Andrea Schroeder, May 2021


Susannah, thank you so much for inviting me here to Journal Love Club. I love this — I love
journaling clubs and communities and classes and just new tools and new ways of journaling — so
I love this.

Hello to everyone here. So happy to be here. My name is Andrea and I'm from The Creative Dream
Incubator. I teach journaling and meditation to creative people who are ready for a breakthrough.
So I do believe that your journal is one of the best tools for breakthroughs, for making changes, for
doing the inner healing and growth work, and then for doing the outer planning and visioning and
the To Dos and the — you know, step-by-step of making things happen. I think the journal is just
hands down the best place for all of that.

You can see behind me here — like that's not all my journals at all, but that's the latest bunch of
them — I love journaling. Right now, filming this a year into the pandemic, I miss coffee shop
journaling. I miss it so much. I used to get up really early and be in a coffee shop between 6:30am
and 7:30am before there's a lot of people around, where I could always get the table that I loved.
Depending on where I was, it's a different table, but it's usually along a bar by a window so I can
look out the window and watch the sunrise — except in the summer here, because we have very
long days — I live in Winnipeg, Canada, and the sun rises very early in the summer. But in the
winter I can watch the sunrise and, either way, I can get that nice private spot before there's a lot of
people in the coffee shop, and put on my noise canceling headphones.

Something about that just really worked for me. Having that space away from home, but feeling
kind of private — I would sit in such a way that no one could see what I was writing. Something
about doing that journaling out in the world just really felt good to me. So that's something that I
have been missing so much for this last year and I really look forward to getting that back. For me
it's not quite the same to journal at home — somehow there's a lot of distractions — and for me
one of the big things about journaling is, or one of the things that my journal, or not my journal —
it's my inner self — is always asking me to do in my journal is go deeper, be braver.
That's kind of a common thing for me with my dreams, with my life — how can I go deeper and
how can I be braver? Because it's just human nature to try to avoid the things that we like to avoid,
and your journal — talking about your journal as a tool for a breakthrough — well, it works better
when you're not avoiding those things of course, right? So when I'm at home, if I'm journaling and I
hit upon something hard, it's very easy to be like, oh, I'm just going to put this down and go do
something else — like maybe the dishes need to be washed, right? But if I'm out, if I went
somewhere just to journal for an hour before I start work — then I stay with it. So that was a thing
that really worked for me in coffee shop journaling.

I think it's great to explore different places to journal in and find what's the right place for you,
what's the right atmosphere. I know a lot of my students over the years have said to me, “That's
crazy, I would never want to do journaling or anything this vulnerable in a coffee shop, that's nuts!”
Yes, we all have to find our own way, right? But I think it can be helpful to try different things, try
different ways, different locations — even just different spots in your home, and notice does that
change how it feels for you?

I was going to show you my little journal-to-go kit. I guess I'm just really missing it. So I have this
zipper bag and I would always keep this with me. I like to use these little journals so it actually fits
in the bag, so I can just grab this one thing and know that I have everything. In the bag I keep —
you're not going to see that well — but I love paint pens, lots of different colours of paint pens so I
can get colour on the page. My favourite journaling pens are Le Pens. The brand is Le Pen, and
they're like a really thin felt and so they are so smooth and light. I just love it. So I have these in
tons of different colours and then I have scissors and a glue stick, because I do like to cut and
paste, and I'll show you some of those too.

Then I have all my little self-care things — I have some hand cream and tinted lip balms,
sometimes I have little perfumes. I have allergy pills in case I have an allergic reaction — just sort
of like this big self care thing. And because it has all these things that make me feel good, it just
makes me feel good to have it, you know? I’ve got to say, I highly recommend making a little
journaling kit for yourself, even if you don't want to journal outside of the home, but just to have
everything together there. Just as a way of creating that space for yourself — that this is my self
care time — I have my self care tools. I used to keep a lot more aroma therapy in there too.

[I’m going to drink a lot of water while I do this because a year into the pandemic, I don't talk for
very long, so I'm noticing how I have to keep drinking water.]

I just think making your journaling time special and bringing in all the things that help you feel good
— a special drink, special snacks, whatever — to give yourself that space and that treat. To me
that also can help make it feel a little bit like a sacred space — stepping outside of your regular life.
So that's one of the big things that helps create breakthroughs, it helps us in our healing and
growth, and making changes in our lives — is to be able to look at ourselves from a different
perspective. That's the idea of creating sacred space for your journal, because in our day-to-day
minds, day-to-day mindset — in terms of how we're doing all of our things — if we remain in that
same mindset or way of thinking while we're doing our journaling, our journaling can still be very
helpful for our wellbeing and our creativity, but it can't help us make big changes in our lives if
we're doing it from that day-to-day mindset. We do need to kind of shift into a larger perspective.

