2. Who have been the significant people in your life during this period?
3. What previous periods of your life have been of special concern to you during this period? What memories from these periods have you found yourself recalling or dwelling upon?
4. What were the important events and happenings of this recent period of your life?
5. How did you spend your time during this period? What was a typical day like?
6. What experiences of loving, either physical, emotional, or spiritual, belong to this period?
7. What family relationships were important during this time?
8. What friends or groups of friends were important to you during this period? What were your main social articles?
9. What inner experiences belong to this period? What inspirations? What artistic or spiritual experiences?
10. What unusual experiences or coincidences occurred during this period?
11. What were your bodily experiences during this period? What illnesses, what sexual experiences, what experiences with tobacco, alcohol, or drugs? What sports or athletic experiences did you engage in? How did you feel about your body during this time?
12. What social or political movements or involvements were a part of your life during this time? What groups or communities did you identify with? Which did you feel estranged from? What changes in your beliefs and feelings of identification took place during this period?
13. What individuals—acquaintances, family members, historical personages, imaginary or mythical figures—did you identify with or attempt to model yourself after?
14. What was your physical environment during this time? What were your experiences of the natural world? Of civilization?
Start Your Own!
All you need to start your own Intensive Journal are a copy of Progaff's book, a looseleaf notebook, some paper, a pen or pencil, sixteen three ring dividers, and the section titles to stick into the dividers. Here are the section titles.
1. Period Log
2. Daily Log
3. Dialogue with Persons
4. Dialogue with Works
5. Dialogue with Society
6. Dialogue with Events
7. Dialogue with the Body
8. Dream Log
9. Dream Enlargements
10. Twilight Imagery Log
11. Imagery Extensions
12. Inner Wisdom Dialogue
13. Life History Log
14. Stepping Stones
15. Intersections
16. NOW: The Open Moment
Period Image
In going through the checklist, you have been focusing on the memory level of your experience. Now we wish to return to the relaxed, nonanalytical level of experience with which we began.
Close your eyes and let yourself relax. Let your mind grow quiet. Breathe slowly and deeply and let yourself drift back into a state of twilight consciousness.
At the top of a new page, write "Period Image" and today's date. Then, closing your eyes again, sit again in stillness, breathing deeply and regularly, letting conscious thoughts drop away. Allow yourself to turn inward, and consider this chosen period of your life as a whole. Let yourself feel the tone and quality of this period.
Read the remaining words in this section in a state of deep quietness. When you reach the end, continue to sit in quietness, letting your eyes close gradually, of themselves. When you let your eyes close gradually and slowly in this undeliberate way, the darkness and the quiet is pleasant and comfortable.
Let yourself feel the tone and the quality of this period you have just described. Without making any effort to think about it, without evaluating or judging, simply dwell on this period in deep quietness. Sit in quietness and let the images come. There is no need to make any effort, no need to even specify the kind of images that will come—whether you will hear them, see them, feel them in your body, smell them, or intuit them. The images will form themselves on their own, arising naturally out of the content of the period you have chosen.