Reflecting on the Reflections

2025 Journals & Choosing a Journal Writing Practice in 2026

I spent the last few days of 2025 looking back through my (almost) nine journals from the year.

I am so grateful that I journalled my way through 2025. Just as meaningful was the act of returning to those pages rereading words, prayers, pictures, poems, ideas, lists, scrawls, and allowing myself to see the year retrospectively. Doing the heart work is work worth doing.

You think you know yourself. You think you’ll remember the moments you don’t want to forget.

But without a journal, I’d argue that you don’t.

Looking back is part of moving forward.

What I Found When I Looked Back

There were threads I could never have seen while living in the middle of the year.

In 2024, I shared a free resource on Instagram: one journaling prompt a day for 21 days. My intention was to support people through the holiday season - a time that can be equal parts delightful and overwhelming. I wanted to help you start writing and keep writing.

That became my first published work in 2025.

I didn’t set out to publish a book. I set out to be faithful to the practice and serve those who wanted more.

That’s my mission: get people journaling and keep them journaling. Because when you do, your heart will surprise you. You are deeper than you give yourself time or credit for. You are full of passion and potential, if you’re willing to believe it. Many of my own beliefs have solidified and softened on the pages of my journals.

Notes Become Nourishment

In January 2025, I signed up for a free online workshop with Hay House Publishing. I filled pages in my journal during those sessions — processing, reflecting, noticing how much I enjoyed learning about publishing.

Revisiting those notes recently was unexpectedly energising. They are helping me prepare emotionally and creatively for 2026. I suppose I am old-school like that. I love handwritten notes. I love summaries and mind maps. I love the way words on paper feed me long after the moment has passed.

Living by Love’s Voice

In my own journaling practice and in the courses, workshops, and retreats I teach, I return again and again to this truth: the voice of love in your journal can transform your life.

I love the idea that we live either in a love zone or a fear zone. Both require faith. We choose which voice we follow.

As I reread my journals, the highs and the lows, the celebrations and the questions — I can trace supernatural threads of love weaving through my story. One line I scribbled down somewhere in 2025 stayed with me: Every cell in our bodies is eavesdropping on our thoughts. I don’t remember where I first heard it, but it felt true enough to write down more than once.

A journaling practice that notices thoughts, names toxic ones, and deliberately chooses better, life-giving ones is a practice I believe in. Over and over, my journals tell this story: Love softens hard places.

Learning to Rest

Another pattern. Page after page revealed a learning to lean into rest instead of resisting it. More of that, please.

Rest is a weapon. And the world will do its best to keep us distracted, occupied, and disengaged — mistaking busyness for fruitfulness. My journal is the place where I gave myself permission to stop, listen, and recover what is (most) important.

Forgotten Ideas & Buried Treasure

I stumbled upon ideas and plans for projects I had almost entirely forgotten. Reading it again, I got excited.

I’ve been sitting with Maya Angelou’s words about the pain of bearing untold stories. I see that pain some days in myself and I see it in so many others. We are deeply creative, yet so often our art is buried beneath responsibility, circumstance, and false belief systems. Please let your art out in 2026. Start with your heart. I can show you how.

Book after book, my journals revealed creative gold, scribbled in morning pages, gratitude lists, vents, shopping lists, collages, and half-formed thoughts. Threads waiting to be pulled.

Your ideas need a landing place. A page. Without one, they ache inside you.

Watching Something Come to Life

Looking back, I could see the bones of Be The Elephant forming long before the workshop existed in the world. What started as my Safari reflections about elephants: their slowness, their memory, their habit of digging wells, became a fully formed offering.

And then, just like that, in November, there I was in Barcelona sharing that work twice with an international audience. None of that would have happened if I hadn’t been paying attention. If I hadn’t been taking notes.

What might you create in 2026 because you choose to write?

Love Letters & Living Memory

My 2025 journals are filled with photographs and love letters from my family. Returning to them feels like falling into a soft bed after a hard day. These are comforts we need. These are places we must sink into. Words matter. They become our world.

I reread words that were lavished on me. I remember moments of deep joy. Doing, speaking, and writing beautiful things is its own reward — and then being able to return to them again and again is its own kind of abundance.

Brutiful Truths

I’m not Pollyanna. It wasn’t all peaches and cream.

In July, I started using a word in my journal that stayed with me for the rest of the year: brutiful — when you mash-up of beautiful and brutal.

There were mountaintop moments: celebrating 19 years of marriage with my husband in Italy; watching one of our oldest friends marry on the Amalfi Coast; the joy of restored relationships after hard conversations. Beautiful!

And there was deep pain: cancer diagnoses touching those we love most; sitting beside my son through yet another bout of pneumonia; the fear, the waiting, the disappointment of missed school days, basketball trials, and tournaments. Brutal.

Real life. Hard things. Also holy ground.

Choosing the Page Again

And through all of it, I wrote.

So as 2026 starts, I’m choosing the page again. Will you choose it with me? Choosing attention. Choosing Love’s voice. Choosing a practice that holds both beauty and brutality with honesty and hope. Choosing creativity and expression. Choosing heart work.

If you’ve ever wondered whether journaling is worth the effort, let this be your invitation.

The looking back is part of moving forward.