Spiritual Journaling: How to Keep a Spiritual Journal, and 46 Spiritual Journal Prompts

If you have an active spiritual practice, I strongly recommend keeping a spiritual journal. I’ve been spiritually journaling regularly for the past three years, and my personal spiritual growth over that time feels much faster, and much clearer and better-defined, than in the preceding years of my life.

In this article, we’ll cover what spiritual journaling is and how to keep a spiritual journal, and then offer you 46 prompts for spiritual journaling if you’d like inspiration.

What Spiritual Journaling Is

No hidden corners here. By “journaling,” I mean keeping a regular, ongoing personal record, and by “spiritual journaling,” I mean journaling about our spiritual lives.

By spiritual journaling, I simply mean journaling about our spiritual lives.

What is spirituality itself? That’s up to you to define, of course—but I would say it involves life at its most fundamental, most meaningful, most mystical, and most sacred.

Spirituality isn’t really separate from life, in my view, so I’d say every journal (even a journal of new soup recipes) is also a spiritual journal in a sense; but this is getting a bit in the weeds.

Summing up, if you’re journaling about spirituality on purpose, then congratulations! You have a spiritual journal.

How to Keep a Spiritual Journal: 5 Tips for Spiritual Journaling

Below is my advice from several years of regular spiritual journaling. This is what has worked for me on my own spiritual path (heavily informed by Tibetan Buddhism) and with my own preferences around technology and so on, so please take any part of this advice that’s useful and leave the rest.

1. Spiritual Journaling Advice: Adopt Different Technologies

There are lots of reasons to keep a multimedia journal, not just handwritten or typed text. If you see a beautiful sunset or or an unexpectedly meaningful car license plate, it’s helpful to be able to record these things in photo or video, as companions to your words. If you’re having a spiritual experience, you may want to dictate some elements of it verbally, rather than interrupting it to start writing or typing. Transcription applications like Whisper Memos are wonderful for dictating vivid dreams, when writing them would take too long and start to cloud the memory. And so on.

For these reasons, my own journal is a multimedia record of my spiritual path, more than it is a text document. This is more complex, and it does force me to rely on the security and discretion of big tech companies; but I still recommend trying it for your spiritual journaling.

My own journal is a multimedia record of my spiritual path, more than it is a text document.

For an in-depth discussion on technology options and tradeoffs for journaling, please see our overall introduction on how to start journaling:

How to Start Journaling: Practical Advice on How to Journal Daily

2. Spiritual Journaling Advice: Embrace Fluidity and Change

My own spiritual practice is constantly changing and evolving, and I believe this is how it should be. As such, I don’t journal to create a record of the absolutely correct things I will agree with forever.

I don’t journal to create a record of the absolutely correct things I will agree with forever.

Rather, I journal partly to record my spiritual practices at any given time, so that I can refer back to it later, and also partly to process my own spiritual path. I find that writing about whatever I’m going through clarifies those experiences; and it also helps them move properly through my system, so they can integrate with everything already in place, and with whatever comes next.

So that this isn’t abstract, you can imagine processing your feelings about a difficult interaction with a family member. You’re not writing it down because you’ll feel this exact way forever. Instead, writing it down both organizes your thoughts and feelings about the experience. It is also cathartic, helping open your system to the broader dynamic, and to whatever comes next in the relationship. It’s the same in our spiritual life (again, not that our spiritual and family lives are different).

So much of spirituality seems to be beyond what we can neatly encapsulate in words and then walk around agreeing with.

This point seems especially important because, for me, so much of spirituality is beyond what we can neatly encapsulate in words and then walk around agreeing with. As such, getting the words out might sometimes open us to deeper truths that our initial concepts were partially obscuring. A lot of spiritual discovery seems to take place in those moments of freshness and surprise.

3. Spiritual Journaling Advice: Be Uninhibited

As I experience it, true spirituality isn’t prim or tidy, and it doesn’t deny our pain and confusion. In fact, I often journal exactly to express and process these darker energies. As a result, my journal is as contrasting, shocking, and ultimately unprintable as life itself. 

Allow your spiritual journal to be honest and unfiltered—not prim or tidy.

The promise of any kind of journaling is this authenticity—being able to be honest and unfiltered with ourselves—and it becomes even more important in spiritual journaling, where opening fully is often the recipe for growth and discovery. Be willing to write uninhibitedly about the painful and bewildering energies you encounter on your spiritual journal.

4. Spiritual Journaling Advice: Consider Parts Work

Speaking of energies, one of the most effective ways I’ve learned to process life occurrences for spiritual growth is known as Internal Family Systems (IFS), informally called “parts work.” I urge you to read No Bad Parts, the primary reference to the IFS approach. It will be time well spent.

“Parts work” sees a human being not as a unitary entity, but as having many “parts”—personality structures, each with its own goals and perspectives.

The core message of IFS is that a human being is not “single”—a unitary, totally coherent entity doing its singular thing, like a billiard ball rolling into a pocket. Instead, we each have many “parts”: different personality structures, each with its own goals and perspectives.

