This is a reflection from master Glo teacher Elena Brower, introducing her new
Practice You Journaling Program.

The tattered diaries are twenty, thirty forty, fifty years old; pages folded, dusty, underlined, margins full of notes. Some marginalia are letters to myself, others intended to be found by someone I’ll never meet, inhabiting the distant future.

Keeping journals since I was a child (not consistently, not perfectly, but faithfully), I keep returning to myself, to the truth, sometimes after straying far, away. Reading them decades later brings a healing each time. A reconciliation with my past assumptions and misperceptions. 

Long before I was a yoga teacher, dozens of years before I understood cognitively the meaning of practice, I was writing. Often I’d jot down questions I couldn’t answer. Feelings I couldn’t name aloud. Observations about the days deemed important for reasons I couldn’t yet articulate. The journal was the place where I could be confused without consequence, honest without performance, open without worry, uncertain without apology.

Decades later, this hasn’t changed. If anything, writing practice has deepened. When I look back at those years of pages, what I find isn’t embarrassing or irrelevant; it’s a record of my own becoming. Evidence of what I was working through, what I was moving toward, that which I couldn’t yet see, but was already reaching for.

That sustained journaling experience became Practice You, a journal I published with Sounds True in 2017. Built around nine windows of self-inquiry, each holds questions, teachings, space to write, draw, reflect. More than 150,000 people have used it over the past eight years. (Which tells me that we’re all hungry for a practice that asks something real of us.)

Now, in direct response to what I’m hearing from this community here on Glo, a growing desire for journaling tools that complement movement and meditation, we’re bringing this program here, at exactly the right moment. Welcome to the Practice You program.

Why journaling works

The mind, left to itself, tends to circle. We think the same thoughts, rehearse the same worries, return to the same conclusions. Writing interrupts that loop. When thought becomes language and language becomes something on a page, we can finally see what we’re actually thinking, and that visibility changes everything.

Journaling can be therapeutic, inviting us to cultivate a similar quality of attention to that which we offer in meditation, or even asana practice. Most essentially, it’s a practice of bearing witness. You’re the one asking, as well as the one answering. You’re learning, slowly, to trust what you find within.

What’s revealed isn’t always comfortable; sometimes the page shows me a gap between who I am and who I want to be in a certain situation. But that gap is not a failure; it’s new information. 

The beginning of real change.

How journaling and movement work together

The postures were devised to help us sit for long periods of meditation, to bring agility and flexibility to the joints, muscles, but most importantly, the mind. Every long-term yoga practitioner understands intuitively that what shifts in asana practice, on the mat, is difficult to name but unmistakably real. 

Journaling after movement captures that shift before it dissolves back into the noise of the day. When you write in the minutes following asana or meditation, you’re working with a nervous system that is genuinely more available, more honest than usual. Protective layers are down; body is safe, mind is stable. And the quality of what arrives on the page in those moments is different, less defended.

The Practice You program sequences the practices the way it does: a short teaching, then movement, sitting, writing. Each short class prepares the ground for the next.

The arc of the program

The five modules move through five of the most powerful phrases available to us: I Am. I Feel. I Love. I Speak. I Serve.

This sequence of topics doesn’t end with the self. It begins there, with identity, with feeling, with the heart, moving through voice, and then opening outward into service, the final portal. I Serve is where your journey lands. Because, importantly, a practice that only turns inward is only half a practice. 

After all the self-inquiry arrives the real question: Now that I know myself a bit better, what do I do? How can I serve others with this burst of clarity? 

Our journey from self-knowledge to service is the whole point of practice.

How to begin and sustain your journaling practice

Start with five minutes; one question, one honest sentence. Smaller than you think. This practice doesn’t require beautiful handwriting or profound insights. It requires only that you show up and tell the truth about where you are. 

A few principles that have served me over the years:

Write by hand when you can. There’s something about the slowness of my hand moving across the page that keeps me honest in a way that typing cannot quite replicate.

Don’t edit as you go. Took me years to really comprehend that my  journal is not a performance. Be messy, incomplete. The most important material lives on those pages for me. 

And return to what you’ve written. The practice deepens not just in the writing but in the reading back sometime in the future. You will surprise yourself with what you already knew, way back when. 

A few prompts with which to begin

These are entry points; not questions to answer perfectly, but invitations to see what’s there:

What am I not saying to myself or to someone else that most needs to be said?

Where in my life do I feel most like myself? Where do I feel least?

What would I do, or be, or say, if I trusted myself completely?

Who in my life is asking for something I actually have to give?

There are no right answers. There is only what’s true for you, right now, on this page, in this moment. That’s always been the invitation of this work.

Begin there. See what you find.

– Elena Brower

The Practice You Journaling Program is available now on Glo.