Jen Sonstein Maidenberg

I’ve realized that some of us are natural journalers and some of us are not. You can tell pretty easily if you are a natural journaler: You kept a diary in fifth grade, even if it only had five short entries in it. You’ve gone through a period of life where you’ve tracked thoughts, reflections, or activities in some kind of notebook, even if you later abandoned it. (ie. travel journal, dream journal, pregnancy journal.) You might even be a natural journaler if instead of writing your thoughts and feelings down privately, you have written a blog at some point or published a vlog documenting your life for others, or you’ve considered writing a memoir about your life. 

For you, natural journaler, what I am about to suggest might come a little easier than for the one who is not a natural journaler, not prone to reflecting about life on the page, not comfortable with public confessionals. Hopefully, even those of you who don’t feel drawn to journaling and may never open to it, will discover unexpected ways in which you’ve accidentally documented yourself and therefore can meet up with yourselves across time in a felt way, which I believe is one of the most accessible tools for self-healing possible, even though it’s mostly hidden to us.

I’ve written about the practice of mental time travel for healing in various places (see We Invented Time Travel and We Don’t Even Know It ) and spoken about it on my Patreon and a few podcasts, but to name it plainly again: I propose we can engage with ourselves across time in a way that may be deeply felt by both versions of ourselves, via dreams, yes, and also in altered states of consciousness. I discovered a reasonably simple way to put this into active practice by what I am calling Long Journaling.

Long Journaling is basically keeping some kind of journal — it does not have to be a traditional written diary — with the idea that the journal will be read by a future version of yourself. You may decide to keep a future version of yourself in mind as a reader when you write, even. But it’s not necessary. You can just be you when writing in your journal. The more important practice and commitment comes next.

You need to decide at some point to go back to an old journal of yours and read it. Your intention when doing so is to deeply reconnect with that past version of yourself through the senses and feeling.

Ideally, you won’t do what I did at the start: cringe at your immature behavior, feel shame about the person you used to be, criticize him or her for the harm he or she caused or the foolishness of her heart. But if you do that, don’t judge your present self too harshly, either. Learning how to love our past selves can take time and work. At the start, go slowly, and choose a past self you feel a little less judgmental about. Then, open her journal. 

Once you find yourself open-hearted and compassionate enough to love one of your past selves enough to want to help her, guide her, or send her comfort or strength, you can dip back into a journal and send her whatever you wish you received at that time in your life. Perhaps it was advice from an older, wiser mentor. Maybe it was empathy for what you were going through. Maybe all you needed was someone to tell you that no matter what happened and in spite of the pain of the moment, in the end, you’d be alright.

There are a few practical ways to meaningfully meet up with your past self across space and time. Which way you choose will depend on which way feels most authentic to you. You’ll need to stretch a little to do this practice, but it shouldn’t feel so unaligned with who you are that you can’t get out of your own head while you’re doing it. 

Note: All of this requires a momentary suspension of belief in linear time as the only way we experience time, and a willingness to relax into a state in which you are open to sending or receiving images and feelings to or from yourself.

If you are someone who even slightly believes in telepathy, reincarnation, or ghosts, you should be able to expand that belief to include communicating with yourself across time. Think about it: if there is anyone who knows how to reach you outside of space and time, it’s probably You.

Back to the practical: You have your old journal to read in front of you. Start reading. At some point, you’ll find yourself in a section that touches you. You remember what it was like to go through that period. You feel some tug on your heart. It might be painful. It might be tender. It might be a whole mix of emotions. 

In my own recent journals, I have started to keep a table of contents with a “heads up” that inside there is a “note to Future Self.” You can do this, too. You can alert your Future Self that you need her attention. In this way we begin to develop an even closer relationship with ourselves across time: we start to believe that she will be there to support us when needed.

However, when I decide to visit with my self of a long ago time, before I wrote to “Future Self,” I often strangely know exactly “when” to look. You might, too, if you stay open and trust yourself. 

At the beginning of taking on the practice of meeting your past self, you may find yourself bracing or feeling anxious as you remember what it was like to be that person, in that time. Take care of yourself. Don’t re-enter into the really tough stuff first. Try something easier at the beginning, something you feel really whole and complete about now.

Maybe you choose to meet up with a high school You who didn’t know if he should choose to study religion or psychology. Maybe you drop into a journal during a time of life in which you made some mistakes that you thought would be world-ending, but turned out to be alright, or even good for you. 

When I find a Me in an old journal I feel open-hearted and compassionate toward, I will usually put headphones in and listen to some music that relaxes me or opens my heart even more. Some of you may find breathwork or meditation is more effective at this than listening to music. If you’re good at visualization, you may try imagining that version of yourself in your mind’s eye. (I’m not good at visualization, but sometimes I’ll look at an old photo of myself.) You can also hum a song that your past self used to like back then. The most important thing is to feel open to him or her, to miss him or her, even. Ideally, you might feel tender toward him or her, as if they were your own child, your own best friend, your own favorite student, your own mentee.

