombs or they emotionally misfire, or they just send the wrong signals. Most people are confused. All it takes really to cut through that fog of lack of emotional clarity is honesty. When you write a journal, this is exactly what you do, you become emotionally honest. You basically ask yourself, time and time again in so many ways, who am I, what do I want, where am I going, what is my life about. These are profound questions that really at some level everybody is asking, but for the most part people answer it the wrong way. This is why people buy fancy cars, buy big homes and buy all sorts of trinkets that they think could make the question go away. However, with real honesty and real clarity we would understand that the answer is really within us. It goes beyond material possessions or how much other people respect us or all sorts of goodies that life tends to give to people. When you write a journal, you really get to the heart of your being, you really give yourself an opportunity to truly know yourself from the inside out.

Real healing can only happen if you let it out

Let us face it, the reason that you are in jail is because you are feeling hurt. Seriously, people who act out in anger, people who commit crimes against other people my have primarily been driven by anger, but bottom line is that they are feeling hurt. Something is missing. Something was not right inside. Their hearts have scars or wounds on it. A lot of times the worst kind of injuries are the ones that you can not see. It is easier to break a man’s arm because bones can heal, it is harder to break a man’s heart because it is harder for invisible wounds to heal. The good news is that when you write every single day, you can allow the healing process to take place. You can give yourself the opportunity to heal. Why? One simple word, honesty. You are not writing because other people are looking at you, you have no audience, you are in jail after all, your only audience is yourself. You are writing because it allows you to become honest. Sure, you might not be honest at first. You might have all sorts of bad assumptions and bad expectations, but given enough time the moment of truth will come out and everything that comes out of your pen will basically be the truth. As The Good Book says, the truth shall set you free. The moment you become honest with yourself is the first moment where you start becoming free. Keep that in mind. A great gateway for that is daily journal writing.

Sharing yourself in a safe place

The great thing about journal writing in prison is that you are basically sharing sensitive information about yourself with yourself. There is nobody else laughing at you, there is no people mocking you, there is no people hating you, you are in a very very safe place. A lot of these is really internal conversation with your mind. The more you celebrate this, the more you practice this the faster the healing process would become.

Track your thoughts

When you look at your past journal entries you can see how you develop thoughts. Most importantly, you can also see how your emotional responses to certain thoughts change with time. This can be very therapeutic. This can start the process of healing. Why? A lot of the reasons why people are in jail is because they are feeling so powerless that they become angry, and anger is like a fire on your palm. It only hurts you. You think that you are pushing it out to other people but at the end of the day you are the primary victim of that fire. When you track your thoughts and your emotional development, as to how you feel regarding this fire that is raging in your heart, it changes you as a person. There are two ways to change, we can all change unconsciously or we can change consciously. Writing a journal and keeping track of your emotions and your thought processes is a form of conscious personal evolution. Instead of hoping to get lucky and hoping that a certain emotional trigger would change you as a person, when you write a journal and you do it methodically all the time day after day, you increase the chances of really being conscious about how you think about certain things. You increase the chances of really questioning why you think the way you think. The moment you reach the stage is the moment you can almost control how you change as a person.

Gain peace from within

The whole point of writing a journal is really to gain peace. The main reason you are in jail is because you did not have peace. Maybe you had a father who was abusive. Maybe you had a mother that did not listen to you. Regardless of what the reason was, you can finally gain peace on your own terms and at your own time by writing about it. Thinking about it, writing about it and just repeating this process, and as long as you are fully honest, you can gain peace from within. It may not happen overnight, it may take some time, but it is definitely worth doing.