Samuel has designed each of these journals to help you realize that you're not alone in this earthly experience, you have help, and that you are much more and much greater than your current beliefs about yourself.

Try keeping one (or all!) of these journals and see if it doesn't make a huge difference in your awareness of yourself, your power, and your connection with Source!

Samuel's instructions are to give the journals a try for three days to begin seeing patterns emerge and giving change a place to start. If you can then keep it up for three weeks you'll have established a positive habit, good for life.

A Time Journal

This technique is designed to give you a greater awareness of how your time gets spent each day. Keeping this journal allows you to see patterns and understand how you prioritize your activities.

What you'll need
A small notebook, one that you can carry around with you.
A pen or pencil.
A watch.

How to do it
From the time you wake up to the time that you go to bed, keep a record of all your activities. Beginning with when you wake, write in your notebook the time you begin every activity. So when you've completed your first activity of the day (i.e., brushing your teeth, going to the bathroom, making coffee, etc.), write down the activity and time you completed it. Continue this throughout your day and be as detailed as you can.

At first, you may find it hard to remember that you're keeping your time, but after a while it will become automatic and your entries will become more consistent. If you're like most people, you'll begin to notice some patterns immediately.

With this timekeeping system you will also become very aware of what your priorities are and whether or not they are in alignment with your goals. For instance, you might want to add a thirty-minute walk into your daily routine, but can't seem to fit it into your schedule. By looking back through your time journal you may see that you end up spending about forty minutes of your lunch hour commuting to a restaurant, ordering food, eating, then driving back to work. By seeing the pattern written out in front of you, you realize that if you managed your lunch hour differently by bringing your lunch, you could eat it AND take a thirty-minute walk in the same amount of time. Of course, not everything will be that easy to see.

According to Samuel, if you keep your time in this way for three days you will see things you could change to make better use of your time; continue for a week, and you're well on the road to having more time in your life; after three weeks you will have made permanent changes in your life.

As you go through this process, occasionally take some time to look back over the recorded entries and see if you notice any new patterns. You might find that you spend an average of two hours each night watching late-night television, or that you spend an average of thirty minutes each morning reading the newspaper while drinking your coffee.

While it's not necessary to change all of your patterns, Samuel says that power comes from being consciously aware of how you're choosing to spend your time. Once you have awareness of how you spend your day, you have the power to introduce changes in your activities that will help you achieve the goals and resolutions you made for 2003.

A Victory Journal

Repeatedly Samuel has said one of the biggest hindrances to spiritual progress in this life experience is a lack of trust in the co-creative partnership with Source. When you don't know that Source is "on your side," it's easy to give up too quickly, to lack confidence in your decisions and maintain negative attitudes that repel success, leaving you feeling lonely, powerless, and lost. Sound familiar?

"A Victory Journal," Samuel says, "is about testing the Universe and having success at it." He says, "I want you to do it [create this journal] because it shows you how much power you have ... it's a way of training yourself to create miracles." This journal is the doorway to experiencing your co-creative partnership with Source because it is all about manifesting what you need to be happy, and it's amazingly easy to do.

What you'll need
A small notebook that you can easily carry with you everywhere, and a pen. Keep them handy!

How to do it
To be successful, start by working on small things that you don't have a stake in. By asking for something you're not attached to, you're less likely to sabotage it with your negative thought patterns/beliefs and fears getting in the way of success.

Asking for a parking place is a good starting point, and so are such things as asking for traffic signals to change in your favor when you need to get where you're going quickly, changing time a bit now and again, or even asking for the car in front of you to change lanes so you can pass. The key to each of these is ASKING--each time you ask for help manifesting something, you are affirming your co-creatorship with the Universe/Source/God(dess).

Then, every time you ask for something and get it, write it down. You won't always get what you ask for, but be patient, you're just learning. In a short time you'll find that you're beginning to trust yourself and the partnership you have with the creative power of the Universe. Your notebook is the key, because by going back and reading what you've written in it you will begin to see progress from the beginning of this exercise with very few entries, to a time in which you are regularly asking and receiving what you ask for. You'll see that you began with very simple, easy things to manifest (things you might have once written off as coincidence or serendipity) and have progressed to things more and more important to you. Whenever you begin to doubt, your notebook will also provide proof to you that manifestation is possible because you have a connection into the creative source of the universe!

A Power/Success Journal

The key to manifesting what you want in this world is trusting and believing in yourself, your personal power, and spiritual empowerment. This technique amplifies your strengths and feeds your belief in yourself by focusing on what worked so that you can find your patterns of power and repeat them at will..

