Happy New Year!! Group ideas.

Many people like to set New Year's resolutions to write more in their journals. Although we do not encourage guilt-based journaling here on Giant Journaling, we DO think journaling is a great way to send out the old, bring in the new, set goals, and achieve them. Hopefully you gave everyone you know a journal and they're excited to start a group with you!

In lieu of an assignment this month, I'd like to give a few ideas for starting your own groups. Journaling in a group is a great way to get new ideas, talk out your issues, and share supplies! Even if there are only two journalers in your group, it really helps to have someone to help you brainstorm ideas. My own group started when a few of us just loved getting together to work on the pages we were doing on our own. We usually saw someone else's page and that would spark an idea. Other times we'd find a poem structure we could use, and we'd each do a page of haikus or other poems. Sometimes we spent the entire group just tearing out potentially useful images from a stack of magazines.

As our journal group became larger and more structured, we chose a specific day of the month (the last Tuesday) and met at a different house each month. As the group facilitator, I create assignment sheets to give the group ideas, but of course, none are required. I usually get these ideas from other members of the group. We usually start with some music (picked by the hostess) and have about 5-10 minutes of a "color warmup" where we just do whatever the music or our feelings prompt us to do. Color warmups are really great to help you get your creativity going, and to get you out of the must-have-perfect-pages mode. Sometimes we write on our color warmups and analyze what we drew. Sometimes they are just fun to look at, or serve some other emotional purpose. But this is a good way to give the group time to warm up, share pages, talk, and generate ideas for their current page.

I post the assignments I create for my own group each month on this website, and if you would like to start your own group, feel free to use these ideas for your own groups. There are also 50 great starter ideas in the Giant Journaling booklet. Every so often I look through this list again, and it always gives me new ideas. It's also a good idea to start a page in your journal to write ideas as they come to you or your group.

I hope 2007 is a great journaling year for you, and that it helps fulfill emotional and spiritual needs throughout the year.

ONE QUICK IDEA: Word collages are a great way to do a year in review. Write "2006" big in the middle of your page and write in all colors, shapes, and sizes all the things you can remember about this year--important events, movies, accomplishments, books, etc. Opposite this page you can write your hopes, plans, or resolutions for 2007!