Visual Journaling

I like to doodle. Especially, I like doing mandala exercises, which basically involves drawing a circle and then doodling inside that circle. 🙂

I’ve been doing this for a couple of years after reading The Empath’s Journey by Ritu Kaushal. I had the pleasure of doing a beta read for her book and was fascinated by the section on mandalas and color.

The basic idea explored in that section was that drawing what is going on inside of us is sometimes a better way to process emotions and energy than verbalizing what is going on inside of us. When we have many emotions rumbling beneath the surface and we express those things through color and art, that energy gets expressed and moves on. We can feel lighter, brighter and more peaceful by intuitively choosing colors and shapes that simply want to come out of us. It’s a great exercise.

At the time I started doing this, I had lots of emotions that could sometimes feel stuck within me. Like they were all in one great big jumble. Doodling inside circles helped me process this energy.

Late in 2020 I had also begun to consider a challenge for myself–namely doing a 365-day challenge–where I committed to doing something everyday. I thought about a few different things, but mandala drawing won out.

So, for 2021 I will be keeping a visual journal everyday, where I will draw a circle and then fill it in with the colors and shapes that want to come out of me. I got started on December 31st.

“Visual journal” was a phrase that just came to me around what I wanted to do, and I also took a look around the internet to see if this was a thing. Not surprising, turns out it is.

One article described visual journaling as “a thinking space for those that don’t always think in words.” I loved this and I also thought it described something about INFPs well.

INFPs take in a lot of information from the outside world through our intuition. We also feel things deeply. When you combine these two things you get a lot going on inside one person! I wondered if I was attracted to drawing mandalas and visual journaling as a way to process all this inner stuff.

I think there is a lot to be said for non-verbal ways of expressing ourselves (and this is coming from me, a writer!). There is something about the way that energy moves when it’s not being expressed in words but through our bodies.

So, that’s one of the things that I will be up to this year–keeping my visual journal. I’m interested to see how it moves my energy on a regular basis and, also, what patterns may come up in my doodles.

I’m posting all my mandala doodles on Instagram, so if you are interested you can follow me there!

And one more thing to note–I’m doing these on my chalkboard wall in my home office, so that adds another tactile element to this exercise. There is just something about writing on the walls…

Amanda Linehan is the author of Productivity For INFPs. She is a multi-genre fiction writer, indie author and INFP, who has published five novels and has been read in 113 countries. Amanda was a speaker at the INF Summit in February 2020. Get the Productivity For INFPs Mini-Course when you sign up to her For INFPs newsletter.