POWER JOURNAL
by Mary Claire O'Neal, from "Phoenix Rising", Fall, 1991

Keeping a power journal is one of the most powerful techniques that Samuel has given us to help facilitate change in our lives. Basically, the power journal is a daily log of all the positive, loving things that we experience every day. When I began mine, I started out very simply with entries like: "I took my walk today, and the air was so clear and refreshing," or, "A stranger smiled at me today. That was nice," or, "I did my "Greeting The Goddess" exercise this morning, and I felt wonderful! YES!" The power journal is a place where I can pat myself on the back and raise my self-esteem level, or where I can observe the blessings in my life reflected in the outer world around me. After only a few days, writing in my journal was something I looked forward to. I also found that it seemed to magnetize more and more positive, loving experiences my way.

I have been journal keeping on and off for the last twenty years, and before I started the power journal, I used to write about the difficult experiences I was "working through" in order to try to understand them. Samuel explained that this was not the purpose of the power journal. The purpose was to focus on the little jewels, the little twinkles of light (and the big twinkles) instead of the garbage. I found (wonder of wonders!) that my days became brighter as I focused more on the positive. When I looked at my journal at the end of the day, I could honestly say it was a good day, and the difficulties faded into the background.

After several months of keeping my power journal regularly, I discovered more gravy! The PJ had actually helped to change my patterns of thinking and helped me to see how magical my life is. Things were passing me by before, without my noticing all the love existing in every moment. I started challenging myself to see everything I experienced as positive in some way and would log in even a potentially difficult experience if I saw it as an opportunity where I overcame existing patterns that I wanted to change in my life.

Ever since I can remember, the goal of my life—the reason why I kept on keeping on—was to be happy. The power journal has been such a magical tool in helping me to realize that happiness was right in front of me all the time, but I couldn't see it. Now I can see it and experience it every day. I give thanks for receiving the gift of one more day to experience joy and passion and being alive! Feeling connected with the Universe and with life! IT WORKS! IT WORKS! YES!

The preceeding article was written by and used with the permission of Mary Claire O'Neal. Thank you, Mary Claire!

A Dream Journal

While your body is asleep, your mind is working through the complexities of day to day living, leaving your spirit available for what Samuel calls "Dream School." Your dreams are important, and a dream journal will help you remember your "real dreams" so that you can make use of those important lessons in your waking world.

Samuel divides dreaming up into two categories: First, those dreams that are scattered, nothing really flows but instead jumps around from one scene to another, incorporating impossible scenarios and leaving you chuckling over the silliness of your weird dreams. He says that those dreams are the way your subconscious tries to make sense of the massive weight of incoming data that streams through your brain day and night.

Next, there are those dreams which Samuel refers to as "Real Dreams." In a Real Dream it is almost as though you are reading a book or watching a movie—everything flows, it's in order, it is so real that when you wake up you're not certain if you were dreaming or if you were remembering an experience in your life. Sometimes in the midst of those dreams you might even realize that you're asleep and dreaming. Some people are able to learn how to control these dreams while they are in the midst of them. Samuel says that Real Dreams ARE actual experiences of your spirit learning in "dream school." He says that you can learn to make use of those teachings in your waking life by training yourself to remember and become aware of your dreams—which you can begin to do by keeping a dream journal.

What you'll need
A small notebook that you can keep in a place where you will see it immediately upon waking, and a pen. Consider purchasing a pen with a built-in light if you sleep with someone who would be disturbed by the light needed to write in your journal.

How to do it
You're training yourself to remember your dreams, so the first thing you might need to do is affirm to yourself that you regularly dream. Just because you don't remember them, doesn't mean you aren't dreaming! Before you go to sleep at night, remind yourself that you're going to have Real Dreams and you're going to remember them. Then, as soon as you wake up, open your dream journal and write down what you remember.

Samuel says that you need to be patient with the process if you don't remember your dreams at first, after all, you've spent a lot of years affirming to yourself that you don't remember your dreams and, by default, that your dreams aren't worth remembering.

If you wake up and find that you don't remember anything, write that down: "I don't remember anything." A week or so later you might find that you've had a week (or more) of "I don't remember" and "I didn't dream anything" variations in your journal; then, it will slowly begin to change so that you awaken and realize "I remember something red in my dream" or "I woke up feeling agitated." Slowly but surely you're breaking down your mental inhibitions about remembering your dreams and beginning to allow yourself to remember bits and pieces. As Samuel describes the process, when your inner self begins to see that you really do want to remember your dreams (because you've been impeccably consistent in dream journaling, of course!) you will begin to remember them--and that's when the fun begins!

Before long you're writing pages of information that you remember from your dreams, and from that you'll soon be learning from those dreams. Samuel says that everyone has their personal symbology, so it's important to try not to use "dream books" to decipher your dreams. "Real Dreams," he says, "are learning experiences from start to finish" so pay attention to what each dream means to you based on experiences, thoughts, hopes and beliefs in your own life. Come from a place of mastery and you'll recognize the mastery of your dreams.