Why Does Writing It Down Help So Much?
You've had the experience. Something has been circling in your head for days, large and shapeless and impossible to put down. Then you write it out, badly, on the back of an envelope, and it turns out to be three sentences long.
Nothing was solved. The thing is still there. But it's the size of three sentences now, and you can carry that.
Yesterday I said lasting change needs three jobs, and that the first one, clean up, starts with looking at what's in the storeroom. Today is about the oldest tool for the looking.
In a volunteer's room in a hill town in Kerala, I once opened my journal and couldn't remember the last time I'd written two days in a row. Maybe the previous February, when I got a job. After that it took a whole year to come back.
What got me was that every self-development programme I'd ever touched puts journalling near the top. I had nodded along each time and ignored it, and somehow kept my life going without it. Just about.
That day I wrote one line I still think about: what do we do with this knowledge when we can't act on it ourselves? I had no answer. But I was sitting there writing, and that was day two.
Writing shows you all your other habits, and it restarts with one extra day.
Self-study
Patanjali lists three practices as the working method of yoga, the kriya yoga: discipline, self-study and surrender (2.1). The middle one is svadhyaya. It usually gets translated as study of the scriptures, and it does mean that. But the word itself is sva, self, and adhyaya, study. Reading yourself.
He lists it again among the five observances (2.32). Swami Vishnudevananda's note on it in Meditation and Mantras is practical: study keeps the mind flowing in the desired direction.
I think writing is the plainest form of self-study there is. You can't read your own mind directly. It moves too fast and it lies. But you can read a page, and a page holds still.
The diary Sivananda insisted on
Swami Sivananda required it. In Practical Lessons in Yoga he gives a spiritual diary of 27 questions to answer every night, and in his Autobiography he writes to a student: do not neglect to maintain the spiritual diary. That is your guru (teacher) by your side.
The questions are concrete to the point of being uncomfortable. When did you get up? How many hours did you sleep? How many times were you angry, and for how long? How many hours did you spend in useless company? What evil quality are you trying to get rid of? Which sense is troubling you most?
He explains why it works in one sentence. The diary helps you to rectify your mistakes then and there. And another: you should compare this week with last week, and adjust.
That's the mechanism. The mind runs in grooves and tells you stories. The page records what actually happened, and once a week you read it back and the stories fall apart. He calls the diary a whip to goad you on, which sounds harsh, until you remember that the alternative is five more years of the same groove.
He also adds a rule I'd underline: you should not utter any falsehood in recording your daily actions. A diary you lie to is just another story.
Why paper beats the head
Here's what I think happens, in the terms we've been using all week.
In your head, a worry is a vritti, a wave. It rises, takes the shape of the problem, and you become it. The witness is gone. On paper, the worry is an object. You're looking at it. The witness is back, without any effort, because writing puts you on the other side of the thing by its nature.
Sivananda says the mind has a reflexive power to look into its own depths, and that introspection develops it. Writing is introspection with a record. You get the looking, and you get to look again next week.
There's also the storeroom. The chitta (the mind-stuff) holds impressions, and the ones you've never looked at run you from the back. Writing them down moves them from the back of the storeroom to the front, where you can see what you're dealing with. That's clean-up work. It's what I meant yesterday by looking at the room before you tidy it.
Someone who writes back
The diary has one weakness, and Sivananda's own life shows the fix.
A diary only answers with what you put in. When the groove is deep enough, you'll write the same three sentences every night and never notice. What breaks that is another person reading your page and asking one question you hadn't thought of.
Sivananda ran his ashram partly by post. His Autobiography is full of letters to students: send me a report of how you spend all 24 hours of the day. Change your nature and habit gradually. Write the mantra (the short phrase you repeat in meditation) at the top of your letters. He read their accounts and wrote back, and the writing back was the teaching.
This is why I started Explorative Letters. It's a diary with someone on the other end. You write about what's circling, a writer reads it with care, and writes back within two days with questions and a thought or two. Then you write again. Nobody tries to fix anything. The letters keep moving the thing from the back of the storeroom to the front, until it's the size of three sentences.
I run it myself, with two other writers. I'm telling you that plainly because I'd rather you know it than discover it later. You'll find it at the link at the end.
What to do with this
Tonight, not tomorrow.
Take six of Sivananda's questions. When did you get up? How long did you sleep? How many times were you angry, and how long did it last? How long on your phone with no purpose? What one habit are you trying to change? What one thing did you do today for somebody else? Write the answers in a notebook, by hand if you can.
Add one line of weather. Which of the three moods ran the day: clear, restless or heavy. One word.
Add the thing that's circling. Whatever's been in your head. Write it until it stops, however long or badly. Don't fix it.
Read it back on Sunday. Sivananda says once a week. Compare it with the week before. Notice what repeats. The repeating line is the groove, and now you can see it.
If after two weeks you find you're writing the same page every night, that's the moment for someone who writes back.
Another way to look at it
Sivananda called the diary a guru by your side. I used to think a guru had to be a person. A page you tell the truth to, and read back weekly, does a surprising amount of the job. And when the page isn't enough, there are people who've been doing this by letter for a very long time.
Tomorrow, the last of this set: why meditation doesn't work for you, and the ladder you were never shown.
Where to read more
The Sivananda-tradition books behind today's piece:
Practical Lessons in Yoga, Swami Sivananda (the spiritual diary, with all 27 questions)
Autobiography of Swami Sivananda (his letters to students)
Meditation and Mantras, Swami Vishnudevananda (on kriya yoga and svadhyaya)
Yoga Sutras, 2.1 and 2.32
If this helped, subscribe to Yogic Productivity on Substack for one short piece a day this month. And if you'd like someone who writes back, that is exactly what an Explorative Letter is.
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