Soulmaking Journal Prompts: 25 Questions That Go Deep

A prompt is a chisel. The right one, held against the right material, splits it clean. These twenty-five are organized by what they work on, with a note on how to use each set. They are built for soul writing: fifteen minutes, one page, by hand if possible, precision over eloquence.

If soul writing is new to you, the beginner's guide to soulmaking practices sets up the container these prompts belong in.

How to use them

One prompt per sitting. Read it, sit for one minute before writing, then write without stopping for fifteen. Don't pick the prompt that looks interesting; pick the one you'd rather skip. The flinch is the address of the live material.

Contact: what is actually happening

1. What am I feeling right now, in the body, in three sentences that contain no interpretation?
2. What have I been too busy to feel this week?
3. Where in my body does this week live? Describe the sensation as if to a doctor.
4. What am I pretending not to know?
5. If my exhaustion could speak, what is the first thing it would say?

Meaning: what I made it mean

1. Write the event in one paragraph of pure fact. Then write the story I told about it. Mark where fact ends.
2. What did I decide about myself the day that happened? Is the decision still running?
3. Who would I be in this situation if I had never been hurt in the earlier one it resembles?
4. What interpretation am I most attached to, and what does the attachment buy me?
5. Write the other person's honest account of the same moment.

Desire: what I actually want

1. What do I want that I have not said out loud?
2. Where am I asking for a smaller thing because the real thing feels too expensive?
3. What did I stop wanting because wanting it hurt? Did the want end, or go underground?
4. What would I do this year if I trusted myself completely?
5. Finish twenty times: "I want..." Do not repeat, do not explain, do not apologize.

Difficulty: the curriculum

1. What is this here to make of me?
2. What is the difficulty asking me to feel that I keep converting into thinking?
3. Which of my strengths was built by something I would never have chosen? Write its origin honestly.
4. What would it mean to stop surviving this and start being schooled by it?
5. Write a letter to the difficulty itself. Begin: "I know why you're here."

Return: what compounds

1. Reread last week's pages. What does this week's writer know that one didn't?
2. What did I give away this week with no expectation of return? What did it cost, and what did it make?
3. What am I doing daily that is making me, and what am I doing daily that is unmaking me?
4. Write the day just passed as the school it was: what was the lesson, who was the teacher, what was the homework?
5. What is one true sentence I have been avoiding writing? Write it. Stop there if you need to.

After the page

A prompt opens material; the practice is what you do with it. Some pages want to become letters. Some want to be brought to the sit. Some want to become an act of service, because the page made clear where the surplus should go. The full structure for that, with the writing, meditation, and letter exchange organized into a course, is The Art of Soulmaking.

Keep the pages. Rereading them at a month is its own prompt, and by then you will have the distance to see what they were making.