So I'm going to back up a little bit to explain that what I mean by that... To me, dreams are
everything — you see, it says dream back there — my business is The Creative Dream Incubator. I
believe in our dreams in a really profound and meaningful way. When I talk about a dream I mean
anything — if it's I wish I had something great to wear this weekend, or if it's planning a holiday, or
if it's starting your own business, writing a book, finding a partner, eating better — whatever. It
doesn't matter if it's big or small to you, or if it feels meaningful or silly. If you have that desire for it,
if you truly want it, then it's important. I believe that those dreams are actually our soul calling us
towards our truth — helping us be more who we really are and how we live our lives, right?

There's a million ways that the world makes that hard. Starting the moment we are born, and it's
normal to kind of conform and do what's expected of you, and there's a lot of different reasons why
we do that. So the act of listening to your dream, journaling about your dream, giving it space — I
mean, the journal as a way of making space for your dream — I could talk on that forever.

When dreams come in and they feel impossible, the journal is one of the best ways to actually start
to make space for the dream in your life before you can do that in kind of bigger ways, right? It's a
way of holding space for the thing. But as I was saying, your dream, whatever it is that you're
wanting, is a way of your soul calling you towards your truth.

That process is going to include your dream pushing you to grow. Your dream will push you to face
the things that you least want to face almost every time. Probably not almost — every time. And it
will push you to grow in ways that may surprise you. Because what I was talking about originally is
that we journal from the mindset that we live our day-to-day lives in, but what I always focus on is
journaling from the mindset of my dream or the mindset of who I am once I have my dream. That
version of me is always more trusting of herself, more sure of herself — it feels more creative and
brave — usually somehow magically taller too [laughs]. There's all these things that I find out as I
connect with with this part of me.

So if I try to journal from that part of me, then my journaling becomes kind of a light — like it can
help light that path. You know there's that saying how you do anything is how you do everything,
and that's what it really comes down to for me. So like, when I was just journaling — I did morning
pages for many years, I’ve journaled as long as I can remember — I don't remember who told me
to start, how I learned, but I remember doing it as a child and loving it, loving that process of just
having the book for myself and being able to write whatever I want and take things out of my head
and put them on the page. All of that — so, so helpful.

But the journal didn't help me make changes until I was able to start journaling from that larger
perspective — to journal from my dream instead of to my dream in a sense. I also remember being
in my early twenties and having a job where they had promised me it would be one thing and then
it was actually something else, and then just feeling so frustrated and stuck and writing. I was
doing morning pages and just writing every day about how stuck I was, and so with everything I
know now about growth and healing and creating change in our lives, of course I wouldn't have
stayed in that situation so long, but the act of writing every day from my daily perspective did of
course eventually push me to say, I can't bitch about this anymore, I need to make a change here.

So there are ways where, if you just want to journal from your regular mindset, that of course is
going to help you to see yourself more clearly. But if we can work to journal from a larger mindset,
then you actually help to light the path a lot more quickly and with a lot more ease.

One of my favourite journaling processes, I call it my dream self — of course it starts with you. You
can meditate on it and visualise and really let your imagination go free. You don't have to meditate
— you can do whatever you like — but just imagine who you'll be once you have the thing you
currently want. You’ve got to really trust your imagination and everything that comes. Collage is a
fun way to do this, you can look and find photos that express that feeling. Or you can do drawings.
I call them my three-year-old drawings — it looks like a three-year-old did it — it's just kind of this
blobby stick figure time travelling me when I have my dream, and then I do lots of writing.

So it'd be like — well, she wears different clothes than me — like you see this dress I'm wearing,
which I love. I wear things with lots of patterns and kind of clashing colours. Well this version of me
wears fabrics that are really silky and flowy. And right now the dream self I'm working with wears
really long flowy dresses! But I ride my bike everywhere, so I'm not sure… I was thinking of just
getting some long flowy dresses — and I have a few and they're great — but since I ride my bike
everywhere, that feels a little challenging to me. But just you know, writing about these long flowy
dresses that this part of me likes to wear...

How does this part of you look like? What does she do when she wakes up in the morning, and
where does she live, and what does she wear, and what kind of perfume does she like? All these
little details about her morning or what are the big details — like how would she handle this
situation that you have at work? Or how would she do this? How would she do that?

So using the journal — what I do is create this whole page with as many details as I can find about
this person — again just trust your imagination. This is a longer discussion, but I believe our
imagination and our intuition are extremely connected, that our creativity and our spirituality are
two parts of the same thing — or two sides of the same thing. So if you just get into your
imagination about it, like a character development kind of thing, and right, this is who it is, that will
really help.

