52 Mondays: Spring Session: A Seasonal Mindfulness Journal

The 52 Mondays series is an invitation to live seasonally and mindfully. It is a set of four seasonal mindfulness journals that invite you to primarily attune to your inner landscape or the emotional season you’re in as you also lean into what’s happening in the natural world.

If you’re looking for a journal that focuses on the outer four seasons as we cycle through the year, weather, seasonal celebrations, etc., these journals are not the best fit. Instead they are more about noticing our emotional experience in difference seasons, common life challenges and growth points that women in the middle season of life might experience.

They’re meant to point us inward – to encourage us to slow downward as poet Michael Meade writes – and build a trusting and respectful friendship with ourselves as we navigate the ebb and flow of life.

Each Season offers a pretty, soft-cover journal with seasonal reflections (and lovely art!) to start off each week with new food for thought and a hearty dose of hope and encouragement. Each of the 13 weekly reflections in the journal offers 3 prompts which invite you to “pause + consider” along with 8 dotted pages to sketch/doodle or journal your thoughts. The journals are not dated.

If you practice lunar tracking or menstrual tracking, the 52 Mondays series will be a helpful accompaniment. Each week, orient yourself by naming the moon phase or season of your menstrual cycle that you’re in. Next read the weekly reflection and prompts, journal your response, and also take note of your current level of energy (inward/outward), creativity, mood, how your body feels overall, and any emotions or stories that are loud right now in your mind.

At the end of each season and journal, before moving on to the next, pause and reflect on any themes or patterns that you want to take into account in the year to come. For instance, do you notice that in autumn you need more rest time built into your life? Or maybe next summer you want to be more careful about maintaining good boundaries rather than burning the candle at both ends. This is a way of tracking your patterns, or deepening self-awareness, and then harnessing what you learn for a sustainable and soul-honouring life in every season – even the hardest of them.

There is no perfect starting time for each seasonal journal and depending on where you live in the world your sense of when each season begins can vary. Start each journal when it feels best to you but one option is to use the following schedule if you live in the northern hemisphere:

• Spring Session: Start at the vernal equinox (about March 21): day and night of equal length, marking the start of spring
• Summer Session: Start at summer solstice (June 20 or 21): longest day of the year, marking the start of summer
• Autumn Session: Start at autumnal equinox (about September 23): day and night of equal length, marking the start of autumn
• Winter Session: Start at winter solstice (December 21 or 22): shortest day of the year, marking the start of winter

I hope you enjoy the journals and invite you to connect me and my work at alifeinprogress.ca,

Krista xo