Then, in whatever way feels right to you, send that version of You love, guidance, and support.

How?

You’ll know the best way, but here are some options:

Maybe you imagine an image you know will make him laugh. Perhaps you say a prayer for her and then hold an image of a healthy, strong Her in your mind and heart. Sometimes just crying along with him or her is all that’s required in the moment. Maybe all she needed was to feel less alone in her grief. Imagine being by the side of her bed while she is curled up in a ball weeping. Imagine stroking her hair or her arm as she sits in your lap. Imagine sitting across from him while he receives the awful news and say “I’m here.” Again, if imagining visually is difficult for you, you can use other senses. Sing to her out loud. Talk to him in a gentle, loving voice. Sway back and forth in a way that relaxes your muscles and bones and hold in your heart the belief it will relax his, too.

That’s the practice. You can do it as often or as infrequent as you like. I go through phases. It’s not so easy to keep up with such a dedicated practice as meeting ourselves across time. Indeed, our lives are busy, inundated with requests and demands from everyone else. As hard as it is to make time and space for ourselves or our friends in the present, it can be even harder to commit to sitting with a past self, especially if doing so might make us sad or frightened. 

Another thing to notice every now and again is whether it feels like — sometimes — you are receiving love, guidance, or support from a Future You. Perhaps, the dream you had last night is a receiving of her message. Perhaps the chill on your neck was the stroking fingers of a Future You. Maybe the light bulb that just went out in the kitchen as you were crying is the crying Future You trying to let you know you’re not alone. 

These are some of the ways I have felt the presence of my Future Self, both before I was aware of this practice and since.

There are times in our lives when our heart is so broken open or our bodies are so in need of support or we are so confused and desperate that our certainty about what we know dissolves. In these moments, we sometimes feel a presence, we sometimes receive a sign.

These moments, I am suggesting, may be you on the receiving end of the love of your Future Self.

* * *

There is another benefit to Long Journaling, which I will touch upon only briefly now, but return to more at length in a future article. 

When we track our life, our choices, our changes, and our feelings across time, in a way that enables us to go back and examine them, we find that we notice patterns between then and now. More incredibly, we find that those patterns of behavior or change align with cycles of time: whether those repetitions seem to align with calendrical time (ie. every October), astrological transits (ie. every time Saturn transits Aries), seasonal time (ie. in the Spring), or other ways we measure time (ie. every 4 years, every 10th Passover, every time I’m pregnant, every time I change jobs). When you identify patterns between then and now, it can be pretty reality-shifting and frankly a bit unsettling! How does that happen? You might wonder. How did I not notice that until now?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but I have spent enough time “tracking time” to know that patterns exist, and knowing these patterns can serve us.

Once you recognize a pattern, you can choose to repeat it or not. You can choose an alternative way. You can be the character in the time travel book or movie who gets to go back and choose a different path than the one chosen last time. You get to experiment. You get to try again. You get to learn that it takes many tries before getting it right. Sometimes you learn you will never get it right, or that getting it wrong was actually getting it right.

Since we live in such a digital age, there are many traces of us in many places. If you haven’t kept a journal until now, it might be a little more challenging to find those traces of Past You, but they exist: in old work emails, in photos on your phone, in texts, in social media posts. I’ve used old emails to track down past versions of myself to see if, for instance, there is a pattern between something as specific as being offered a job then and being offered a job now. In many cases, especially when it relates to work, romance, moving, buying a home, or starting or finishing a major project, I’ve found reliable matches in the astrology of “then” and “now.” I’ve even been able to do this practice using OTHER people’s daily planners from the past. Seriously! You didn’t have email back in 1994?  Maybe your mom has an old daily planner in a trunk in the basement. It may have stuff written about you in it.

I offer all this to you as a method for self-healing. It’s not meant to be something to obsess over or be rigid about. (Though there is definitely a risk of that, so be careful!)

This method of learning how to love myself across time came to me gently and surprisingly so, when no other method of loving myself was working. I certainly liked the idea of loving myself, but couldn’t find a self-help practice that enabled me to authentically get into that state of mind or heart.

This method arrived spontaneously and over time. I believe it came to me in a way it knew I would open to: via dreams, psychic phenomena, music, memory, time. It came to me by way of melodies and lyrics and playlists. It came to me through old love letters. It came to me via videos — of my children on my phone, or of my past self at my brother’s bar mitzvah. It came to me via spirit medicine cards. It came to me through my very open heart that has always known how to love others with abandon, but not myself in the same way. 

It came to me in a very Jen-friendly way, I suppose. And I hope that it’s You-friendly, too, in whatever version of it feels right to you.