I like to always have a page for every dream I'm working on, have a page with here's who I'm
becoming with this dream. Get to know that person and then you play around with journaling from
that person's perspective, or do that back and forth thing where you write a question and then you
ask your dream self, and imagine your dream self answering and write that up. So you could use
like a different colour pen for your questions and for their response, or do it as a conversation, or
write a love letter from your dream self to your present day self, or write a love letter from your
present day self to your dream self.

So this kind of stuff can feel very silly, right? You're just making it all up. You're playing with your
imagination, but I've been teaching this for years and it works. I can promise you that it shifts your
inner landscape. You're making more space for who you're becoming. You're getting to know your
own growth in a more intimate way. Like this is the kind of stuff where I think journals have so
much power. So this is where your journal can really generate breakthroughs in that you have the
right shift in perspective, the right energy, the right idea — right when you need it, in a way that it's
easily implemented.

I feel like right now as human beings we have more access to breakthrough type experiences than
we ever have, right? Like with therapy or life coaching, or those workshops, masterminds — there
are so many different ways, right? If you need a breakthrough, you can get one — someone will
help you to do that. And retreats, that's a big one, right? You can go away, step away from your life
and you have this big total shift in perspective. And those big breakthrough events can obviously
make huge changes for us. But how you integrate that breakthrough, how you use it to create your
new life — that comes down to how you're showing up every day — that's your journaling. To me
that's where the real work happens of integrating insights and taking the tiny little steps each day,
the teeny tiny little things that you do each day, and the way that those tiny things add up to create
some kind of change. This is the work that happens in your daily life.

For me, having that journal as a daily practice, that's the magic. Like keep showing up and make
space for yourself in your journal, find ways to make space for your growth in your journal, right?
Make space for your healing. Let it be messy. Let yourself be in the process.

I think I've said this right at the beginning. If I didn't, I meant to, that's what I love so much about
journaling — that it holds space for you. That it's this thing that's only yours and you get to put your
stories in it. You get to put your “stucks” in it. But also you get to take all of that — I call it creative
dream alchemy — you get to take all of that stuff, Whatever is going on, and use that as the raw
material to create what you want to have. So that's why I call it creative dream alchemy. It's like
using what you have to move you closer to your dream and I think the only way to really get there
is to be present where you are.

It's like if you want to drive somewhere and you're looking at a map, you need that map to start
where your feet are on the ground right now and often we're just looking way ahead and we're not
present with where we are; and that's why we can't get there. By being really present with where
you are which your journal helps you so much with, it helps you be present with the healing and
growth that needs to happen to be able to get there. So that's a gift that my journal continues to
give me. As I said, my dreams keep pushing me to go deeper and be braver. That's been the
theme for at least the last six years, and it feels like a recurring thing.

This is what our dreams always want for us. We want to go deeper into our own inner process,
being more present in our own inner worlds, being present with what's really up for us, and then
being braver about how we're facing that. And then also how we're taking what we learn through
this self-reflection process and applying it in our lives.

So I just realised I was going to show you my journal as well, and I'm like running out of time, but
I'm going to show you. I opened it up to this one space. So this is what I'm going to show you.
Here's what my journal looks like. I teach a journaling class where I send out these cutouts every
week. So like there's a mantra there, that's a cutout and I use those because they really help me
not start with a blank page. I know Susannah is doing stickers and I think that’s amazing. So I have
the little cutout there and they're painted a bit.

With this one I was really, really stuck and I was looking at the things that overwhelmed me and I
was like, I'm in a cycle of overwhelm — and so it's like I’m drawing it out. Actually I used this to kind
of come up with a plan and then I realised, so that's why I wrote this. I love this note to self: I can
do everything I want to do. There is time and space for it. So obviously the opposite of how I was
feeling when I was working on this page but, by taking that overwhelm, drawing it, writing about it,
being with it while also listening to my intuition, making space for my own inner healing process —
I was able to come to that place of like, yes, I can do it all.

Everything I want to do, right? Sometimes when we're really overwhelmed because we're taking on
too many things that aren't ours to take on — which is another topic — but just the way that this
one page showed me a way. Actually I remember this because I'm still doing this. It changed how I
approach marketing in my business and it did give me a lot more time and space to be present with
the things I really want to do. So, yes, bring your problems into your journals, draw them out,
sketch them, invite your intuition to help you, invite your dream self, invite your inner wisdom and
courage. Be present, being more present with all parts of you just helps you connect with the fact
that you are insanely powerful and you can — you know we all have huge obstacles, but your
power is even bigger. Keep journaling because that's really the way to access it.
Thank you for listening, it’s been really great to be here with you.