If you think about it, this explains a lot. Why am I so nice most of the time, but my spouse says I have a mean streak? Am I a single unit that is “nice-most-of-the-time-but-also-with-a-mean-streak”? Actually, the mean streak is its own structure, its own thing. It recedes into the background much of the time, and under certain conditions it asserts itself.

Parts work has given my spiritual journaling a lot of specificity and healing power.

I bring all this up because parts work has given my spiritual journaling a great deal of specificity and healing power it didn’t previously have. (I personally don’t call them “parts,” I call them “energies,” and I’m also not bought into IFS’s assertion that all parts are in relation to a central capital-S Self.)

When I feel an energy arising—for example, if I’ve just acted out the mean streak I mentioned—I ask the following questions in sequence:

1. “May I speak with the energy that [feels however it is I’m feeling]?” (From there on, I address the energy as “you” and let it respond as “me”)
2. Sensation: Where can I feel you in the body?
3. Emotion: What feelings and emotions do you carry?
4. Impulse: How do you want to move the body?
5. Thought: What thoughts (words, memories, images…) do you carry?
6. Is there a name I should address you by? (To find this name, I let the energy say “I’m…” and then keep everything but the “I’m”)
7. What do you feel could be good or fruitful to discuss?
8. What do you feel you need, or what do you feel is needed?
9. Is there someone or something you protect? (This would be another energy)
10. If you weren’t in your current role, what do you feel would likely happen?
11. If you weren’t in your current role, what do you feel you’d enjoy?

In my experience, the psychological growth this process brings is also (or is identical with) spiritual growth: knowing my own energies better unlocks my power as a spiritual practitioner. More generally, whatever’s going on with me, psychologically and spiritually, is much clearer when I can give voice to and begin to connect with and integrate my individual energies.

If you’re interested in implementing parts work in your spiritual journaling, I strongly recommend you read No Bad Parts first, and I also recommend you get an IFS-trained therapist.

Doing parts work has opened energies in me that were very painful coming out of hiding.

Doing parts work has opened energies in me that were very painful coming out of hiding. I’ve had entire days where I couldn’t really get out of bed or talk to anyone. But then, after those days, my life is permanently better, like a shard of glass has been picked out of my foot.

So if you’re interested, please use caution, and please equip yourself with knowledge and with access to experts; and I hope you’ll find parts work as transformative as I have for your spiritual journaling, your spirituality, and your life.

5. Spiritual Journaling Advice: Don’t Forget to Practice Spirituality Itself

Like family, spirituality isn’t something we just learn about, think about, ponder, or discuss—it’s something we enact.

Spirituality is not just something we ponder or discuss, but something we enact.

Spirituality comes alive when we practice it through meditation, prayer, group worship, body work such as yoga or qi gong, sacred sex, visiting sacred places, absorbing spiritual teachings and so on.

So let’s give our spiritual journaling the nourishment it needs, by participating heavily in appropriate spiritual practice. Conversely, our journal can be a major asset as we find what spiritual paths and practices resonate with us.

Spiritual Journaling Prompts: 46 Prompts to Inspire Your Writing

I personally don’t usually journal from prompts. Instead, I write about whatever I’m going through, day-to-day. However, prompts can be a wonderful way to guide our focus and reflection in our spiritual journaling. Here are 46 spiritual journaling prompts as ways into your own spiritual life:

1. Sources of Support

1. What gives you hope?
2. What gives you strength?
3. What gives you courage?
4. What gives you joy?
5. What brings you happiness?
6. For what are you most grateful?
7. Whose spiritual practice do you most admire?
8. From what sources of wisdom do you draw guidance?

2. Meanings

9. What, to you, is kindness?
10. What, to you, is compassion?
11. What, to you, is goodness?
12. What, to you, is community?
13. What, to you, is connection?
14. What, to you, is life?
15. What, to you, is death?
16. What, to you, is love?
17. What, to you, is grace?
18. What, to you, is generosity?
19. What, to you, is faith?
20. What, to you, is magic?
21. What, to you, is sacredness?
22. What, to you, is power?
23. What, to you, is glory?
24. What, to you, is devotion?
25. What, to you, are blessings?
26. What, to you, is salvation or liberation?
27. What, to you, is transcendence?
28. What, to you, is divinity?

3. The Spiritual Journey

29. What spiritual path or journey are you presently on?
30. What is the biggest obstacle on your spiritual path at present?
31. What help do you most wish for in your spiritual life?
32. Where do you most hope your spiritual path will lead?
33. What is your highest spiritual aspiration or goal?

4. Working with Challenges

34. How do you work with pain?
35. How do you work with suffering?
36. How do you work with confusion?
37. How do you work with fear?
38. How do you work with anger?
39. How do you work with guilt?
40. How do you work with loneliness?
41. How do you work with self-aggression, such as self-criticism and self-blame?

5. General questions

42. What is a part of yourself that nothing can ever change?
43. What is the most spiritually powerful experience you’ve ever had?
44. Can you name some of the primary gifts you’ve been given?
45. What gift do you most wish to offer the world?
46. What is someone or something that you will always love, no matter what?

Spiritual Journaling: Enjoy!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this introduction to spiritual journaling. How do you approach journaling on your spiritual life? Do you have any questions about keeping a spiritual journal I can help answer? I’d love to hear your comments below, and good luck!